He's come unstuck herding sheep with a drone and crashing tractors, but it's the red tape that's killing our writer's attempts to make his farm profitable. Without a revolution, British agriculture is doomed, he tells Nick Rufford.
During the centuries in which sheep have occupied the countryside, man has rounded them up by traditional methods. The farmer enters the field with his dog and the sheep run to a distant corner. The farmer whistles and the dog herds the sheep to where they're needed. It's always been done like this and sheep have every right to expect it always will be. So when Jeremy Clarkson arrived in their field with a remote-control drone that made barking noises, who could blame them for scattering in all directions?
Flying the drone low, Clarkson chased them across the field towards the farm gate. For a while the experiment seemed to be working and he imagined being able to sit indoors, out of the cold and wet, rounding up sheep in the way that operators of Predator drones patrol the skies of Afghanistan from Nevada.
Quickly the animals realised that, unlike a sheepdog, the drone had no teeth. Once they got used to the noise of the rotors they resumed munching without so much as a skywards glance. "They were completely unfazed," says Clarkson. "They just ignored it." No amount of dive-bombing or electronic yapping from the airborne sheepdog would make them deviate from the time-honoured rules of engagement between man and sheep. "They just looked at me with gum-chewing insolence as if to say, 'Why is that idiot flying that drone?' "
It was one among many experiments Clarkson has tried in an effort to turn a loss-making farm into a going concern. If it sounds harebrained, he points out the drones are an eighth of the price of a trained sheepdog, which is why New Zealand sheep farmers use them. Perhaps his North Country mules were smarter than their antipodean cousins.
For more than three years he has worked the land in Oxfordshire, trying to balance the books on a farm he renamed Diddly Squat because "that's how much money it makes". As chronicled in his regular "Farmer Clarkson" columns for The Sunday Times, he has ploughed, sown and harvested in what he concedes is not richly fertile soil. He has reared livestock and gathered eggs from free-range hens. He has planted cover to attract game birds and created ponds to breed fish. He has built a farm shop and a bottling plant for spring water.
Things haven't gone to plan. Some of his crops died from fungal disease and insect infestations. He was told his farm shop breached planning and Covid regulations. His bottling plant became contaminated. When pubs closed during lockdown, brewers stopped buying his barley. Hundreds of trout he hoped to sell to restaurants were eaten from his newly dug lake "by otters or cormorants or herons — or all three". He was chased by bees.
When he tried to clear woodland, his chainsaws jammed in the tree trunks ("At a rough guess I'd say that 20 per cent of the trees in my woods have chainsaws stuck in them"). He bought a new tractor — a Lamborghini — and managed to drive it "into six gates, a hedge, a telegraph pole, another tractor and a shipping container. I think I'm right in saying I have not completed a single job without at least one crash." All of that while being squeezed by rising costs and weak food prices. To illustrate the problems, on the day I visited a fox got into his henhouse and killed his 36 prize egg-layers.
The sheep have caused the most trouble, through their "sheer belligerence, or should that be shear?" He began with 75, including two rams — Wayne Rooney and Leonardo DiCaprio. Rooney died last year but the flock now has 130 lambs. He compares them to delinquent teenagers who can't walk past a fire extinguisher without setting it off. They broke through an electric fence into a neighbour's field. He replaced it with wire mesh and they got tangled in that.
When he tried last year to shear the mothers, they put up such a fight "it was like trying to turn Jean-Claude Van Damme upside down to cut off his mullet". He had to bring in professional shearers, who charged him £1.45 (2.80) for each sheep. The wool sold for only 30p (58 cents) per fleece. "That's why the farm is called Diddly Squat," he sighs.
When we sit down in the late spring sunshine outside his barn he's wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt — "the only clean one I could find". Ideally he'd like a T-shirt that says "A bad day on the farm is better than a good day at the office". Even with all the problems, he doesn't regret moving here from London. "I love it for the stolen moments. Summer evenings on a tractor. Leaning on a fence looking at the lambs. In the first lockdown I'd open a chilled bottle of rosé before bed and sit listening to the wood pigeons. God, they were wonderful days."
