Clarkson's Farm (2021) s01e08 Episode Script
Harvesting
It's peak summer
and a normal day on the farm
now looks like this.
I get up at 6:30 and after a hit of coffee, set off to let the hens out of their houses.
Morning.
On the way back, I pick some mushrooms for my lunch.
And then it's off to feed the fish.
Back at home, I start work on the tomato sauce recipe I'm working on for the farm shop.
I add a few chilies and some fresh coriander and leave it on a low heat to simmer while I mend a fence that the hunt says it didn't knock over back in the winter.
I then mow the wildflowers I sowed because that's what all gardeners do, wait till the plants are looking at their best and then prune them, so they don't look so good anymore.
After this, I pick some vegetables for Lisa to sell to some customers we have in Atlanta, and I've even found a patch of rhubarb, so I pick that, too.
And I rush it to the shop.
This is the rhubarb that needs washing.
Where I throw away all the stuff I'd picked the day before, because it doesn't sell, because no one likes vegetables these days.
I then stir the tomato sauce before heading out to check on the bees.
Come on, off you go.
And the sheep, and the lambs.
And then I begin the big job of the day.
There's always one.
Today, I've gotta clear all the straw and the sheep feces out of the barn.
But as I don't have a bucket for the front of the tractor, I have to ask Kaleb to get the snowplow out of the other barn.
Why can't you do it? Because the Lamborghini won't fit in here.
Right away, I could tell he wasn't happy, because he thinks my tractor's too complicated.
Your tractor's crap.
And then, when I'm having the mushrooms, which I'd picked earlier and cooked in a cream sauce and served on sourdough toast, with some parsley from the garden I get a call from my associates who say that the sheep have escaped and are on the road.
So, I drive over there to find the sheep haven't escaped.
But at least the plow is now fitted to the front of the tractor, so I head to the lambing barn and straightaway, I discovered it wouldn't fit in there either.
Shit.
I then fit an 80-year-old deathtrap to the back of Lisa's tractor and use that instead.
It's getting late now, so I rush home to add some seasoning to the tomato sauce, before heading out to feed the fish again, and collect the eggs.
And then I hit the sack, knowing that soon things are gonna get really busy.
One of the extra jobs in our new busier lives was doing a daily moisture test of the crops.
And with Charlie on holiday, that task fell to Kaleb and me.
- Now, a seasoned old farmer - Yeah.
Can tell how moisture is in the pod just by biting it, can't they? Yeah, they go like this.
They open it up, I've seen them do it.
They open it up, they're very serious when they do it.
Go like that and they go "That's 12.
" -And they're right.
I mean, they know? -Yeah, absolutely.
But I can't do that, 'cause I'm not a seasoned old farmer.
-No.
-And you can't, 'cause you're a fetus.
So, we've got the machine.
You ever used one of these? Let me think.
See that bit there, look, we wanna fill that with rape.
Fill it? Can we have a caption now, saying, "Several hours later"? You got a bit more? And you do that, look.
And then So, if this says less than six, we're in deep trouble, we can't harvest it.
- Yeah.
- If it's more than - Nine.
- Nine.
It's too wet and they won't take it.
Are you ready? Right, it's testing.
Dun, dun, dun.
So, that's Eight.
- eight percent moisture, which means? We're perfect, we need to get out here.
Let's do this! But, actually, we couldn't do this.
To harvest the rape, I need a combine harvester, and I haven't got one because they're a quarter of a million pounds, so I'm gonna have to rent one.
And the trouble is that every other farmer in the area will have been out this morning in the fields, testing the moisture and they'll all be coming to the same conclusions and they'll be trying to rent one as well.
Back at the office, my worst fears were realized.
Three days? You can't do anything before that? No, no, I've got his number.
Yep, you've guessed correctly.
No, I know.
He's doing his own He's doing his own farm first.
All right, okay, no, thanks for your time.
I went outside and wherever I looked, there was a glaring reminder that I really was the new boy on the block.
Look, there's a combine there and there.
Yeah, there's another.
Every farm's got a combine on it.
By late afternoon, I'd got nowhere.
37, 42 But then Kaleb hit the jackpot with a mate of his I shall call "Jesus.
" Even though his real name is Simon.
- This afternoon.
- If it comes down, I'll try I've only got two fields left to do, so ideally, I can get mine done this evening.
Yeah.
And then get up to you, sort of like, tomorrow.
Tomorrow, and then we can start cutting.
The next morning, with the combine sorted, it was action stations.
- This is perfect.
- Yeah, look at the day.
I know.
Right, the tractors are gonna be coming through here all day, so I'm gonna try and move this gatepost to make life easier.
It is quite a Yeah, that's what I meant.
-I don't think you did any of that.
-I did Right, this is your big day, Lambo.
This is what we've been looking forward to.
8.
9.
I'm gonna go and hook up.
After a whole year of watching Kaleb attach things to tractors, I figured I'd have no problems hitching my Lambo to a trailer I'd rented.
Um I do that, then that, then not that.
Um Right, that is definitely not coming out.
Well, there must be something else I've forgotten to do.
What have I forgotten? Um Not that.
There was only one solution.
Get Kaleb to do it.
Actually, wait! Wait, wait, whoa! Right, you are all set.
With that, we headed off to the farm shop to rendezvous with Jesus.
It's now Friday, twenty to twelve.
We have a weather front moving in Sunday morning.
So, we've got to try and do four days' harvesting in a day and a half.
This could be a long day.
Me aircon stopped working.
And I'm too tight to get it fixed at the minute.
It's either there, or there.
That's nice there.
So, we're going all night tonight probably, yeah.
In there, there's some toilet roll.
All right, if you get short, let me know, all right? -You've actually brought bog roll? -Yeah.
Wouldn't be the first time I get caught out.
Look! We have a combine harvester.
It's here.
- That's Simon.
- That's Simon.
Has he briefed you on how to do this? Are we doing this on the move? - Unloading on the move? - Yeah.
We then discussed an issue that would add yet more pressure.
This is an unusual year for the barley and the rape to be ready at exactly the same time.
- Yes, very.
- Very unusual.
-Almost unique, I would say.
Normally, the barley's ready much Normally ready two or three weeks earlier, yeah.
- And then the rape's - Yeah.
