Series / Clarkson's Farm

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Clarkson's Farm is a documentary on Amazon Prime which debuted on 11 June 2021, focusing on Jeremy Clarkson's attempts at farming.

Jeremy Clarkson purchased 1,000 acres of the former Sarsden Estate in Oxfordshire in 2008, including Curdle Hill Farm, which was farmed by Howard Pauling until he retired in 2019. Clarkson then decided to try his hand at it, because how hard can it be?

Aided by his girlfriend Lisa Hogan, his land agent and agriculturalist "Cheerful" Charlie Ireland, young farmer Kaleb Cooper, dry stone wall builder Gerald Cooper (no relation) who has harvested the farm every year for the past fifty years, and shepherdess Ellen Helliwell, Clarkson navigates the pitfalls of farming practices, the infamous unpredictability of British weather, the pettiness of local politics and the consequences of the UK's departure from the EU, to name a few things... all to make the newly-christened Diddly Squat Farm a roaring success.

Midway through production, the COVID-19 Pandemic hits, but farmers are deemed key workers, so the farm must adapt around restrictions and market changes (i.e. planting vegetables instead of barley because pubs were closed and demand for beer was down).

It was renewed for a second series in July 2021, which released on 10 February 2023. The series was renewed for a third series in October 2023, which released on 3 May 2024. A fourth series was greenlit in November 2023; prior to this the long term prospects of the series were initially in doubt due to Clarkson's controversial comments regarding The Duchess of Sussex but these doubts have since been allayed with the greenlighting of new seasons.

Tropes:

• Actor Allusion: Various nods to The Grand Tour:
  • When Jeremy applies for a variance to build a farm shop, one of his neighbours opposes the idea by citing the commotion he caused when he blew up his house, which happened in "Opera, Arts and Donuts". A clip from that episode is even featured to accompany her remark.
  • While trying to show a inspector a tour of his farm via Zoom, one of the items shown is a Alfa Romeo, frequently used by Clarkson throughout the series.
  • Clarkson jokingly refers Kaleb's Volkswagen as a "grand tourer" (or GT) car.
  • Clarkson's modified Bentley Continental GT from the "A Massive Hunt" special is used in "Harvesting" as an emergency vehicle.
  • At one point in Series 2, Jeremy places a second safety helmet over the first one, something he did back in the safety PSA's he did when he worked on Top Gear.
  • Likewise, Clarkson still owns the Range Rover with a drinks-and-gun cabinet built into the boot, a car he and his co-presenters showed off when it was still a concept car on Top Gear, and eventually bought one for himself. He breaks out the cabinet in S02E06, complete with the sloe gin.
• Adopt the Food: In Series 2, Jeremy buys a herd of cattle to provide beef for his restaurant, but makes sure to take special care of the white cow, Pepper, at the request of the daughter of the handler he buys them from. Over time, he ends up getting attached to Pepper; when she's unable to get pregnant even after mating with a live bull, Jeremy can't bear to send her to the slaughterhouse and adopts her as a pet instead.
  • In Series 3, Clarkson is forced to sell a majority of his cattle to make ends meet, including Pepper. But later on, during a visit to the farm she was sold to, Lisa & Jeremy are delighted to find Pepper has become a mascot for the farm and has given birth to a calf.
• All for Nothing: The final episodes of each series are rarely happy, and the few trhat are tend to get a Happy Ending Override:
  • In Series 1, Jeremy only makes £144, due to his inexperience with farming. However, he considers this Worth It as he's never been happier.
  • In Series 2, The restaraunt does open as expected, albeit with a few hitches, but this becomes undone by the start of the third series where he's forced to shut it down.
  • In Series 3, Despite having earned a combined £72,601 worth of profit, Clarkson and Kaleb have to give all of that up to buy seed and fertilizer for next year's farming cycle.
  • In Series 4, The pub opens successfully, but the pressure of opening on time really takes a toll on the staff and Jeremy.
