First of all, my sincere thanks for supporting this book. Twenty percent feels like a milestone, even if there's still a fair way to go. I'm delighted and touched that you believe in it. There's no way I could have got here without you. Now I need your further help to get the project over the line.

Please tell your friends and fellow Archers fans about it. It's a book inspired by the characters and village community we love. It's about a show that's rightly known as a 'national institution'. I'd be more inclined to call it a national treasure.

            Just lately there's been a lot of media clamour about the Amazon Prime series Clarkson's Farm. The former Top Gear presenter has brought his unique style to the business of running of a farm. He plays the rich but clueless landowner whose numerous mistakes provide laughs for a cast of country characters. They include Kaleb, the farm contractor, Cheerful Charlie, the land agent, Ellen, the shepherd, Gerald, the dry-stone wall builder, and Clarkson's girlfriend Lisa.

            It's a winning formula that's become a hit with viewers. It also happens to be the formula that worked brilliantly for The Archers when it launched nationally in January, 1951. Judging by the current TV schedules there's more popular interest in farming than for decades. Clarkson's Farm is riding the crest of this new wave. But it was The Archers that created the format.

Britain's longest-running drama series began as the story of a farming dynasty – Dan and Doris, Phil and Christine, Peggy and Jack. Along with farm worker Simon and neighbouring farmer, the irascible Walter Gabriel. It was this everyday story of farmers and farming that gave the show an incredible audience of 15 million in the 1950s, a figure most TV soaps could only dream of today.

            It's fair to say that, in my time on the show, not everyone on the team was a fan of the farming stories. Some believed it was the human dramas that mattered to listeners; the tales of love and loss, jealousy and betrayal, the usual currency of TV soaps. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for these stories. The Archers often does them brilliantly well. Alice Carter's battle with alcoholism, for example.

            But I'm still convinced farming needs to be the show's beating heart. Its stories should be threaded through the daily and weekly happenings like a golden strand. And in my 30 years on the programme, they were. I'm not saying they all had to be big stories as when Tom Archer trashed his uncle's GM crop or when Lynda's dog Scruff appeared to set off the cattle plague that effectively put paid to Ambridge mega-dairy, managed by the sinister Rob Titchener.

            Sometimes it was enough to set an everyday conversation in a tractor cab. Or dramatise a light-hearted tea break in the harvest field. Or trail along behind the cows when they were brought in for milking on a summer afternoon. These were reminders of a heritage we often overlook, the heritage of our farming. You don't have to go back many generations to arrive at a time when it was central to all our lives.

            As a write this in late July I've just listened to a week's episodes. Though the Ambridge harvest season is well underway, there's been little about it on the show. You can't, of course, draw meaningful conclusions from a single week's episodes. But I'd hate to think it was drifting away from its farming roots.

            It's what made The Archers a brilliantly successful drama and a national institution. At a time when there's more media interest in farming than ever, this pioneering drama should be setting the pace. Who knows, it might even provide solutions to the world's most pressing problems – the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. More on this next time.