- it's just that dry spring then? Yes.
Here it comes.
And we're away.
My first harvest.
They are bloody clever, combines, aren't they? They're wicked.
You're right, I mean, to be able to chop the thing, open the pod, take those tiny That massive machine take those tiny seeds out and go, "Don't need that, don't need that, don't need that.
But do need that.
" And it measures how much seed is taken out.
It's just Farming is amazing, isn't it? Adrenaline's buzzing, I am buzzing.
You know, come three 'clock tonight, in the morning, I'll be still going.
You're gonna be hanging.
When the combine was close to full, Kaleb maneuvered into position.
Okay, hold it about there.
That's the first lot coming out.
And once he'd filled up with two payloads from the combine he headed to the barn to unload.
And whilst he was grappling with my 19th-century trailer My God.
I was psyching myself up for my first run.
I'm just hanging back.
His yellow light is on, that tells me its tank is 80% full.
I'm underway.
This is the moment.
I'm coming in now, coming in.
Not hot, no, not coming in hot.
I'm gonna go back further.
Further back, further back.
That's right, I'm filling the back first, that's it.
I need one eye there and one eye there, to see where I'm going.
I need to be a pigeon.
It's off.
No, I've stopped.
Keep going.
I can't do it.
No.
I need to be at the front, I need to be at the front.
Wait a minute, what do I need to do? Slow down.
Ready, steady, steady, go.
No, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
Well done, you got most of that in the middle.
Jesus, that's difficult.
Everything's reversed, so if I'm looking here, over my shoulder and I think, "No, it's at the back," I have to slow down.
When it's at the back, slow down.
When it's at the front, speed up.
Happily, on my next run there was no onanism.
It all went well.
All these racing drivers talk about precision driving, they do not know what the words mean.
I then rushed off to unload my cargo, fully aware that having complained for years about tractors holding up traffic, I was now in a tractor holding up traffic.
You should all have stopped at the farm shop, Then you wouldn't be stuck here, would you? Back at the farm, it was imperative I got the seed unloaded quickly, so I could get back to the field before the combine was full again.
Lovely.
Then, back up Wait a minute.
If I swing that way.
Back up Yes.
My angle was wrong.
If I back up, that way keeps it to the right.
Yeah, that's it.
God.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Pay attention, Jeremy.
So, if I go that way, keeping the back out.
For heaven's sake, this is just impossible.
After a mere six attempts, which could easily have been edited out the much more modern rented trailer was in.
Yes.
Shit, shit, shit.
Jesus, that was lucky.
I won't tell Kaleb about that.
With the weather holding, we worked as a team to cover as much ground as possible.
Right, this field, according to my map here, 54.
8 acres, and if we'd had good weather, we could expect £23,500 worth of rape out of it.
I don't think it'll be that much.
I'd like to ring Charlie and ask him, but he's on holiday.
So, we're doing ten acres an hour and all the Canadians have just fallen off their chairs laughing at us.
It's definitely getting rather hot in here.
Just turn my air conditioning up a bit.
Go that way get that out it means I go right, so I wanna be going that way.
Wait, wait, I'm gonna try that again one more time.
Despite the idyllic working conditions, there was a nagging issue on my mind.
How much seed were we actually harvesting? What's it saying on thecomputer, Simon? The yield monitor on the combine is saying it's running at two and a half ton to the hectare now, so that's a ton to the acre.
But what we're looking for is a ton and a half an acre.
It's good in patches.
7.
3.
We're all right.
So far as I could tell, most of what we were harvesting were earwigs.
There were thousands of them.
But I was told this was normal, so we kept on working.
Right, here we go, coat on.
The second field I think yielded better than the first one definitely.
Wait a minute.
You kick the back out that way, yes, head it on that way.
Bloody hell, that's the wrong way.
It's like a tractor meet.
Isn't it? - So, we've done Picket's Piece.
- Yeah.
We're doing Lower Washpool now.
And then we've got Bury Hill North, which is 45.
7 acres.
You better get going, Jeremy.
- His light's on.
- Yeah.
The next morning, when we resumed harvesting, my first offload of earwigs was even trickier than normal.
He's parked his truck in the farmyard.
There's something wrong with him.
Right, he won't be finding that in a hurry.
However, Kaleb's annoying parking was the least of my problems.
Because, unlike yesterday, the sky was overcast and that didn't bode well for the mid-morning moisture test.
- Ten.
- Ten.
Yeah.
That's too much.
Two percent over.
Why has it got wet? It hasn't rained.
Is it just moisture in the atmosphere? It's probably the moisture in the air.
'Cause actually, it's damper now than it was at seven o'clock this morning.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, what do we do? Happily, there was one thing we could do.
Go and test the barley to see if we could harvest that instead.
- What's the news, mate? - 14.
7.
- What's the limit for that? - 15.
- So, it's good enough to go? - We could go.
Yeah.
Right, I'd say that was pretty successful.
Hoo.
Did you hear that, fetus boy? It was successful.
Simon, don't give him a big head.
What I've got in the trailer right now will keep Wetherspoon's going for about a year.
That is beer seeds.
However, when I got to the barn, I realized I had another problem.
All right, what have we got left on rape? We've got about, big field, about 40 or 50 tons of rape still to go.
So, where do I put the barley? Hello.
Where the bloody hell am I gonna store this barley? Because the barn's all full, we can't mix them up, can we? No, no, you'll have to store it up the airfield.
That bunker I built, we can probably store about 400 tons of barley up there.
Yeah, but we can't, 'cause it's gonna rain.
If it does rain, we can't just leave it outside, can we? No, it will get wet and then they will reject it.
You'll have to just sell it straightaway.
What do you mean? Well, you can't store it, you'll have to just literally dump it up there, then sell it straightaway.
What, today? Well, yeah, ideally, today, yes.
Back in the office.
Okay, grain merchants.
Yeah, hi.
Really, I need a wagon today.
So, you can't help at all? After a few calls, I finally got a result.
You're playing music in my ear.
Cheers, bye, bye.
Wagon on its way.
I then drove to the storage facility that Kaleb had rebuilt after some lockdown agri-yobs had burnt the old one down.
This is like being nine, playing sandcastles.
I like it.
Then, Kaleb arrived with his load.