  • In Series 5: The pub is losing money due to being too popular, there were unneccesary deaths of two cows, Jeremy develops prostate cancer and is rushed to hospital, and worst of all, even with all the robots and information about where to plant seeds, the farm is over 5,000 pounds in the red due to the weather not playing ball.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Jeremy buys a Lamborghini R8 tractor. It turns out to be too big to fit in the barn (or really, anywhere else he tries to park it), the controls are confusing, and Jeremy can't read the manual (it's in German). It also comes with the wrong hitch for the equipment he needs to use, and has to have it replaced.
  • Jeremy buys a flock of sheep to control the meadows, and uses a drone to herd them. The sheep are scared of it at first, then ignore it entirely later on, forcing him to hire professional shepherdess Ellen and her sheepdog.
• Black Comedy: Jeremy immediately follows up on selling his sheep to a slaughterhouse by having lamb for dinner. He points out that him rearing sheep really should've put him off lamb, but it simply hasn't.
• Boring, but Practical: Much of Charlie's advice, such as buying second hand equipment at an estate sale.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Gerald launches into non-sequiturs and strange topics even when his accent is intelligble, but Clarkson nontheless respects his years of experience at masonry and farmwork.
• Call to Agriculture: Jeremy takes up farming between series' of The Grand Tour after the contract farmer retires.
• Cock-a-Doodle Dawn: In series two, Jeremy buys roosters for the chicken coop on his farm. Predictably, they end up crowing at every sunrise and waking him up... which quickly irritates him due to sunrise happening at 4 in the morning. Over time, the crowing turns out to be more useful than expected, since it gives Jeremy more room to get to work on the farm.
• Country Mouse: In Series One, 23-year-old Kaleb says the furthest he's been from his hometown in his new car is 12 miles. He once went on a school trip to London when he was younger, but was so scared he refused to get off the bus. In Series Two he calls his infant son "foreign" because he was born in Oxford, 20 miles away. He also doesn't read very much (if at all) and has essentially no knowledge of the world beyond his village. Jeremy, therefore, gleefully picks him to go to London to drop off some orders for the farm's clients.
• Deadpan Snarker: Lisa Hogan, Clarkson' girlfriend is much more attractive than he is and reminds him of all his foibles.
• Demand Overload:
  • An in-universe example (as far as "in-universe" goes for a documentary series) occurs once Clarkson opens his farm shop. His fame as a motor journalist and TV presenter means that once he advertises it on Twitter, the one-shack storefront is downright swamped with customers on its opening day, to the point where it causes traffic jams throughout Chadlington (something Clarkson ultimately issued an apology for once the cameras were off).
  • Charlie in Series 5 says this is what the pub suffers from. Because so many people want to drink there due to the popularity of Clarkson and the show, the expenses for running it and maintaining staff, equipment, sanitation etc. make it a net loss each quarter, despite, again, being incredibly popular. Essentially, too many people visit, which leads to a chokepoint of not having enough resources to deal with everyone at the pub. Also, people steal the beer glasses, which doesn't help matters.
• Didn't Think This Through: At least Once per Episode, Clarkson admits that he didn't forsee a major problem with his plans. For instance, instead of simply cutting the fields' grass once a year or paying someone to do that, he instead opts to buy a flock of sheep, which nets him an overall loss once he factors in all their costs and the low income the lambs are worth.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Jeremy has one in the second series when Alan mentions that he is allowed to do whatever he wants with the old existing barn on his land, which finally lets him get the restaurant idea going when Plan A is refused by local government. Overlaps with Now You Tell Me?.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Clarkson may be an vocal anti-environmentalist, but even he doesn't want bugs to die off due to climate change and habitat removal, in part because they're necessary for all plant life to continue.
