Farmers like me have felt besieged for the past two decades, castigated by Nimby neighbours, trussed up in red tape by over-zealous civil servants and, worst of all, frequently targeted by animal rights fanatics and militant vegans, particularly on social media.
The ‘culture wars’ have spilled out of university campuses onto our green and formerly pleasant farmland. Guardian journalist George Monbiot openly advocates the end of farming and its replacement with industrially produced laboratory food to achieve ‘Net Zero’. We can’t even turn on the television without being made to feel redundant and guilty by our publicly funded broadcaster.
BBC One’s Countryfile seems to portray the traditional farming community as anti-nature, wholly responsible for the climate and biodiversity ‘crises’ and even racist.
The Archers plotlines on Radio 4 become more woke every year and the BBC’s environmental presenter Chris Packham is brazenly spending this weekend promoting humourless, meat-free anarchy on the streets of London alongside Extinction Rebellion.
Enter stage right an unlikely saviour in the slightly paunchy shape of the ‘world’s most famous motoring journalist’ (his own words)
Guardian journalist George Monbiot (left) openly advocates the end of farming and its replacement with industrially produced laboratory food to achieve ‘Net Zero’ and the BBC’s environmental presenter Chris Packham (right) is brazenly spending this weekend promoting humourless, meat-free anarchy on the streets of London alongside Extinction Rebellion
I keep reminding myself that rural life must have felt like this in the 1650s. Cromwell’s puritans hadn’t quite banned foxhunting but they had banned almost everything else and everyone kept their heads down for fear of saying the wrong thing and being accused of witchcraft.
It would have taken a clairvoyant back then to predict that in 1660 the Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II would usher in a period of cheerful debauchery — and the political correctness of the puritans would go out of fashion.
Will the third Carolean Age see a similar sea-change in attitudes? Well, hopefully, it just might.
Enter stage right an unlikely saviour in the slightly paunchy shape of the ‘world’s most famous motoring journalist’ (his own words). Walk into the snug bar of any rural pub and eavesdrop on the conversation of the young farmers and the word of approval on all their lips is: Clarkson.
Suddenly there is a national figure on TV who is on our side.
On the BBC, Springwatch’s Chris Packham wears stylish clothes and adopts a self-righteous tone to tell us we’re farming our land all wrong.
In Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime, Jeremy Clarkson takes a deliberately shambolic, double denim-clad approach to portraying farming as a series of cock-ups, mingled with intense frustration and occasional moments of joy, all told with charmingly self-deprecating humour.
It succeeds because we are bored with being preached to by woke people on mainstream TV and Clarkson is refreshingly candid and honest as he discusses the challenges and inevitable compromises involved in producing food for the nation, frequently at a financial loss, while preserving the natural landscape and its wildlife.
In Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime, Jeremy Clarkson takes a deliberately shambolic, double denim-clad approach to portraying farming as a series of cock-ups, mingled with intense frustration and occasional moments of joy
It’s been a huge success because we are drawn in by the reality of farming life as we watch the team on Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm battle to turn a profit from its photogenic acres
It’s been a huge success because we are drawn in by the reality of farming life as we watch the team on Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm battle to turn a profit from its photogenic acres (although, of course, Clarkson’s wealth and television earnings make the farm profit and loss account relatively inconsequential). It is all in the very best British tradition of what Winston Churchill called KBO — Keep Buggering On.
And it is making Britain’s urban majority see farming communities in a new light, as what the great 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke described as ‘the little platoons’ that still form the building blocks of rural society.
Every farm has its cast of characters — the Kalebs and Geralds we see on Clarkson’s Farm, people often without much formal education or the attributes valued by modern society but nevertheless highly skilled and committed individuals who lovingly tend to Britain’s livestock and landscape with practical intelligence and often great physical bravery.
Clarkson’s hapless farming persona is also uncomfortably accurate for many of us who try to make a living from the land — the half-wit boss who pays all the bills, routinely gets trodden on or kicked in the gonads by livestock, and puts up with a stream of invective from his employees when he breaks machinery or generally gets in the way. And who often earns only around 40p per day from the enterprise for a 100-hour week.