Followed shortly afterwards by the lorry I'd ordered.
That is a smart lorry.
-Will it weigh what we put in there? -Yeah.
- Will it? Epic.
- Yeah.
However, as the loading began, I got a terrible hot-neck feeling as I realized that the grain from the ten acres we'd harvested would completely fill the lorry.
And we still had 140 acres to go.
My only hope was that Kaleb wouldn't notice.
Twenty lorries you should have organized.
- Twenty lorries? - Twenty lorries.
They should have been coming back and forth, back and forth.
- What, 29 tons in each one? - Yes.
It's six o'clock on a Saturday night.
We're not gonna get any more now and it's Sunday tomorrow.
And it's gonna rain tonight.
Are we completely stuck then? Yes.
Completely stuck, we can't cut any more barley now, because you fucked up.
All you had to do was get your phone out and go, "Hiya.
" - No.
- Yeah.
Yes, it is.
Wrong, no, I made the mistake about nine months ago.
What? When I went, "That barn's big enough.
" I was in full Yorkshire mode.
"No, I'm not spending more than 22 grand, that barn's perfectly big enough, everything will go in there.
" I thought we'd have little bays with rape would go there, the wheat would go there, the barley would go there.
They never said to me, you never said to me, if I'm honest I did say, "Your barn's small.
" Yes, I know, but you should have said, "You do realize that that barn will be totally filled by your rape.
" - I did! - You didn't say that.
I did.
You just don't listen.
You do not listen.
No, you switch off.
You'll probably switch off now, you don't even know what I'm saying now, probably.
What did I just say? - Something about switching off.
- See? This is my point.
So, thanks to me, all work ground to a halt.
And Kaleb headed for home.
Where's my fucking car? I see it.
I see the tailgate.
As it turned out, the next morning, I didn't need my tractor keys.
Obviously, we couldn't harvest in the rain.
And even when the downpour stopped, we couldn't restart until the crops had dried out.
So, while we were waiting, we used the time to get another job out of the way.
Starting the lambs on their journey to the Sunday lunch table.
We're looking at good, well-meated, lambs that are the right sort of weight, 44 kilos-plus that are good to go to the abattoir, so we can have some good meat.
So, what we got, Ellen, the right weight and the fit? - Seventy-eight.
- Seventy-eight.
It's like they know.
This is a powerful advertisement for vegetarianism.
But I've seen powerful adverts for going on a cruise, and I'm still not gonna do that.
Once the lambs had gone and the fields had dried out, we finished off harvesting the oil seed rape and the barley.
And then we sold what we'd got to a grain merchant.
That just left one crop the wheat.
What's the news? 16.
6.
So, still over.
Without any green in it.
It wants another week.
- Without any green.
- Right, we must leave it.
Sadly, I then received a rather distressing phone call.
Okay.
Okay.
All right, I'll, um, I'll be back later.
All right, thanks.
Bye.
Wayne Rooney's dead.
How my poor ram had died was a mystery.
So, after we'd loaded him into the most dignified hearse we could find, the vet took him away to do an autopsy.
And rang later on to say he died from a twisted intestine.
I'm surprised at how sad I am about the death of Wayne, because I am.
He'd become sort of part of a little ritual I had in the evening.
I'd go for a walk and bring them a bit of food and they'd come running up.
I've just come down now because I wanted to make sure that Leo was all right.
But he's sort of hiding in that bush over there.
And he won't come out, not even for the food.
Sadly, we had to leave my only remaining ram to his grief.
Because soon, the moisture level of the wheat was bang on.
What's the news? 14.
4.
And we were good to go.
There were 96 acres of wheat to harvest, and its value was measured differently to oil seed rape and barley.
With wheat, the volume you get I was gonna say it doesn't matter, it does matter, but it doesn't matter as much as the quality.
So, I've got a half a trailer load back there and I don't know whether I've got half a trailer load of really good wheat that'll be used to make bread, or really terrible wheat that'll have to go to be animal feed.
As we beavered away, Kaleb, now desperate for his long-awaited visit to the barber's, took a moment to rearrange his coiffure.
Hair.
I like it.
It's out of my face at least.
Shortly after this exchange, though, the mood changed, because Gareth Bale noticed that a neighboring farmer was in trouble.
Look to your left, Jeremy, it doesn't look very good over there.
Something's on fire, isn't it? This is every farmer's nightmare.
A harvest blaze caused by malfunctioning equipment.
I'm on it now, just bear with me, two minutes.
I know there's two fire engines going to it now.
How does he know that? How do you know that? Got contacts everywhere.
I took a moment to thank the Lord for the bulletproof reliability of the Lambo.
And then we got back to work.
Just let it go back towards the back of it.
Thanks to Simon's calm and clear instructions over the radio That's good, now bring it forward.
I was getting pretty good at my tractoring.
You're sort of just the front end of the middle.
Turn it slightly closer to you than the middle at the moment.
But, later that day, I came back from a run to the storage barn to find Simon had been replaced in the combine by a colleague.
I just don't know, I I don't know.
I don't know what he wants me to do.
Do you want me to come alongside on the next run? As long as you don't go too fast He hasn't put his light on, but the spout's out, so I'm assuming he's ready.
As I say, if you turn Am I at the back? I have no idea.
Shit, shit, shit.
Not a word, not a word.
Eventually, though, we got into a rhythm.
I tell you what, he's 72, look at him.
He was telling me last week, he's combined this farm every year for 50 years and he didn't want to miss this one, even with COVID.
And here he is.
I'll wait for your light to go on, Gerald.
Put your light on, I'll come back.
Okay, but like I said, if you just don't go too fast, then I can see the backof the trailer and I can do the combine Okay, got you.
I haven't, but By the end of August, our work was complete.
We had harvested 546 acres of wheat, oil seed rape and barley.
And the fields were now taking a well-earned breather.
I couldn't, though.
I had to sell the wheat.
So, I took a sample and called Charlie, who, now all the work was done, was back from his holiday, and arranged to meet him at my local mill.
There it is.
Sample bag.
My hope was that my wheat would end up in here, being turned into flour for bread.
Because then I'd get top dollar for it.
First, though, it had to pass muster with Paul the miller.
This is your Number one, Premier League Premier League.
Milling wheat.
