Jeremy Clarkson and Caleb Cooper at Clarkson's farm
It's been a brutal and merciless spring on British farms, but morale has been boosted by the showing of the third episodes of the popular Amazon Prime series Clarkson Farm. Squire Clarkson can be relied upon to tell farm life as it is, with the kind of brutal honesty that other channels lack.
His sonorous, cringe-inducing voiceover comments about the weather's impact on his crops are surprisingly straightforward, and all the better for lacking the prim connections to the climate change narrative that now seems de rigueur elsewhere. Sometimes just Anglo-Saxon monosyllables are enough motivation to convey the horror of a farming situation, and the series is unabashedly rated 15 for strong language at the top of the screen.
The show is a success thanks to the endearing chutzpah of our Toad of Toad Hall hero. It's an instantly recognizable stereotype. There is a proud tradition of British landowners: make a fortune, then buy a farm and continue farming until all the money is gone, usually through failed diversification and expensive gadgets.
Clarkson challenges all accepted wisdom and tries his best to find rules to break. But we know that the more trouble he gets into, the more fame his Diddly Squat brand will gain, and that he will have the last laugh.
And humor is something that is increasingly missing from British rural life. Jezza's satirical take on the humorless “pig police” decrees provides a welcome counter-narrative to the endless stream of directives facing farmers in this country, though not necessarily elsewhere.
However, his cavalier attitude towards health and safety is sometimes literally too close to the bone, as in the case of the chainsaw that nearly ripped off his unprotected, denim-clad leg. In our sparsely populated parish of Dumfries and Galloway, over two decades, three people have died in accidents with livestock or machinery and two life-changing injuries to farm workers, one from a chainsaw. Hopefully viewers will understand the fact that farming is a dangerous business and are more influenced by the justifiable nonsense of land agent Charlie Ireland than by Clarkson's example.
Political correctness is what we love about Clarkson, though. His previous decision to allow local hunting on his land – in keeping with normal Cotswolds custom rather than metropolitan media bubble dogma – led to his Hawkstone Brewery being besieged by animal rights terrorists.
A scene from the third episode of Clarkson Farm By Ellis O'Brien
In this series, his one-off remark about the pheasants he releases on his farm is sure to draw insults from the Axis of Malice. A lesser man would have avoided talking about it on camera, but Clarkson earned respect by being willing to stand up and be considered a shooter.
However, for those of us living in remote parts of Britain, Clarkson's farm is a depiction of Cotswold life rather than rural life. The area around Chipping Norton, where Clarkson works, probably now has more in common with Chelsea than with where I farm. No one here would think of renting goats to local celebrities so that they could rid their flowering meadows of thistles.
If we could open a farm shop, there wouldn't be many customers willing to pay £40 for 30 servings of lion's mane mushroom powder to put in their coffee. And we would have a hard time finding anyone to work in it. Since Brexit put an end to the arrival of Eastern Europeans, finding labor has become almost impossible; We had to bring our last recruit to milk our cows from the Philippines on a temporary worker visa.
Queue outside Diddly Squat Farm Shop, February 2023. Photo: Gareth Fuller
But despite the slight envy many of us feel at Diddly Squat's ability to make huge profits through direct sales, we were all cheering Clarkson on in his battles with West Oxfordshire Council's planning department. While politicians utter platitudes about how farmers need to diversify and sell directly to consumers, while ruthlessly removing our subsidies and subjecting us to free trade agreements with less restrictive countries, the need for deregulation to make it easier for small agricultural businesses to adapt and innovate couldn't be clearer. Meanwhile, Clarkson's farm store is technically prohibited from stocking a book he wrote himself, as it was not printed locally. You couldn't make it up.
The Cotswolds seem to have a love-hate relationship with Clarkson. On the one hand, real estate agents are keen to highlight the proximity to Clarkson's Farm Store in Country Life's advertisements for incredibly expensive properties nearby. On the other hand, the NIMBY tendency went against his farm. They should be grateful that he is determined to take up farming. In other parts of the Cotswolds, near Badminton and Blenheim, plans are underway to develop city-sized solar panel complexes that will completely change the character of the landscape.
The theme of this recent episode was “non-farming” and we see Clarkson literally hoovering blackberries from the hedges to find something somewhere on his partly wooded farm that will make a profit and won't depend on a highly speculative game of roulette , which can be plowed. Agriculture. It's a path familiar to many farmers, and while we know Clarkson's day job is still that of a highly paid TV presenter and newspaper columnist, we're happy to indulge his farming nature by exploring with him the uncertainties of diversification. The further you go off-piste, the deeper the snow drifts can be.
Jeremy Clarkson's partner Lisa Hogan at Clarkson's Farm
Just as characters are vital to any drama, the critical success factor in any farming business is people. And what a diamond partner Clarkson turned out to be, Lisa Hogan. Working in a farm store, she becomes a piglet midwife. It sheds important light on farming as a family business, where spouses typically must work long hours together and provide free labor to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, Clarkson's right-hand man, 25-year-old Caleb Cooper, has become such a celebrity that he is invited to Downing Street to meet the Prime Minister. Clarkson's decision to make him the farm manager in this series and give him the kind of autonomy that most young people could only dream of is a brilliant advertisement for farming as a career choice.
It is disappointing that so many young people go to university to study environmental sciences to become agricultural bureaucrats, while it is very difficult to attract young people directly into agriculture. On my farm we have a hard time understanding why this is the case. An apprentice who joined our dairy farm at the bottom of the ladder as a teenager could be earning £100,000 a year as a manager by age 30, in a career that will not be replaced by artificial intelligence. If Caleb proves to be a role model and gets more young people interested in farming, the series will do a world of good.
As Jeremy Clarkson now realizes, he was more involved in farming life than he ever thought. being, despite all the difficulties, it is still the best job.
Jamie Blackett is a farmer and author of A Red Rag for the Bull and The Land of Milk and Honey (Quiller)
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