  • When sending one of their cows (carrying twins) to slaughter due to an inconclusive TB infection, Jeremy has issues with the testing process, both in how it's done^note a measuring of lumps on a cow's neck with a small spanner measuring device, which is millimeter-precise, and thus prone to the cow moving about and potentially giving a false reading and how that, even an inconclusive cow is sent to slaughter after a second test, despite being unconfirmed, and posing no more safety risks than if it was kept in isolation. Jeremy opines to Charlie, Kaleb and Lisa about this, and that he really dislikes the notion of the Appeal to Tradition and Older Is Better mindset of some farmers who are simply used to the process, when he's certain that there must be a means to make a cure for Cow TB given the world's scientific advances since cow farming started. But for some reason, in his mind, a cure is just not being researched, simply because the current system works, so why change it?, even if it's better and rules out the needless deaths of cows. Nobody in the room objects to Jeremy's line of thinking, not even Charlie, and it's one of the few times all of them are speechless. After initial filming wrapped, Charlie asks Jeremy into a meeting, and the results showed that the cow they sent off was completely unneccessarily slaughtered on the slaughterhouses own inspections, which seems to just break him, and further proves his point.
• For Inconvenience, Press "1": Basically any time Jeremy Clarkson needs to apply for a licence or do other paperwork to comply with government regulations, he ends up stuck in a tedious series of automated phone messages.
• Genius Ditz: Kaleb knows everything there is to know about farming, and almost nothing about anything else.
• Green Aesop: As the first series progresses, it places increasing emphasis how much harm climate change is doing to the farming industry as the issue becomes an increasingly big problem for Clarkson (a vocal anti-environmentalist) and the rest of the farm staff.
• Ignored Epiphany: Jeremy's first attempts at tilling the fields goes wrong when he decides that, instead of doing it slowly and methodically, he'll do wide swings that leave big gaps between the rows. He realizes that this is a bad idea once he sees how it looks, but then immediately does it again while attempting to seed the field, which pisses off Kaleb to no end as he has to do more work to get the fields planted.
• Intergenerational Friendship: There is a 38 year difference between Clarkson and Kaleb's ages, but they get on like old mates. According to Kaleb in the third season, they go out for dinner together every weekend.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Although Kaleb is blunt and tactless in how he talks to Jeremy and doesn't understand why Jeremy is so reluctant to have Pepper slaughtered since he could always pick another one if he wanted a favorite, he is well-intentioned, is shown to be friendly with Clarkson despite their disagreements, and he has a close network of friends and family.
• Job-Stealing Robot: A recurring theme in series 5 is Clarkson modernising the farm with these sorts of robots. Him and Kaleb take a trip to The Netherlands to visit various tech-run farms that have precision and recycling waste as their goals (equivalent to Competence Porn for farming) and Jeremy gets inspired to do the same for his farm. He visits a farm expo in Birmingham to scout for robots to use, and when Jeremy purchases the Agbot, him and the salesman joke about no longer needing Kaleb. When the Agbot is working on the farm, Kaleb shows some resistance to the robot, and even took potshots at it requiring a GPS and an app when it didn't work properly. In the following episodes however, the efficiency of the Agbot leads to Jeremy finally selling off the Lambo tractor, and even Kaleb comes around on the robots, and is astounded by the robots' efficiency, and actually becomes quite enamoured with the onion seeder bot's farming process.
• Lack of Empathy: Deconstructed:
  • The other farmers and the workers at the abattoir appear unempathetic towards Clarkson when he has to send four of his sheep to slaughter and Pepper, one of his cows that he grew fond of. However, it's not as malicious as it looks; all the farmers and abattoir workers have been doing their jobs longer than Clarkson has and are just used to it, whereas Clarkson is not used to making these decisions and is visibly upset when he realizes his sheep have been slaughtered while he was in the office.
  • It's also a result of a culture clash; farming doesn't always involve treating the animals as pets and has a practical culture with utilitarian values, livestock are kept on a farm because they are seen as assets and a means of production (i.e. meat, milk, and wool, to name a few). If the animal doesn't produce anything, then the animal is removed to be sent to slaughter or sold off to another farm. Clarkson isn't used to treating animals as assets so he grows attached to them much faster than Kaleb. This is best shown by how both of them reacted to Pepper's infertility; Kaleb immediately stated that they should get rid of Pepper because she was a liability and Clarkson should just pick another one if he wanted to play favorites, whereas, Clarkson was conflicted and chose to keep Pepper as a pet to save her from slaughter, especially since he had promised the daughter of Pepper's previous owner to look after the animal. In season 3, Clarkson was eventually forced to sell Pepper but she was returned because she was pregnant during that time and managed to give birth to a calf.