Not Vauxhall Conference.
No.
We'd like a Liverpool here, you know, top of the league.
Man City at the very least.
Right, okay.
We will see what we can do.
I will go in to our lab man and we will come out with the result for you.
- How long's it take? - Okay.
Five minutes.
The make-or-break number, according to Paul, would be the percentage of protein in the grain.
- You're aiming actually for 13.
- Thirteen percent.
Thirteen is the number.
I think it's about 13.
4% protein.
Right.
I'll go for 12.
6, 12.
7.
Paul, we want to know whether Yeah, we need to know.
Okay.
Shall I go and test it? - Yes.
Please.
- I'm Yeah.
- Good.
- Bye.
Love your hat.
Whilst we were waiting for Paul's bread boffin to do his thing, I was keen to know what success would look like, in terms of money.
-How much is premium wheat per ton? -£185.
Right, and if it's hen food - how much? - 150, 155 pounds.
All right, so, £185 a ton if it's good quality.
- Correct.
- £155 if it's hen food.
Correct.
So, once we've established.
it's good quality, do I then start haggling with him over price? Well, you might sort of ask for an indication of what it's worth.
Can I hit him with, "I want £200 a ton.
" I think that's a nice figure, isn't it? Sounds round.
It does.
Just Just say £200 a ton and then, "Okay, I won't sell it today," and get in your car and drive off.
So, we can just say, "I'm not selling.
" "We'd like to sell it, you know, we will sell it to you, but" But not necessarily now.
"Not necessarily today.
" Well, he might say, "Okay, fine.
" Yeah, he might.
I'm really useless at haggling.
The time for speculation, though, was now over.
He's back.
He's back.
The all-important protein, the first number is one.
Yeah.
The second number is three.
Yes! Then we have a point.
Yes, zero.
And the next number is five.
Almost like - How did you know that? - Well, it's the color.
This is probably as good as I've seen to now.
- Very good.
- Well done, Jeremy.
No, well done him and Kaleb.
Can I insist, Charlie, that we buy it to grind up in the mill and then we can send some of the flour back to Jeremy to sell in the shop? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Well, no, we've got to haggle.
No, no, no, I've sorted that out.
What do you mean, you've sorted it out? You may know about car prices, but I know about wheat prices.
How much is it then? It would be around the £180, 185 mark.
That's fantastic news.
So, it's gold star, to be honest.
I'm gonna go and bathe in it.
Thanks, Paul.
That's actually good news.
With the harvest done and Charlie now crunching the numbers, I caught up on the post, where I found the results from the latest tests on my bottled spring water.
Um "22 degrees and 37 degrees bacterial results have failed.
So, the water is not in a sellable state.
For your reference, the TVC count should be zero and they were found to be 10,000-plus.
" That's not a fail, that's a catastrophe.
Ten thousand? This meant I had to get to the farm shop sharpish, to remove the water from the shelves before anyone bought it.
And luckily, I had just the machine for the job, because I'd been reunited with an old friend.
Welcome, everyone, to the new Diddly Squat fast response vehicle.
It's great to have it back.
The fact is, if it can handle the roads of Madagascar, it can definitely handle the fields of Chipping Norton and it is doing.
Weird that I've never driven this car at more than eight miles an hour.
Now look at me.
I'm literally saving lives here, doing this.
I've come to get the water.
Why? It's got shit in it.
- Sorry, what? - It's got shit in it.
It says it's got no shit in it.
It says it's got no shit in it, but that's not strictly accurate.
It's full of it.
I don't know what it is, it's bacteria, it's not actual feces, it's bacteria.
But we'll flush the system out with detergent, get it tested again.
What are they? Mushrooms.
- What? - Mushrooms.
Big mushrooms.
Big? - Bloody hell.
- You know what you do? You slice them up and dip them in egg and you fry them and it's like a mushroom toast.
No, but that's a mushroom.
Yeah, that's a big mushroom.
Our field mushrooms here.
Look at that! They're fantastic.
Everything was fantastic at the farm shop, as we were finally starting to see some fruit from our labors.
Orangutan-friendly vegetable oil made with our own oil seed rape was already on the shelves.
And a couple of days later, our lambs were back.
- Your shoulder boned and rolled.
- Yeah.
The breast, which is like your scrag for just roasting.
Your chops.
Your liver and your kidney and mince.
So, I delivered that, reared it, fed it, nurtured it.
- You did.
- Loved it.
Loved it.
You've killed it and chopped it up.
Chopped it up for you, yes.
Ready to eat.
It had cost £5,000 to raise and butcher the lambs, but they were so popular with the locals So, you want two whole lambs, basically, so it's four halves.
Yeah, yeah.
It looked like we might even get a couple of hundred quid back.
See you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for coming.
Hope you enjoy.
Who needs supermarkets? A thing, a thing has worked.
Morning, morning.
- We've got seven left.
- Good.
That's all we've got, seven, - and it's only half past 11:00.
- Excellent, okay.
Anyone else here for lambs? The shop is incredibly busy.
And it'll be such a shame if we have to shut it down because the milk is from eight miles away, which is in Gloucestershire and we're only allowed to sell stuff from Oxfordshire.
This had been my first-ever farming year.
But even so, I decided to celebrate in the traditional way.
So, I met with Kaleb in my old barn, to hang a wheat sheaf on one of its oak beams.
It's like a celebration.
End of harvest, hang it up.
And along with the hanging of the wheat, there was something else to celebrate.
Did they use a pair of these to do it? It looks good.
It doesn't look good, it looks ridiculous.
Did you pay money for it? Yes.
It's not How have I done that? How can I not even do this properly? I would go up the ladder, but I can't.
Why not? I got shot.
What? I was shot in the leg.
What, you've really been shot? Yeah, honestly, yeah, yeah, I was with a group of mates in a circle, playing footie and he got his air rifle and "accidently" shot me in the leg.
- You're kidding? - In my shin.
- No.
- With an air rifle? A .
22 air rifle, from about four meters away.
Bloody hell.
Scabbing over now, look, the pellet's still in my leg.
The pellet is there.
But he was a mate who shot you? Yeah, a mate of mine, yeah.
So, he got his gun out, loaded it and then he pointed it at you.
- Yeah.
