Jeremy Clarkson has opened up about some of the "unpleasant jobs" he has to do at his Diddly Squat Farm in the Cotswolds, while also admitting that the financial rewards are often missing.
Writing in The Sun, the 66-year-old former Top Gear host said the unpredictable nature of harvest time makes it virtually impossible for farmers to book summer holidays. This year the harvest got under way in mid-July, he noted, but there are occasions when "you don't get cracking" until the end of September.
Unpleasant jobs on the farm
Clarkson, who has been running the farm since 2019 and turned it into the award-winning Amazon Prime series Clarkson's Farm, described some of the more gruelling aspects of the work. "Some jobs on the farm are unpleasant. Sexing rabbits is annoyingly difficult, and disposing of dead piglets is heartbreaking," he wrote.
Despite these challenges, he insisted there is "nowhere you'd rather be", but added that there is "one slight fly in the ointment": the lack of payment. "Thanks to the hot summer and this government's strange hatred of farmers, you don't actually get paid for the wheat and the barley you've harvested," he claimed. "In fact, I worked out this morning that it's be cheaper to go on an expensive holiday."
Impossible to make money from growing food
The presenter, who bought the Oxfordshire farm in 2008 before eventually taking on the job himself, has previously been open about the struggles of modern farming. In a recent column he said making a profit from growing food was "quite simply impossible".
"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."
TB outbreak and the loss of Pepper
Clarkson also spoke about a devastating outbreak of bovine tuberculosis on the farm last year. "Those of you not involved in cow farming, you have no idea how devastating that is. I mean, we were absolutely heartbroken at the farm, having to send pregnant cows off for Keir Starmer to kill them for no reason," he said on the show.
He later described the moment a vet broke the bad news to him during a routine test. "It's awful, it is awful. You have a test every six months on the cows and then you sort of become blasé, it's a hypothetical threat. And then the vet looks up, as he did yesterday lunchtime, and said 'I'm really sorry this one's failed'. So that means we're now locked down and it's just dreadful, absolutely dreadful," he told Times Radio.
One of the cows, Pepper, had been the very first calf born on his farm and was pregnant with twins when she had to be put down due to the disease.