• Layman's Terms: Charlie is a saint for carefully and clearly explaining things to Clarkson and the audience, and clearly has experience doing this. Compared to Kaleb, who doesn't care that Clarkson doesn't have the farming background to follow along, and Gerald, who is Gerald.
• Loophole Abuse: Episode 7 of Series 2 has Clarkson tell everyone to employ this trope to get around council restrictions:
  • The farm shop can't sell their made-in-China t-shirts and hats as they're not local produce within the 16 mile radius the council enforces on them. They decide to clear out their stock by selling expensive vegetables that just so happen to come with a free shirt or hat (£15 for one Potato, get a free shirt!), as that's not technically selling them.
  • The council denies their proposal to turn the lambing shed into a restaurant, but any barn that's been on a farming property for over ten years can be used for whatever the farmer wants, and the farm does have an old farmhouse they can refurbish...
  • To solve the parking issue, Charlie applies for parking permission on the various fields around the farm shop, knowing the council will deny them, but also knowing that the council have to wait out the 28 days until they can take action.
  • Later in Series 5, a group of Travellers take over the pub's parking lot and then block the access road to race their horses, using a centuries old law permitting them to exercise their horses on public roads.
• Naïve Newcomer: Much of the show's comedy revolves around how woefully inexperienced Jeremy is at farming. He approaches the job like he would a typical challenge on Top Gear and The Grand Tour, emphasizing television-friendly flashiness above all else, and ends up stuck with ill-fitting equipment and self-sabotaging techniques, repeatedly irritating the younger, but far more experienced Kaleb. As the show progresses, he gradually gets a better hang on the ins-and-outs of farming, but still gets blindsided by new equipment and techniques at least Once an Episode. It also gets deconstructed in Series 2, where Jeremy's inexperience as a farmer and his past as a controversial and showy media personality fuel the public skepticism and bureaucratic obstruction towards his plans to open a restaurant on the farm.
• No Hero to His Valet: Kaleb really doesn't give much of a toss that Jeremy is A) a celebrity and B) his employer, and does not hesitate to rib him, snark at him, or outright scold him with profanity included.
• No OSHA Compliance: Played for drama. It's shown multiple times on the farm that the tactics used by Kaleb and Clarkson are incredibly dangerous for what they're doing. It should be worth noting that farming is considered one of the most dangerous careers in the world due to the high number of risk factors in the industry.
  • In the second season, Clarkson is understandably uneasy about Kaleb using a tractor to fix a fence since Clarkson has to hold the post while Kaleb uses the tractor to push it into the ground. However, this causes an injury to Clarkson's knee when the fence falls. Even though Clarkson said he was uncomfortable with Kaleb's tactic, an indifferent Kaleb carried on and caused the injury.
    • Which didn't stop Kaleb from doing it the same way with his brother later.
  • In season 3, Clarkson uses a chainsaw to cut a tree branch despite Kaleb telling him that he needs to cut the branch at the knuckle and from the bottom to stop it from pinching the chainsaw, When the branch breaks, a heavy tree branch fell on Clarkson, and Clarkson stumbles backward while still holding an active chainsaw. Kaleb snickers at first but Clarkson quickly calls him out on it as he believes Kaleb could have predicted what happened and didn't warn him. Thankfully, Charlie de-escalates things by scolding both of them and pointing out that careless use of chainsaw was the least of their problems that day.
• Not What It Looks Like: As part of a wilding effort, Jeremy cuts down a few trees in a nearby forest to give other plants access to sunlight. When he posts about it on Twitter, he immediately gets hit by replies from people who mistake it for one of his more typical anti-environmentalist stunts.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: A running theme in Series 2 is the local council repeatedly denying Diddly Squat Farm basic farming projects:
  • Clarkson wants a farm track to connect the restaurant to the farmhouse, with the added benefit of keeping his tractor off of the roads, which the Council denies, despite being an active benefit for everyone involved. Charlie also notes that, in his time as a farmer assistant, he has never seen the council deny such requests.