- And what did you say? "Don't point that gun at me, you dickhead.
" You hadn't had a row or anything? No, no.
I've been, like, best friends with him since primary school.
He said it was an accident, so it must have been.
Well, how can it be an accident, to point an air rifle at someone and then pull the trigger? Don't know.
My next conversation, I suspected, would be equally troubling, as the time had come to sit down with Cheerful Charlie and find out how much money the harvest had generated.
We're all We're all done.
End of the harvest.
- Well done.
Good.
- Well, thank you.
How's it feel? It's It's Well, I'll let you know in a minute, 'cause you're going to tell me the figures.
You're going to give me the moment of truth.
Well, as you know "As we know," here we go.
It hasn't been a great year for for farming, generally.
I read in The Times yesterday, it's the worst year for farmers since 1976.
Dry summer.
I know, I remember it well.
It was the year of my O Levels.
It's why I haven't got any.
So, we're just gonna look at these top boxes.
Look at the blue.
And now I'm gonna frighten you.
Last year, we made £226,000 from crop sales.
That's before any costs.
So, £226,000.
- Yeah.
- And this year's 137.
So, £90,000 lower from the same area.
It is nine -Which is quite incredible.
So, you know.
-Well, "incredible" is one word.
- That is £90,000 down.
- Yeah.
It's It's enormous.
Forty percent lower.
£90,000 gone because of the weather.
So where are the costs, because how much -Here are the costs then, so we spent -We spent - £14,000 on seed.
- On seed.
£34,000 on fertilizer and £20,000 on sprays.
So, £68,601.
And then there's £68,457 of costs.
That's Kaleb, that's the machinery.
So, you've made £144 profit from the arable farm.
So, the fact of the matter is this, farming seven days a week for a year, on a 1,000-acre farm, has generated an income of £144? Correct.
Fortunately, at the moment, we have this subsidy.
When that goes What are farmers going to do? I mean, honestly, what are they going to do? The ones who don't have Amazon film crews following them around and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? To top up the income? I mean, what do you do when the subsidy starts to go down? There will be there's gonna be a sea change to the, rurally, you know, the countryside.
There'll be 30 percent less farmers, probably.
But that's where we are with farming in this day and age.
And the next time a farmer moans about the weather put your arm round him and buy him a pint, because he's not moaning about it 'cause it's a bit miserable working in the rain, he's moaning about it 'cause it's crucifying.
I was now in a quandary.
I'd worked bloody hard all year and my reward was £144.
Even with the grants and subsidies added in, I'd have been far better off selling up, putting the money in the bank and living off the interest.
And yet the past year had been absolutely brilliant.
I'd done so many things I didn't think that I'd be able to do.
I'd become a shepherd.
A tractor driver.
A shopkeeper.
A midwife.
A key worker.
An engineer.
And a conservationist.
All in the company of Diddly Squat's endlessly happy, endlessly dysfunctional family.
But could I really go through the whole cycle again for less than 40 pence a day? It's a question that crops up almost immediately at our harvest festival picnic.
If there's anything I'm gonna go for, it's one of them whatsanames.
No, those.
- One of these.
- That's the one, yeah.
So, is it a year and a day since we started farming? It is.
Just over.
So, the big thing I've got to work out now is, I've got a choice, realistically.
I can either go back to London and resume my old life Yeah, do that.
You haven't heard the "or.
" No, no, no.
Do that.
I think I don't want to go back to London now.
- Ever? - No, I'm happy here.
You like London, let's just You know, you love London.
And London suits you.
- And, um - You've got friends in London.
Yeah, you've got friends in London, you know loads of people.
You've got loads of friends here.
He wants me to stay.
Because I am a cash cow to him.
If you weigh it up, weigh-hey-hey, I'd go farm.
I think you're happy here.
You're right, I am happy here.
I said, back when we were lambing, that I've never been happier.
Remember, we had all the lambs coming and it was quite a nice day, I went, "I've never been happier at work than I am now.
" - Really? - No.
-Look at the colors.
- It is stunning.
- Autumn's coming.
It's always stunning on the farm, actually.
Whatever the day, there's always something that's absolutely beautiful.
The thing is, the show's now over.
This one.
- Cheers, guys.
- Which is sad.
But thank you very much for all your help over the last year.
Cheers.
All of you, thank you very, very much.
Thank you for being so patient with me.
-I'm gonna get in that tractor now.
You're gonna come back with me and put the cultivator on it and I'm gonna go cultivating now.
I thought you was going to a party tonight, you said.
In London.
I get up at 6:30 and after a hit of coffee, set off to let the hens out of their houses.
Morning.
On the way back, I pick some mushrooms for my lunch.
And then it's off to feed the fish.
Back at home, I start work on the tomato sauce recipe I'm working on for the farm shop.
I add a few chilies and some fresh coriander and leave it on a low heat to simmer while I mend a fence that the hunt says it didn't knock over back in the winter.
I then mow the wildflowers I sowed because that's what all gardeners do, wait till the plants are looking at their best and then prune them, so they don't look so good anymore.
After this, I pick some vegetables for Lisa to sell to some customers we have in Atlanta, and I've even found a patch of rhubarb, so I pick that, too.
And I rush it to the shop.
This is the rhubarb that needs washing.
Where I throw away all the stuff I'd picked the day before, because it doesn't sell, because no one likes vegetables these days.
I then stir the tomato sauce before heading out to check on the bees.
Come on, off you go.
And the sheep, and the lambs.
And then I begin the big job of the day.
There's always one.
Today, I've gotta clear all the straw and the sheep feces out of the barn.
But as I don't have a bucket for the front of the tractor, I have to ask Kaleb to get the snowplow out of the other barn.
Why can't you do it? Because the Lamborghini won't fit in here.
Right away, I could tell he wasn't happy, because he thinks my tractor's too complicated.
Your tractor's crap.
And then, when I'm having the mushrooms, which I'd picked earlier and cooked in a cream sauce and served on sourdough toast, with some parsley from the garden I get a call from my associates who say that the sheep have escaped and are on the road.
So, I drive over there to find the sheep haven't escaped.
But at least the plow is now fitted to the front of the tractor, so I head to the lambing barn and straightaway, I discovered it wouldn't fit in there either.
Shit.
