Carole L. Presberg then comments on the video:

"Beautifully filmed on the wind-swept Atlantic coast of North Devon, England, Year of the Working Sheepdog is not a training video, not a big screen drama, just a glimpse into the everyday life of a shepherd. David Kennard’s Robora Farm is at the edge of Exmoor where he has been running about 900 breeding ewes for 15 years. He has five or six Border Collies to help him. Greg is the oldest, a 6 ½ year old magnificent-looking black and white rough-coated dog. Swift is a 4 year old smooth coated triclored bitch who partners with Greg as a smooth-working brace team, and they have also produced puppies together with as much working potential as they have. Pip, the 3 year old smooth-coated black and white male, seems to be low man in the dog pack and therefore not used as much in concert with the other dogs. Gael is the 1-year-old daughter of Greg and Swift, also a rough-coated dog like her dad who combines the good qualities of both parents. Fern was 4 months old at the start of the film and her development was followed throughout filming. She is a smooth-coated black and white dog, with prick ears. And finally there is Ernie, born during filming, a smooth-coated tricolored son of Greg and Swift. I was most taken with Swift, who looks like a smooth version of my own tricolored Bess. Swift is strong-eyed and not loathe to show sheep who is boss, and an excellent close worker.

The film shows us the dogs working under a large variety of conditions in magnificent scenery, something you don’t really get with a training video or trial film. The countryside is hilly, rocky, with steep gorges leading down to the sea., covered with bracken and patches of scrub forest, with always the pounding Atlantic Ocean in the background. The dogs are required to round up sheep in this rough land, sometimes in treacherous stormy conditions, from rocky cliff tops, on rolling hills, through brush and trees. We see them in stockyards, in small pens, loading onto trucks, in large open barns. And of course there is the inevitable sheepdog trial. We are shown shearing, lambing, docking, every aspect of sheep raising, and the dogs are involved in it all, for, as the narration points out, in today’s farming, human help is expensive and the sheep farmer must rely mostly on the help of his four-legged farm hands.

Perhaps my only complaint would be the attempted artistic cuts back and forth between black and white and color, and between moving and still photography, at the beginning and end of the film. Otherwise, my hat goes off to David Kennard for producing a superb video, with excellent narration, that is well-worth owning for the sheepdog enthusiast, as well as for those interested in what farming is about in Britain today."
Carole L. Presberg - Spring 2001 edition of 'the Shepherd's Dogge' (a quarterly journal of the Border Collie, published in Tyngsboro, Maryland, 01879-1007, USA), volume XIV, No.1