Though we are very fortunate to work in beautiful surroundings and most of us would not swap what we do for any other existence, farming life is hard and often threatening to mental health — tragically, more farmers take their own lives than in almost any other profession and it is far removed from the comfortable stereotype in the socialist narrative.
But most importantly, what Clarkson’s Farm does is shine a bright light on where public policy is going wrong.
In fact, it has done more for the farming industry in a couple of years than the National Farmers Union has in decades.
Clarkson’s hapless farming persona is also uncomfortably accurate for many of us who try to make a living from the land — the half-wit boss who pays all the bills, routinely gets trodden on or kicked in the gonads by livestock, and puts up with a stream of invective from his employees
Every farm has its cast of characters — the Kalebs and Geralds we see on Clarkson’s Farm
Clarkson, though, is modest about his role in this. He told me he is: ‘Not a proper farmer so why should people listen to any agenda I might have. I just show things as they are and the system, particularly the bits designed by teenagers in Whitehall, is bonkers. You don’t have to make anything up!’
As someone who also came into farming relatively late in life with a fresh pair of eyes, in my case after a first career in the Army, I can endorse that.
Take badgers, a protected species. Clarkson’s plain speaking — ‘I f****** hate badgers’ — is fantastically refreshing after decades of being fed a carefully slanted diet of half truths about farming and conservation by the metropolitan Establishment and by shows such as Countryfile and Springwatch.
They unfailingly portray badgers as cute, cuddly and rare. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that badgers spread tuberculosis in cattle, and this can lead to entire herds being slaughtered — one devastated farmer in the series had lost 60 cows to tuberculosis along with her livelihood.
The truth is because it is protected, I believe the badger population is spiralling out of control and it is having a devastating effect not only on cows but also on other species such as hedgehogs, hares, ground nesting birds, bees, grass snakes and other vanishing species the animal preys on.
I’m sure Clarkson doesn’t really hate badgers; he reveals himself to be a rather sentimental animal lover and keeps one unproductive heifer as a pet, which no farmer can really afford to do. But he is right to challenge the prevailing narrative of the keyboard conservationists — and brave, for the animal rights mob are not people to upset lightly.
His sardonic humour is also the ideal tool for highlighting the neo-Stalinist way that, despite our exit from the EU, the Big State still insinuates its way onto farms, stifling innovation wearing down management in form-filling and frustrated impotence.
This is a serious issue; in the post-Brexit era farms need to adapt rapidly to avoid catastrophe as ‘Global Britain’ adopts free trade. West Oxfordshire District Council’s refusal to allow the sale of milk from eight miles away, over the county boundary in Gloucestershire, in the Diddly Squat Farm Shop is a classic piece of red tape ripe for cutting.
West Oxfordshire District Council’s refusal to allow the sale of milk from eight miles away, over the county boundary in Gloucestershire, in the Diddly Squat Farm Shop is a classic piece of red tape ripe for cutting
I’m sure Clarkson doesn’t really hate badgers; he reveals himself to be a rather sentimental animal lover and keeps one unproductive heifer as a pet, which no farmer can really afford to do
We all know farming has to change if we are to meet the challenges of reversing biodiversity loss and taking carbon out of the atmosphere. It is evident to those of us who obsess about the farmed environment that Diddly Squat Farm is managed sensitively with food production and the preservation of wildlife habitats well balanced.
The crops are established without ploughing, hedges are laid then allowed to grow tall and thick, there is a healthy, biodiverse woodland floor beneath Clarkson’s native broadleaf trees and there are areas of the farm sown with nectar rich plants. He doesn’t need to virtue-signal like the Monbiots and Packhams of this world.
The countryside narrative we have all been listening to has been biased and wrong for too long. But it is changing at last. Keep broadcasting, Jezza!
Jamie Blackett farms in Dumfriesshire and is the author of Red Rag To A Bull, Rural Life In An Urban Age And Land Of Milk And Honey, Digressions Of A Rural Dissident (Quiller)
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