I then fit an 80-year-old deathtrap to the back of Lisa's tractor and use that instead.
It's getting late now, so I rush home to add some seasoning to the tomato sauce, before heading out to feed the fish again, and collect the eggs.
And then I hit the sack, knowing that soon things are gonna get really busy.
One of the extra jobs in our new busier lives was doing a daily moisture test of the crops.
And with Charlie on holiday, that task fell to Kaleb and me.
- Now, a seasoned old farmer - Yeah.
Can tell how moisture is in the pod just by biting it, can't they? Yeah, they go like this.
They open it up, I've seen them do it.
They open it up, they're very serious when they do it.
Go like that and they go "That's 12.
" -And they're right.
I mean, they know? -Yeah, absolutely.
But I can't do that, 'cause I'm not a seasoned old farmer.
-No.
-And you can't, 'cause you're a fetus.
So, we've got the machine.
You ever used one of these? Let me think.
See that bit there, look, we wanna fill that with rape.
Fill it? Can we have a caption now, saying, "Several hours later"? You got a bit more? And you do that, look.
And then So, if this says less than six, we're in deep trouble, we can't harvest it.
- Yeah.
- If it's more than - Nine.
- Nine.
It's too wet and they won't take it.
Are you ready? Right, it's testing.
Dun, dun, dun.
So, that's Eight.
- eight percent moisture, which means? We're perfect, we need to get out here.
Let's do this! But, actually, we couldn't do this.
To harvest the rape, I need a combine harvester, and I haven't got one because they're a quarter of a million pounds, so I'm gonna have to rent one.
And the trouble is that every other farmer in the area will have been out this morning in the fields, testing the moisture and they'll all be coming to the same conclusions and they'll be trying to rent one as well.
Back at the office, my worst fears were realized.
Three days? You can't do anything before that? No, no, I've got his number.
Yep, you've guessed correctly.
No, I know.
He's doing his own He's doing his own farm first.
All right, okay, no, thanks for your time.
I went outside and wherever I looked, there was a glaring reminder that I really was the new boy on the block.
Look, there's a combine there and there.
Yeah, there's another.
Every farm's got a combine on it.
By late afternoon, I'd got nowhere.
37, 42 But then Kaleb hit the jackpot with a mate of his I shall call "Jesus.
" Even though his real name is Simon.
- This afternoon.
- If it comes down, I'll try I've only got two fields left to do, so ideally, I can get mine done this evening.
Yeah.
And then get up to you, sort of like, tomorrow.
Tomorrow, and then we can start cutting.
The next morning, with the combine sorted, it was action stations.
- This is perfect.
- Yeah, look at the day.
I know.
Right, the tractors are gonna be coming through here all day, so I'm gonna try and move this gatepost to make life easier.
It is quite a Yeah, that's what I meant.
-I don't think you did any of that.
-I did Right, this is your big day, Lambo.
This is what we've been looking forward to.
8.
9.
I'm gonna go and hook up.
After a whole year of watching Kaleb attach things to tractors, I figured I'd have no problems hitching my Lambo to a trailer I'd rented.
Um I do that, then that, then not that.
Um Right, that is definitely not coming out.
Well, there must be something else I've forgotten to do.
What have I forgotten? Um Not that.
There was only one solution.
Get Kaleb to do it.
Actually, wait! Wait, wait, whoa! Right, you are all set.
With that, we headed off to the farm shop to rendezvous with Jesus.
It's now Friday, twenty to twelve.
We have a weather front moving in Sunday morning.
So, we've got to try and do four days' harvesting in a day and a half.
This could be a long day.
Me aircon stopped working.
And I'm too tight to get it fixed at the minute.
It's either there, or there.
That's nice there.
So, we're going all night tonight probably, yeah.
In there, there's some toilet roll.
All right, if you get short, let me know, all right? -You've actually brought bog roll? -Yeah.
Wouldn't be the first time I get caught out.
Look! We have a combine harvester.
It's here.
- That's Simon.
- That's Simon.
Has he briefed you on how to do this? Are we doing this on the move? - Unloading on the move? - Yeah.
We then discussed an issue that would add yet more pressure.
This is an unusual year for the barley and the rape to be ready at exactly the same time.
- Yes, very.
- Very unusual.
-Almost unique, I would say.
Normally, the barley's ready much Normally ready two or three weeks earlier, yeah.
- And then the rape's - Yeah.
- it's just that dry spring then? Yes.
Here it comes.
And we're away.
My first harvest.
They are bloody clever, combines, aren't they? They're wicked.
You're right, I mean, to be able to chop the thing, open the pod, take those tiny That massive machine take those tiny seeds out and go, "Don't need that, don't need that, don't need that.
But do need that.
" And it measures how much seed is taken out.
It's just Farming is amazing, isn't it? Adrenaline's buzzing, I am buzzing.
You know, come three 'clock tonight, in the morning, I'll be still going.
You're gonna be hanging.
When the combine was close to full, Kaleb maneuvered into position.
Okay, hold it about there.
That's the first lot coming out.
And once he'd filled up with two payloads from the combine he headed to the barn to unload.
And whilst he was grappling with my 19th-century trailer My God.
I was psyching myself up for my first run.
I'm just hanging back.
His yellow light is on, that tells me its tank is 80% full.
I'm underway.
This is the moment.
I'm coming in now, coming in.
Not hot, no, not coming in hot.
I'm gonna go back further.
Further back, further back.
That's right, I'm filling the back first, that's it.
I need one eye there and one eye there, to see where I'm going.
I need to be a pigeon.
It's off.
No, I've stopped.
Keep going.
I can't do it.
No.
I need to be at the front, I need to be at the front.
Wait a minute, what do I need to do? Slow down.
Ready, steady, steady, go.
No, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
Well done, you got most of that in the middle.
Jesus, that's difficult.
Everything's reversed, so if I'm looking here, over my shoulder and I think, "No, it's at the back," I have to slow down.
When it's at the back, slow down.
When it's at the front, speed up.
Happily, on my next run there was no onanism.
It all went well.
All these racing drivers talk about precision driving, they do not know what the words mean.
I then rushed off to unload my cargo, fully aware that having complained for years about tractors holding up traffic, I was now in a tractor holding up traffic.
