3/17/23

Farmer Jeremy

Farmer Jeremy

I only recently got around to watching the Amazon Prime streaming series Clarkson’s Farm. I had sampled it when it the first season came out a couple years ago, but I thought that a show about Jeremy Clarkson would have to run entirely on his obnoxiousness, which wouldn’t be bearable. I was mistaken.

Clarkson, know in the UK as one of a trio of television hosts on the BBC Top Gear (super)car review series, grew in popularity over a period of years. His fame spread worldwide thanks to his and his cohosts’ chummy rivalry and hilarious antics. While his obnoxiousness lost his team their BBC show, it earned him and his pals a similar role at Amazon Prime with their occasional car series The Grand Tour.

Working with a new cast of real-life characters in the farming series—a necessity, since Clarkson brings no skill or knowledge to the enterprise—he illustrates rural British farming life as he learns one lesson after another, usually by pursuing some scheme and falling on his face. While the situations produce comedy, the show is obviously authentic when depicting the challenges facing a newbie to the practice of agriculture. Except Clarkson enjoys the backing of Amazon and his other sources of income: he can weather the costly mistakes and losses.

After completing the first eight episodes, I decided the show turned out to be more appealing in general than I had originally anticipated. It reminds viewers of just how hard modern farming is, and how meager the financial returns. Every calendar season is a gamble, with a possible payoff months or even a year later, any of which can be obliterated by mistakes or circumstances beyond the farmer’s control, especially the weather.

Or the local government. It turns out that local councils in Britain wield enormous power over a farmer’s property and his or her planning options. The closest village can vote to disapprove just about anything for any reason at all. And since Clarkson himself is a controversial celebrity journalist in Britain, the locals are determined to block his plans to sell his own or even the neighboring farmers’ products. As if that weren’t enough, there is a British national bureaucracy for every aspect of what farmers might want to do on their land: what they grow, what livestock they raise, what pests they aren’t allowed to control, what forms they are required to fill out, and so on in a seemingly interminable list.

Much of the first season took place in the midst of COVID lockdowns, labor shortages, and a shockingly bad growing season that began with unprecedented flooding and ended in an historical English drought. After doing the accounting of expenses and sales, his farm manager tells him he made a grand total of 144 pounds for the year, which he said worked out to around five pence an hour.

At the end of the first year, Clarkson has to admit that he has come to love it, despite the constant work, and even though he couldn’t hope to make a living at it. Without other income sources, there is no way for him to make a living by farming. The weather itself ultimately dictates whether or not there are any fruits of his labor to sell—even if just to cut down the losses.