Jeremy Clarkson has delivered a grim assessment of British farming, admitting he deliberately left hundreds of acres at Diddly Squat untouched this year because growing crops would have guaranteed him a financial loss.
The former Top Gear presenter, who has spent the past seven years running his Oxfordshire farm and documenting the highs and lows in Clarkson’s Farm, said making money from growing food has become ‘quite simply impossible’.
Writing in his column for The Sun, the 66-year-old warned that the situation is only likely to deteriorate.
‘Action is needed now because farmers have reached the point where it is quite simply impossible to make money from growing food,’ he wrote.
‘This year, I have 200 acres on my farm where we grew nothing at all. We knew that if we planted it with wheat or barley, we would definitely make a loss.’
Clarkson believes the outlook will become even bleaker next year, claiming the introduction of a Net Zero carbon tax on fertiliser will pile further pressure on an industry already struggling to stay afloat.
He suggested farmers may soon have little choice but to abandon traditional food production in favour of more profitable alternatives.
Rather than growing crops to eat, Clarkson said landowners could find themselves renting fields to huge agricultural firms growing plants to power anaerobic digesters. Alternatively, he joked that farmers may as well install solar farms or build data centres instead.
In a characteristically wry flourish, he added another option would be to ‘sell the whole farm to a Chinese company who’d build a multistorey high-intensity piggery on it’.
Despite the sarcasm, Clarkson insisted he was making a serious point.
He argued that just as people living in 1926 would never have believed Britain’s factories would largely disappear by 2026, today’s countryside could look dramatically different within a generation.
‘It’s the same story for farmers across the whole country, so you can kiss goodbye to our green and pleasant land,’ he warned.
Clarkson made the comments while discussing the prospect of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham replacing Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, admitting he did not hold ‘much hope’ that a change in leadership would improve the outlook for Britain’s farmers.
The warning comes just a week after Clarkson admitted he was ‘genuinely scared’ about this year’s harvest for an entirely different reason.
Having previously battled rain-soaked fields and delayed harvests, he revealed this year his crops had become dangerously dry, creating a serious fire risk.
‘Since I started farming seven years ago, the harvest has always been a nail-biting affair because you have to stop when the grain is too wet,’ he wrote.
‘This year, though, I have a new problem. The grain is too dry. It’s Thursday as I write this and I should be out there in the tractor, but I’m stuck. And genuinely scared.’
Clarkson warned that a single discarded cigarette or spark from faulty machinery could destroy months of work within minutes.
‘All it would take is a discarded cigarette end, or the spark from a piece of faulty equipment and in a matter of moments, my whole crop would be turned into ash,’ he said.
‘A year’s work, literally, up in smoke.’
Since swapping fast cars for tractors, Clarkson has unexpectedly become one of Britain’s most prominent voices on farming, with Clarkson’s Farm shining a spotlight on everything from unpredictable weather and soaring costs to planning battles and the increasingly difficult economics of making agriculture pay.