Jeremy Clarkson has revealed that Kaleb Cooper is not talking to him after a flax harvest at Diddly Squat farm went wrong, adding to a string of failed agricultural schemes.
With heatwaves contributing to what has been described as the “worst harvest within living memory” this year, Clarkson was advised there would be no point planting wheat or barley at his farm near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. He instead looked into alternative sources of revenue, including growing flax, a vital component in linen shirts and, surprisingly, Formula One cars.
Back-breaking work
Growing flax is a surprisingly complicated business. Clarkson explained in the Sunday Times: "Unlike any other crop, you let the grain fall on the ground and harvest the stalks. But you don’t cut them as you would with wheat or barley. You rip them up by the roots, which requires the use of an enormous machine that can only be described as an industrial accident that hasn’t happened just yet."
After the specialised flax-harvesting machine has done its work, there is a great deal of back-breaking work to be done by hand. With most of his farm workers busy elsewhere, Clarkson was forced to call on his core team.
He said: “It was down to Lisa, Kaleb and me to scoop up the stalks into a stook and tie each one with a bit of string, as though we were living in an Enid Blyton novel.”
Harebrained schemes
It was exhausting work, and after a few hours it became increasingly clear that growing flax was not quite the brilliant idea Clarkson first thought. “Kaleb … is not talking to me,” he said. “He says I’ve got to stop coming up with harebrained schemes without thinking them through.”
Among Clarkson’s other “harebrained schemes,” he has also tried breeding rabbits. Imagining it would be easy because rabbits would breed quickly and be easy to handle, he soon found that the opposite was true.
“It turns out that rabbits don’t breed like rabbits,” Clarkson said. “They breed like pandas. It’s nigh-on impossible to get them to have sex and even if you manage it, the ladies rarely get pregnant. Also, rabbits are extremely vicious, which is a problem if, like me, you’re on blood thinners.”
Similarly, a plan to grow herbs, which can be hugely profitable, didn’t quite go as planned: “For the most part it was all a waste of time because what we’ve ended up with is a ton of parsley, a handful of coriander and a lot of dead thyme,” Clarkson lamented.
Farmers adapting to climate change
After the flax harvest also failed, he added: “It looked like flax was up there with the thyme and the rabbits as another Diddly Squat disaster.”
Farmers across the UK are, like Clarkson, rethinking how they use their land. Charlie Taverner, policy lead at the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, told the Independent: “Climate change has become a constant reality that our farmers are grappling with – they’re at the forefront of this all.
“But while we’re seeing an awful lot of apprehension, we have to see the opportunity. Some crops that we could never even imagine growing here are now becoming viable.”
Sweet potatoes, sweet peppers, artichokes and chillies are among the crops that are now becoming practical propositions for British farmers, and crops of chickpeas and lentils could become viable as summers become even hotter and drier.
But farmers need to plan ahead not just for hotter summers but much wetter winters. Professor Carol Wagstaff, the director of Agrifood Futures at the University of Reading, warns that the British weather is not just getting hotter, it’s becoming more extreme: “It’s naïve to think that because we’re having temperatures similar to Spain’s right now, that we can now just grow what is grown there,” she said. “We simply can’t because we won’t have those same year-round temperatures.”
