If there’s one thing Jeremy Clarkson is, it’s honest, with the former Top Gear man speaking frankly on how much it costs him to run his Diddly Squat Farm.
The focus of Amazon Prime Video’s Clarkson’s Farm, Jezza’s life as a hands-on owner of a massive farm in the beautiful Cotswolds is one of the best shows around.
Season three is about to drop on Prime Video and a fourth has already been confirmed.
The first two seasons of the hit agricultural programme followed Clarkson as he took over the farm he’d owned since 2008 following the retirement of its resident farmer in 2019.
It quickly made him realise how tough it is to run a farm, shining a light on how important the agricultural industry is to the country. And with Clarkson being Clarkson, there was a good few laughs in-between the serious undertones.
In his column in The Times, Clarkson revealed in late 2023 just how much of a financial benefit or burden the farming business has been to him.
In the honest opinion piece, the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire host revealed that things have definitely been done the hard way.
Clarkson is banned (Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty Images)
That’ll come as no surprise to anyone who has actually watched Clarkson’s Farm with it doing a very good job at showing the gruelling nature of life as a farmer where the weather is king when it comes to harvest of feast or famine.
Clarkson went as far as saying that most of his crops completely failed.
In layman’s terms, that means he spent a lot of cash on the production process with nothing produced to make him money.
He wrote: “This year, though, it was noticeably bad. Very bad.
“And what made it worse is that I normally invest maybe £40,000 in seeds, fertiliser and sprays. But last year, thanks to the war in Ukraine and the inflation that resulted, I had to invest £110,000.
Clarkson has diversified his farm to try and make more cash (David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Hawkstone)
“And then, having done that, all I could do was hope the weather would be good. Which it wasn’t. In my first year of farming I made a profit of £114.
“That will look like a dream result when I get the figures for this year.”
All in all, Clarkson said 2023 had been a ‘disaster’ year for the farming industry and went as far as saying he had thought about selling up.
He said: “I’ve tried farming conventionally and it didn’t work. I’ve tried diversifying and that hasn’t really worked either.
“And I’ve tried with sheep and pigs and cows and that has been a bit of a disaster as well. So I arrived at a crossroads. And was not sure which way to turn.
Season three of Clarkson’s Farm is coming in May 2024 (Prime Video)
“I could sell the farm and earn far more from the interest than I do from growing bread and beer and vegetable oil.
“But I like having it and for very good reasons, there are no death duties on farmland. So my children like me having it too.
“This means I have to hang on to it, but what then? Do nothing? That would be heartbreaking. So I have to do something. But what?”