The North West regional winner is Olly Harrison of Water Lane in Prescot near Liverpool – nominated by Garston and Halewood Labour MP Maria Eagle.
Olly is well known as a regular contributor to BBC North West Tonight’s farmer diaries and for his YouTube channel ‘Olly Blogs Agricontract farmer’ which has 51.5k subscribers.
Fundraising
As well as his media work, arable farmer Olly has been raising significant sums of money and doing good deeds for multiple charities. Most recently, he worked with a Polish charity he found via Facebook to send aid to Ukraine.
Olly’s 60ft by 100ft grain shed was ideal for providing the infrastructure needed to store and distribute donations of essentials bound for Ukraine.
Olly Harrison and Maria Eagle MP
A regular visitor to the country before the war broke out, Olly also had useful contacts within Ukraine who he called upon for assistance. One of these was ADAMA Agricultural Solutions UK Ltd which kindly paid for trucks to transport the goods.
On top of this, for two years now, Olly has organised a Christmas tractor run to raise money for Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and to collect food donations for the Fans Supporting Foodbanks – a joint initiative run by fans of Liverpool and Everton football clubs.
Last year 112 tractors took part in the procession lighting up the streets as they travelled throughout parts of north and south Liverpool, and into the city centre.
In 2020, the tractor run raised £43,000 for the hospital, in 2021 that increased to £65,000. It is scheduled to take place again this year on Sunday 18 December.
Sunflower maze
If all this was not enough, Olly was also the first farmer in the country to create a maze out of sunflowers and donated some of the proceedings to the NHS following the pandemic. He raised over £40,000 for that cause.
His latest fundraising idea involves his YouTube channel. Fans of his blog can have their birthday displayed on the bumper of his sprayer. He requests a donation for this to happen and has so far raised £15,000 for the North West Air Ambulance.