He has divided the land under cultivation between traditional staples — wheat, barley and oilseed rape. The biggest area — about 200 acres out of 1,000 — is given over to wild meadows that run through the middle of fields. The strips attract friendly insects — and agricultural subsidies. "From the air my farm looks like corduroy. It's got these stripes, which are very pretty come the summer because they're bursting with wild flowers." He has done his best for conservation. "I planted turtle dove mix around the place because turtle doves are on the verge of extinction. There's a rare hen harrier in one of my owl boxes. And I've got a great grey shrike. It may not sound much in global terms but all I can do is look after the postage stamp I've got here."
When botanists visited they discovered the wild patches in his fields were "chock-full of kidney vetch, green-winged orchids, yellow rattle and various other things that sound as if they've escaped from a Victorian book of diseases". He has created a wetland area for wildfowl and marsh plants (he may also release a few alligators to deal with unwanted ramblers, he jests).
Following government advice to farmers to diversify and rely less on handouts, he built a farm shop. He proudly shows me the fridge loaded with local cheeses and the shelves groaning under the weight of apple juice, honey, piccalillis and preserves with names like Winter Morning Ginger Marmalade. All the produce is either his own or from neighbouring farms. He sends wheat to a miller and uses the flour to bake and sell bread. There's a self-service milk machine and branded merchandise, including hats and aprons embroidered with Diddly Squat. He has just restocked after a bumper weekend in which he "sold out of everything".
"That's the thing about selling seasonal products on a small scale — it's inconvenient for the customer. I make a new batch of honey and it sells in two hours. Once I've picked the rhubarb there's no chance of a top-up. I was left with loads of chard because people didn't know what it was, so I called it spinach and it flew off the shelves."
The shop illustrates the plight of modern farmers, squeezed between officialdom and the might of supermarkets, he says. He will have to close it for two months to replace the steel roof with a slate one as a result of a council decree he describes as "pettiness on an industrial scale". "That's OK, though. It makes perfect sense to shut down the business and lay off the people we employ."
After complaints from "a handful of unhappy locals" stopped him selling teas and coffees, he started a visitors' book to prove that most customers are from far afield and are not being lured away from local shops. Far from stealing business, he's creating jobs, he says. He has hired contractors to dig ditches, repair farm buildings and rebuild walls. "We put 20 new hives in last year to make honey. Viktor the Ukrainian bee man is brilliant."
He has lost count of the times his projects have ground to a halt because of someone with a clipboard. "When a pick-up truck comes up the drive, it's somebody arriving to do a manly job of work, chop down a tree, put in a water pipe. When it's a Vauxhall, it's someone from the government to tell you to stop doing whatever it is you're doing. I'm sure other industries are governed, but nothing like farming. In 2019 we had the wettest autumn ever. The ground gets chewed up by tractors. Because of that I was told that I was in breach of some soil compaction rules and I'd lose 10 per cent of the grants. It won't stop raining and I have to drive my tractors. How am I supposed to do it in a way that I don't damage the soil? It's not possible."
Has it put him off farming? On the contrary, it made him want to shine a light on a world that gets scant attention from Westminster or the urban-centric media.
As you drive south from Chipping Norton and climb to higher ground, the horizon opens up to reveal far-reaching views of the Cotswolds and the Chilterns beyond. Clarkson's spread nestles beneath enormous skies. In the early days he shuttled between the farm and a penthouse flat in Kensington. Then one day he flew back to Heathrow from a holiday in Africa, drove out of the airport and had to decide whether to turn left to the Cotswolds or right to London. He turned left and didn't look back. Something in him had crossed over. Now he devotes the time he might once have spent reading car magazines to Farmers Weekly and Farmers Guardian.
