Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones Interviewed by Nick Higham

Child of the Windrush generation and one of Britain’s most successful black entrepreneurs Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones argues that caution is one of the biggest barriers to realising our dreams and urges us to embrace jeopardy.

Emmanuel-Jones draws on a life that has taken him from a deprived childhood in inner city Birmingham to becoming one of Britain’s best known farmers and owner of the Black Farmer brand. He says we can only go further in life if we learn to escape the fears, uncertainty and self-doubt that hold us back.

Emmanuel-Jones was born in Jamaica and grew up in Birmingham. He is a former producer and director of the BBC’s Food and Drink and ran his own marketing agency. He bought a farm in Devon and developed the Black Farmer brand into a multi-million pound business with products stocked in major supermarkets. Emmanuel-Jones has also set up the Black Farmer Scholarship to help and encourage ethnic minorities to work in the rural community. The scheme was the subject of a Channel 4 series, Young Black Farmers.

Here he talks to Nick Higham, who became the BBC’s first media correspondent when he joined in 1988. He is now a wider BBC correspondent and a former presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.

This event is part of the festival’s leadership programme sponsored by HSBC.

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