AT JUST 4ft 10 she really must be the smallest farmer in the land.

And the fact she’s a ‘townie’ from the seaside also helps account for her entirely fresh perspective on the industry.

Known across social media as the Pint Size Farmer, those who prefer their reading the good old way – in print – can tune into the musings of this arch Tweeter too as from today.

For A Farmer’s Diary: A Year at High House Farm, by hers truly, Sally Urwin, is available in bookshops now.

In the end it proved a painless journey, producing a book, she said, despite the painful self-doubt that riddles her life.

She writes the way she speaks and in her book, she is honest about the difficulty of making a farming living in the current climate and about the anxiety disorder that she was diagnosed with as a child.

Steve, her ever-loyal and supportive husband, worries that she “overshares”, but her response is “if somebody else is feeling the same, maybe it will be helpful...

“Yes, it is a very honest book, but I want people to know that farming isn’t all a bed of roses; that in reality things are tricky.”

At 150 acres, their farm in Matfen is relatively small. Besides Sally and Steve, it is home to Lily (12), George (8), 200 ewes, two cats, a dog and a fat pony.

Oh, and a bald hamster that followers have been Tweeting she must take to the vets. (He’s developed something of a monk’s tonsure and, for those concerned, Sally is keeping an eye on it.)

It was her Pint Size musings Tweeted fresh from the farm that caught the eye of a publisher at Profile Books.

But when she spotted the email ‘apparently’ from the company, she thought it was a scam.

“I only started with something like 30 followers, and most of those were relatives,” she said.

“I wasn’t one of those bloggers who promoted web links and SEOs (search engine optimisations) – I just wrote down everything I had been doing, things I found funny or interesting.”

Such was the inky-blackness of her self-doubt that she used to delete most or all of what she’d traditionally written. But Twitter turned the tide.

“I’d had imposter syndrome until then, thinking I was trying to be something I wasn’t,” she said.

But Twitter came along and it was quick, easy and, crucially for Sally, the feedback was instant. “People seemed to like what I was writing,” she smiled.

Profile gave Sally 12 months to write the book, but within a couple of months she was well in hand. Ultimately her copy needed very little editing and, sending over the text in chunks as she did, she again received quick feedback that was reassuring.

“They did say ‘be careful you don’t slide into slapstick’, because I do like the funny side of things.

“But generally they were very positive and when I sent over the chapter on lambing, I got an email from the chief executive of Profile that was very complementary.”

And next? Well, some nice book signings organised by Waterstones and a launch event organised by Corbridge’s Forum Books.