You should all have stopped at the farm shop, Then you wouldn't be stuck here, would you? Back at the farm, it was imperative I got the seed unloaded quickly, so I could get back to the field before the combine was full again.
Lovely.
Then, back up Wait a minute.
If I swing that way.
Back up Yes.
My angle was wrong.
If I back up, that way keeps it to the right.
Yeah, that's it.
God.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Pay attention, Jeremy.
So, if I go that way, keeping the back out.
For heaven's sake, this is just impossible.
After a mere six attempts, which could easily have been edited out the much more modern rented trailer was in.
Yes.
Shit, shit, shit.
Jesus, that was lucky.
I won't tell Kaleb about that.
With the weather holding, we worked as a team to cover as much ground as possible.
Right, this field, according to my map here, 54.
8 acres, and if we'd had good weather, we could expect £23,500 worth of rape out of it.
I don't think it'll be that much.
I'd like to ring Charlie and ask him, but he's on holiday.
So, we're doing ten acres an hour and all the Canadians have just fallen off their chairs laughing at us.
It's definitely getting rather hot in here.
Just turn my air conditioning up a bit.
Go that way get that out it means I go right, so I wanna be going that way.
Wait, wait, I'm gonna try that again one more time.
Despite the idyllic working conditions, there was a nagging issue on my mind.
How much seed were we actually harvesting? What's it saying on thecomputer, Simon? The yield monitor on the combine is saying it's running at two and a half ton to the hectare now, so that's a ton to the acre.
But what we're looking for is a ton and a half an acre.
It's good in patches.
7.
3.
We're all right.
So far as I could tell, most of what we were harvesting were earwigs.
There were thousands of them.
But I was told this was normal, so we kept on working.
Right, here we go, coat on.
The second field I think yielded better than the first one definitely.
Wait a minute.
You kick the back out that way, yes, head it on that way.
Bloody hell, that's the wrong way.
It's like a tractor meet.
Isn't it? - So, we've done Picket's Piece.
- Yeah.
We're doing Lower Washpool now.
And then we've got Bury Hill North, which is 45.
7 acres.
You better get going, Jeremy.
- His light's on.
- Yeah.
The next morning, when we resumed harvesting, my first offload of earwigs was even trickier than normal.
He's parked his truck in the farmyard.
There's something wrong with him.
Right, he won't be finding that in a hurry.
However, Kaleb's annoying parking was the least of my problems.
Because, unlike yesterday, the sky was overcast and that didn't bode well for the mid-morning moisture test.
- Ten.
- Ten.
Yeah.
That's too much.
Two percent over.
Why has it got wet? It hasn't rained.
Is it just moisture in the atmosphere? It's probably the moisture in the air.
'Cause actually, it's damper now than it was at seven o'clock this morning.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, what do we do? Happily, there was one thing we could do.
Go and test the barley to see if we could harvest that instead.
- What's the news, mate? - 14.
7.
- What's the limit for that? - 15.
- So, it's good enough to go? - We could go.
Yeah.
Right, I'd say that was pretty successful.
Hoo.
Did you hear that, fetus boy? It was successful.
Simon, don't give him a big head.
What I've got in the trailer right now will keep Wetherspoon's going for about a year.
That is beer seeds.
However, when I got to the barn, I realized I had another problem.
All right, what have we got left on rape? We've got about, big field, about 40 or 50 tons of rape still to go.
So, where do I put the barley? Hello.
Where the bloody hell am I gonna store this barley? Because the barn's all full, we can't mix them up, can we? No, no, you'll have to store it up the airfield.
That bunker I built, we can probably store about 400 tons of barley up there.
Yeah, but we can't, 'cause it's gonna rain.
If it does rain, we can't just leave it outside, can we? No, it will get wet and then they will reject it.
You'll have to just sell it straightaway.
What do you mean? Well, you can't store it, you'll have to just literally dump it up there, then sell it straightaway.
What, today? Well, yeah, ideally, today, yes.
Back in the office.
Okay, grain merchants.
Yeah, hi.
Really, I need a wagon today.
So, you can't help at all? After a few calls, I finally got a result.
You're playing music in my ear.
Cheers, bye, bye.
Wagon on its way.
I then drove to the storage facility that Kaleb had rebuilt after some lockdown agri-yobs had burnt the old one down.
This is like being nine, playing sandcastles.
I like it.
Then, Kaleb arrived with his load.
Followed shortly afterwards by the lorry I'd ordered.
That is a smart lorry.
-Will it weigh what we put in there? -Yeah.
- Will it? Epic.
- Yeah.
However, as the loading began, I got a terrible hot-neck feeling as I realized that the grain from the ten acres we'd harvested would completely fill the lorry.
And we still had 140 acres to go.
My only hope was that Kaleb wouldn't notice.
Twenty lorries you should have organized.
- Twenty lorries? - Twenty lorries.
They should have been coming back and forth, back and forth.
- What, 29 tons in each one? - Yes.
It's six o'clock on a Saturday night.
We're not gonna get any more now and it's Sunday tomorrow.
And it's gonna rain tonight.
Are we completely stuck then? Yes.
Completely stuck, we can't cut any more barley now, because you fucked up.
All you had to do was get your phone out and go, "Hiya.
" - No.
- Yeah.
Yes, it is.
Wrong, no, I made the mistake about nine months ago.
What? When I went, "That barn's big enough.
" I was in full Yorkshire mode.
"No, I'm not spending more than 22 grand, that barn's perfectly big enough, everything will go in there.
" I thought we'd have little bays with rape would go there, the wheat would go there, the barley would go there.
They never said to me, you never said to me, if I'm honest I did say, "Your barn's small.
" Yes, I know, but you should have said, "You do realize that that barn will be totally filled by your rape.
" - I did! - You didn't say that.
I did.
You just don't listen.
You do not listen.
No, you switch off.
You'll probably switch off now, you don't even know what I'm saying now, probably.
What did I just say? - Something about switching off.
- See? This is my point.
So, thanks to me, all work ground to a halt.
And Kaleb headed for home.
Where's my fucking car? I see it.
I see the tailgate.
As it turned out, the next morning, I didn't need my tractor keys.
Obviously, we couldn't harvest in the rain.
And even when the downpour stopped, we couldn't restart until the crops had dried out.
