"Man has been growing crops for 12,000 years, how hard can it be, right? Accompany Clarkson on his voyage of discovery as he learns to become a farmer in his year at Diddly Squat Farm."
Love him or loathe him, you cannot help but be sucked into the shenanigans at Clarkson's Diddly Squat Farm. An unlikely farmer, in June 2021 Clarkson's TV series Clarkson's Farm, documenting an intense, tough but funny year at his farm in the Cotswolds, debuted on Amazon Prime Video.
If you read the Sunday Times, you will have already read this book as the content first appeared in his column. If not, grab your wellies and join new eco-warrior Clarkson on his voyage of discovery through the farming calendar, in the year he decided to actually do something on the sprawling thousand acre farm he bought in 2008 as he learns to become a farmer. The repetition from the columns are a little frustrating but nevertheless it's a funny book with lots of take outs.
Following his attempts to become the potato king of Chipping Norton, we see the brutal reality of full-on vegetable farming, his attempt at doing a "Morgan Freeman" with bees and how the farming lifestyle becomes part of him, despite it paying him forty pence a day.
It's been another memorable year on Diddly Squat Farm - will the chickens finally come home to roost?
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Welcome back to Clarkson's Farm.
So, that went well . . .
The spring barley crop failed.
Just like the oil seed rape.
And the durum wheat.
Then the oats turned the colour of a hearing aid and the mushrooms went mouldy.
Farming sheep, pigs and cows was hardly more lucrative. Jeremy would be better off trying to breed ostriches.
But in the face of uncooperative weather, the relentless realities of the agricultural economy, bureaucracy, a truculent local planning department and the world's persistent refusal to recognise his ingenuity and genius, our hero's not beaten yet. Not while the farm shop's still doing a roaring trade in candles that smell like his knacker hammock, he isn't.
On the face of it, the challenges of making a success of Diddly Squat are enough to have you weeping into your (Hawkstone) beer, but misery loves company and in girlfriend Lisa, Farm Manager Kaleb, Cheerful Charlie and Gerald his Head of Security Jeremy knows he's got the best. And it's hard for a chap to feel too gloomy about things when there's a JCB telehandler, a crop-spraying hovercraft and a digger in the barn.
Because as a wise man* once said, 'there's no man alive who wouldn't have fun with a digger . . .'