  • Because the council denied them permission to build a car park near the farm shop, customers parked on the side of the roads, to which the council then put up "no stopping" cones to make sure people don't stop there either. As Jeremy points out, they wouldn't have needed to use the cones if they let him build parking space on his own field to begin with. And Charlie, a usually well-mannered assistant that hardly gets angry, is visibly furious at the council for their actions.
  • When Clarkson and Charlie were denied permission to make a restaurant on the farm, they consider taking the council to court; and the only reason they don't go through with it is due to the eyewatering costs of the legal case (£500,000, including other costs too).
  • Goes to a somewhat ridiculous extreme in the first episode of Series 3 when the council arbitrarily shuts down the restaurant with an enforcement notice after it has been open for a mere six weeks. The enforcement notice even forbids them from putting potted plants near the building.
  • Because this trope was so prevalent, a new law was introduced by the British parliament called the "Clarkson's clause", which now allows farmers to convert disused agricultural buildings for commercial and residential use without planning permission.
• OOC Is Serious Business: When Kaleb learns of Jeremy's cancer diagnosis in Episode 39, his usual combative attitude when talking to Jeremy disappears, and he assures him not to worry about the harvest. He's also much more patient with Lisa when teaching her how to drive the tractor then he usually is when demonstrating something to Jeremy.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: While discussing Kaleb's myriad of haircuts, Jeremy asks him if he's ever tried wearing his hair like Phil Oakey (i.e. long on one side, short on the other). Kaleb, being much younger than Jeremy, has no idea what he's talking about (a more contemporary comparison would be to Skrillex).
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Jeremy's main issue as he starts is that he has absolutely no idea what he's doing (and very often cuts corners, in turn causing more problems for himself) and is constantly making mistakes, driving him to seek assistance from people that live around him who actually know what they're doing.
• Running Gag: Clarkson's choice of tractor has everyone he encounters state that it's too big for his purposes.
• The Scream: When he discovers that the dam he built is leaking again.
• Share the Male Pain: As part of the lambing process, Ellen puts elastic bands on the male lambs' testicles, which will castrate them by cutting off blood flow to their gonads until they fall off. Jeremy is completely creeped out and refuses to take part.
• Silent Credits: After the reveal of Jeremy's cancer the end credits of Episode 39 and the opening credits of Episode 40 are silent.
• Stating the Simple Solution: Charlie and Kaleb both do this to Clarkson on a regular basis for different reasons, whether he listens to them or not is a different story. For instance, Charlie advises against buying a herd of sheep to deal with the simple problem of cutting the grass once a year, and is ignored.
• Tempting Fate: Jeremy finds out his farm used to be a source of spring water, so he sets out to bottle it. The testing results show two of the springs are contaminated, but one is good, so while further testing is done, he bottles it and labels it "Hasn't Got Shit In It." The testing comes back contaminated, so he has to frantically rush to the store to pull it off the shelves because it has got shit in it.
• The Unintelligible: A Running Gag in the series is that Gerald, the Farms' head of security and occasional farm hand, has an extremely heavy West Country accent. Jeremy is never sure what he's saying and mostly just nods and agrees with him, hoping the conversation ends. This makes harvesting in the last episode of series one a bit of a pain at first, with Gerald driving the (very loud) combine with a face mask on, muffling his speech and making him impossible to hear over the comms. Even the Subtitler Is Stumped, as half of what Gerald says is literally just printed as "[[Unintelligible Words]]"
• Wham Line: Series 5, Episode 39

• Worth It:
  • Jeremy's profit at the end of the first series is only £144, but he considers it this because he's genuinely never felt happier in his life.
  • Opening the restaurant, something Charlie advised against doing, has him admit that it was all worth it and he was wrong to think it was a bad idea.