GOOD things really do come in small packages as anyone who has met Sally Urwin can attest.

Standing at four foot 10 and a half (the half is important), she describes herself as 'extremely short'.

But her challenged stature has provided Sally with a unique perspective on life and for the last three years she's built up quite an audience on social media and in the blogosphere with her agricultural anecdotes under the Twitter handle 'PintSizedFarmer'.

As a result she's been asked to write a book, Diary of a Farmer, which is due to be published next year.

The mum of two is finding it difficult to believe her luck.

"I began the blog for my mum and dad and my friends who aren't from farming backgrounds," Sally says. "Then, last August, I suddenly got this email from a lady at Profile Books who said, 'I love your writing - would you be interested in writing a book for us?'"

It turned out that Sally would be in good company as Profile's list of writers included authors of the calibre of Alan Bennett and Mary Beard.

Sally says: "They sent me a contract and I had to join the Society of Authors. I had to turn out 75,000 words by November and I have to send the next lot by the end of March."

Luckily, Sally, who is married to 'Farmer Steven' as she refers to him on Twitter, is never short of material. Often it's the further escapades of Candy, the fat Shetland pony, who is constantly making bids for freedom like a Colditz prisoner, or it might be the continuing travails of Scabby Ewe, a sheep with a deformed jaw that Steve's not allowed to put down as their seven-year-old son, George, has grown attached to it.

Whatever the subject, Sally seems to have an eye for the funny side of farming life.

"I mean, all farmers have the odd scabby sheep, and they normally put them in the back fields, well away from the road, so that no one can spot them and judge their stock keeping," she says.

"But poke around farm buildings and you'll come across some cheerful threadbare three-legged animal, that's living the life of Riley in a tucked-way stable - because we're not heartless and miserable!"

It probably helps that Sally is an 'incomer' to Tynedale's farming community because otherwise those kinds of observations would seem merely commonplace and unremarkable. "But to me, a lot of the things we did in farming struck me as faintly ridiculous," she laughs, reeling off a long list.

"For instance, I am too short to reach the clutch on the quad and I had to buy an automatic gear box. In order to lift the sheep feed bags, I have to tip out half the feed. The Texels knock me over..."

Brought up at the coast in Tynemouth, she came to this area aged 22 when her parents moved up to Corbridge. She met Steve in 2004 and they married the following year and run High House Farm at Matfen where they live with their two children, Lily, 11 and George, seven.

"My dad, Geoff, was a farmer and his dad before him," Steve says. "So I'm third generation, possibly fourth."

Geoff, who was born at Burnside just outside Matfen and was a noted buyer at Hexham Mart, bought High House in 1969 and Steve was born and brought up there.

"We used to keep beef breeding cattle up until foot and mouth disease struck in 2001. We weren't taken out but it was hell because you couldn't move anything off the place. That's what made me think long and hard about the future and that's when we looked at diversification."

Steve was a real ale lover and, after doing a master brewer's course, he and Sally decided to sell the cows and set up the successful High House Brewery 15 years ago, which they now lease out.

The couple run a flock of 180 sheep, a mix of Suffolk, Texel and North of England Mules – all crossed with Beltex tups as well as 150 acres of wheat, barley and oil seed rape.

Sally says: "It's a little farm and, although we'd love to, we're not able to just sit back and farm so we're always trying to do something else. Steve has just got a job working as the Leader programme co-ordinator for Durham Coast and lowlands and I do freelance marketing. We are always looking for the next thing to raise a bit of income."

Although she admits that Steve does '95 per cent' of the farm labour, Sally does try to help out where she can. At the minute, that's with lambing. "I went on a lambing course with my dad which was fun. Steve does the complicated ones with lambing ropes," she says.

Steve adds supportively: "If I'm not there, Sally is perfectly capable of doing it." He even bought her her own shepherd's crook for Valentine's Day - whoever said Romance was dead? - which ended up as perfect fodder for Sally's blog.

But he doesn't mind being the fall guy in Sally's writing. "She's a fantastic writer - she's very funny and writes wonderful blogs so I have nothing to fear really," he says.

Both agree that social media is generally a force for good in the farming community.

"Living and working on a farm can be quite isolating," Sally says. "It's very easy to be sniffy of social media but I think it's vital. We're on the Clubhectare Twitter feed and it's about getting people in agriculture together, whether that's virtually or physically together and it helps you put things in perspective."