Why don’t all farmers love Clarkson’s Farm?

Clarkson’s Farm is back – with the finale of season four out on Prime Video today – but not everyone is happy about it. It’s not the anti-farming brigade I’m talking about – or even the specific anti-Clarkson brigade, who’ve disliked him since his Top Gear days. No, it’s the people within the rural and farming communities that I’m talking about.

When the programme launched, it was heralded by many as something of a miracle for British agriculture. Clarkson’s programme showed the people at home all the ups and downs of farming life in its brutal reality: the sheaves of inane paperwork; the incentives to actually not farm at all; the masochism of the British weather and the brutal acceptance that with life, comes death. As farmers always say, ‘where there’s livestock, there’s deadstock’, and Clarkson’s Farm didn’t shy away from showing viewers this truth. It might not all be entirely genuine, but it was far closer to the truth of life in the countryside than the likes of your average Countryfile episode.

In fact, author and sheep farmer James Rebanks went so far as to say that Jeremy Clarkson had done more for farmers in one TV series than Countryfile managed in 30 years.