London friends predicted the buzz of city life would soon draw him back. Some of those people have joined the Covid exodus themselves. It's easy to see why he fell in love with life among the yellow limestone villages and the rolling, sheep-cropped hills. Even before the abbreviation WFH was coined he was working from home. "All I have to do each day is pull on a pair of jeans and step out of the door of my cottage."
More recently the work has come to him. Amazon commissioned an eight-part series called Clarkson's Farm. The idea was to lay bare the reality of life on the land, as distinct from the bucolic ideal portrayed in some other rural programmes. "All these shows are designed to do the same thing: to show commuter people in towns and cities that life in the rural uplands of Britain is rosier and more sunlit." The truth is that, though rewarding, the daily, muddy grind is often repetitive and bleak. He's embarrassed that his efforts have at times been so shambolic. "I've done other shows where we've messed up for comedic effect. But this time I've really tried."
He vowed at the start of filming he would avoid the kind of sentimentality typified by Kate Humble bottle-feeding a lamb in Springwatch, but he ended up bonding with the animals. He nurses a sick lamb and learns how to be a midwife to pregnant ewes ("the whole process is incredibly sweet and incredibly revolting simultaneously"). At one point a gruff farmhand advises him to cull three sickly ewes — "they're not pets" — and he seems genuinely upset. The camera follows him as he drives the sheep to the stockyards on their last journey. "I don't know what to say about this mission this morning," he says. "I'm a sheep farmer and this is what sheep farmers do." He comes away with tears in his eyes. "This is a powerful advertisement for vegetarianism," he says later, though he's not persuaded and declares his own mutton "delicious" after sampling it.
When his land agent points out his flock is losing money in feed and vet's bills he still can't bring himself to get rid of them. "I love having them around," he says. "The lambs turned the farm into a springtime picture postcard of what Britain can and perhaps should look like."
It's possible, he admits, that he's in love with a vanishing notion of farming — and may himself be an endangered species. Brexit spelt an end to the acreage-based European subsidies that have enabled farms like his to survive. In future, the government will pay farmers to be custodians of the countryside rather than to produce food. Old-timers too set in their ways to embrace the government's green vision will be given money to retire from the land. The upshot could be a rural Britain that resembles a giant theme park, he warns. "They did that in the 1930s and look what happened — we damn nearly starved to death. Covid has shown exactly how fragile the world is. If you want to do something for the planet, eat what's in season and eat what has grown just down the road. That is how you solve it, not by opening the countryside up to ramblers and then buying food from abroad."
Farmers are governed by rules invented to please environmental lobbyists "who live in Hoxton", he fumes. His pet hate is exotic produce flown in to satisfy modern tastes. "If you're trying to go for a zero-carbon country, why fly avocados in from Peru?"
Much of what's imported can already be grown here, he argues. "Why sit on perfectly serviceable land and bring food in from New Zealand?" To prove a point he has recently planted durum wheat, a type grown in the south of France. It thrives in the drier conditions that Britain is now experiencing. "If that's what we are going to have in the UK in the future, that's what we will have to grow."
If all this sounds like Clarkson the climate convert, there are still flashes of the petrolhead of old. Farming has allowed him to indulge his love of machines — like the barking drone. He spends hours browsing the power tools in StowAg, his local farm equipment shop. He can't believe he's managed to get through the past six decades without ever before owning a telehandler, a vehicle that takes the heavy lifting out of farmwork. He has a collection of off-road vehicles that could be straight out of Thunderbirds. He uses a mechanical mole to lay his own water pipes and plans to get a flamethrower to deal with weeds.
The countryside creed of make-do-and-mend appeals to his Yorkshire parsimony. He keeps his ageing Range Rover running "with spit and baler twine" and recently replaced both turbochargers when they blew. For jobs around the farm he wears a patched tweed coat "with 20 12-bore cartridges in each pocket" and a pair of old wellies.
For all this, he still feels like an imposter next to native countryfolk, even after three years. "I'll be walking through a wheat field with my land agent and he'll suddenly notice a speck a millimetre across of [wheat leaf] rust on one shoot. I know what rust on a Lancia looks like but this is entirely different — and destructive if you don't catch it early."
He still can't attach implements to his tractor despite hours of practice. "I know what a cultivator is, and a drill and roller, and I can reverse the tractor and get it lined up. But there are hundreds of buttons in the tractor — hundreds — not counting the laptop that operates whatever is on the back. I sit there and the buttons just swim on the dashboard. Kaleb, my tractor driver, wouldn't know how to park in London but his fingers dance around those buttons like he's Rick Wakeman."
Some locals may, understandably perhaps, look upon landowners like Clarkson, 61, as hobby farmers. He counters that celebrities are good for agriculture. "I've argued in the past — and some of me still thinks it's a good idea — that the land should be handed over to very wealthy people. Look at James Dyson. He's doing an incredibly good job at maintaining the land. He's only able to do that because he's magnificently rich. And look at pop stars. Steve Winwood is an unbelievably good guardian of the countryside. Sting, Roger Daltrey, Nick Mason … they've all got vast chunks of land and they can afford to look after it. If they were relying entirely for their income on farming they would have to chop down every copse to make it profitable."
On the hillside near his cottage he's building a celebrity-sized house that may be the last one he ever lives in. It's made from Cotswold stone hung on a steel frame, a construction method that allows rooms to be bigger. It sounds high-tech but inside it's a throwback to the days before digital appliances. He's installing an Aga and a coal-fired range. "I managed to find one from an old Yorkshire mining house." He's repurposing his loss-making wool as loft insulation.
With what could be a subtle dig at the prime minister, he points out that he doesn't have an interior designer. "If you get someone else in, it's not your house. What I want is a bare shell. Then Lisa [Hogan, his partner] and I, all being well, are going to go and trawl around markets in Marrakesh and Istanbul and go to the reclamation yards in Somerset and Devon and start to turn it into a home. I'm so looking forward to the day when it's built and I can go to Peter Jones in Sloane Square and get cracking on buying knives and forks and napkins and corn-on-the-cob forks."
While the work is being completed he's in a farm cottage with a trailer in his farmyard for visitors. Will he ever return to the city? He's glad to be out of the rat race and to have distanced himself from carping news bulletins. "Listening to politicians is like listening to [Line of Duty's] AC-12 half the time. Their delivery is all the same and they use acronyms so you don't know what they're talking about. It's just platitudes."
The best thing the government could do for farmers, he says, is close down the section of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that deals with agriculture. "British farmers by and large are extremely good at farming and very [environmentally] conscious. They don't want to burn unnecessary diesel because it costs money. So I'd frankly shut down the agriculture department, let farmers get on with it and tell supermarkets they can only sell what's in season and what was grown locally. Then you've pretty much at a stroke solved everything. Everyone would be healthier, the soil will be healthier, the planet will be healthier and we'd save a fortune [in civil servants]. We can take turns to go and run it on a Wednesday."
Does he miss anything from his pre-farming days? He would have loved to have shown the farm to Adrian Gill, a friend and fellow Sunday Times columnist, he says eventually. Gill died five years ago from cancer, aged 62. "He was always ahead of the curve. I'd love to know what he thought about Covid and lockdown."
He's silent for a moment, then his phone buzzes with a message marked "Urgent". It's the organisers of a forthcoming junket to promote the Amazon show. They want his sign-off for the catering arrangements. He looks at the message with a pained expression. " 'The individual lunchboxes will be Covid-compliant and eco-friendly with bamboo cutlery,' " he reads aloud. He shakes his fist at the phone. "This is what I mean about people from Hoxton. I don't want quinoa or hummus or avocados. The show is about ordinary farming. I want pork pies, Scotch eggs and beef sandwiches, with proper cutlery. Served from the back of a bloody Range Rover."
Clarkson's Farm launches on June 11 on Amazon Prime Video.
Written by: Nick Rufford
© The Times of London