So, while we were waiting, we used the time to get another job out of the way.
Starting the lambs on their journey to the Sunday lunch table.
We're looking at good, well-meated, lambs that are the right sort of weight, 44 kilos-plus that are good to go to the abattoir, so we can have some good meat.
So, what we got, Ellen, the right weight and the fit? - Seventy-eight.
- Seventy-eight.
It's like they know.
This is a powerful advertisement for vegetarianism.
But I've seen powerful adverts for going on a cruise, and I'm still not gonna do that.
Once the lambs had gone and the fields had dried out, we finished off harvesting the oil seed rape and the barley.
And then we sold what we'd got to a grain merchant.
That just left one crop the wheat.
What's the news? 16.
6.
So, still over.
Without any green in it.
It wants another week.
- Without any green.
- Right, we must leave it.
Sadly, I then received a rather distressing phone call.
Okay.
Okay.
All right, I'll, um, I'll be back later.
All right, thanks.
Bye.
Wayne Rooney's dead.
How my poor ram had died was a mystery.
So, after we'd loaded him into the most dignified hearse we could find, the vet took him away to do an autopsy.
And rang later on to say he died from a twisted intestine.
I'm surprised at how sad I am about the death of Wayne, because I am.
He'd become sort of part of a little ritual I had in the evening.
I'd go for a walk and bring them a bit of food and they'd come running up.
I've just come down now because I wanted to make sure that Leo was all right.
But he's sort of hiding in that bush over there.
And he won't come out, not even for the food.
Sadly, we had to leave my only remaining ram to his grief.
Because soon, the moisture level of the wheat was bang on.
What's the news? 14.
4.
And we were good to go.
There were 96 acres of wheat to harvest, and its value was measured differently to oil seed rape and barley.
With wheat, the volume you get I was gonna say it doesn't matter, it does matter, but it doesn't matter as much as the quality.
So, I've got a half a trailer load back there and I don't know whether I've got half a trailer load of really good wheat that'll be used to make bread, or really terrible wheat that'll have to go to be animal feed.
As we beavered away, Kaleb, now desperate for his long-awaited visit to the barber's, took a moment to rearrange his coiffure.
Hair.
I like it.
It's out of my face at least.
Shortly after this exchange, though, the mood changed, because Gareth Bale noticed that a neighboring farmer was in trouble.
Look to your left, Jeremy, it doesn't look very good over there.
Something's on fire, isn't it? This is every farmer's nightmare.
A harvest blaze caused by malfunctioning equipment.
I'm on it now, just bear with me, two minutes.
I know there's two fire engines going to it now.
How does he know that? How do you know that? Got contacts everywhere.
I took a moment to thank the Lord for the bulletproof reliability of the Lambo.
And then we got back to work.
Just let it go back towards the back of it.
Thanks to Simon's calm and clear instructions over the radio That's good, now bring it forward.
I was getting pretty good at my tractoring.
You're sort of just the front end of the middle.
Turn it slightly closer to you than the middle at the moment.
But, later that day, I came back from a run to the storage barn to find Simon had been replaced in the combine by a colleague.
I just don't know, I I don't know.
I don't know what he wants me to do.
Do you want me to come alongside on the next run? As long as you don't go too fast He hasn't put his light on, but the spout's out, so I'm assuming he's ready.
As I say, if you turn Am I at the back? I have no idea.
Shit, shit, shit.
Not a word, not a word.
Eventually, though, we got into a rhythm.
I tell you what, he's 72, look at him.
He was telling me last week, he's combined this farm every year for 50 years and he didn't want to miss this one, even with COVID.
And here he is.
I'll wait for your light to go on, Gerald.
Put your light on, I'll come back.
Okay, but like I said, if you just don't go too fast, then I can see the backof the trailer and I can do the combine Okay, got you.
I haven't, but By the end of August, our work was complete.
We had harvested 546 acres of wheat, oil seed rape and barley.
And the fields were now taking a well-earned breather.
I couldn't, though.
I had to sell the wheat.
So, I took a sample and called Charlie, who, now all the work was done, was back from his holiday, and arranged to meet him at my local mill.
There it is.
Sample bag.
My hope was that my wheat would end up in here, being turned into flour for bread.
Because then I'd get top dollar for it.
First, though, it had to pass muster with Paul the miller.
This is your Number one, Premier League Premier League.
Milling wheat.
Not Vauxhall Conference.
No.
We'd like a Liverpool here, you know, top of the league.
Man City at the very least.
Right, okay.
We will see what we can do.
I will go in to our lab man and we will come out with the result for you.
- How long's it take? - Okay.
Five minutes.
The make-or-break number, according to Paul, would be the percentage of protein in the grain.
- You're aiming actually for 13.
- Thirteen percent.
Thirteen is the number.
I think it's about 13.
4% protein.
Right.
I'll go for 12.
6, 12.
7.
Paul, we want to know whether Yeah, we need to know.
Okay.
Shall I go and test it? - Yes.
Please.
- I'm Yeah.
- Good.
- Bye.
Love your hat.
Whilst we were waiting for Paul's bread boffin to do his thing, I was keen to know what success would look like, in terms of money.
-How much is premium wheat per ton? -£185.
Right, and if it's hen food - how much? - 150, 155 pounds.
All right, so, £185 a ton if it's good quality.
- Correct.
- £155 if it's hen food.
Correct.
So, once we've established.
it's good quality, do I then start haggling with him over price? Well, you might sort of ask for an indication of what it's worth.
Can I hit him with, "I want £200 a ton.
" I think that's a nice figure, isn't it? Sounds round.
It does.
Just Just say £200 a ton and then, "Okay, I won't sell it today," and get in your car and drive off.
So, we can just say, "I'm not selling.
" "We'd like to sell it, you know, we will sell it to you, but" But not necessarily now.
"Not necessarily today.
" Well, he might say, "Okay, fine.
" Yeah, he might.
I'm really useless at haggling.
The time for speculation, though, was now over.
He's back.
He's back.
The all-important protein, the first number is one.
Yeah.
The second number is three.
Yes! Then we have a point.
Yes, zero.
And the next number is five.
Almost like - How did you know that? - Well, it's the color.
This is probably as good as I've seen to now.
- Very good.
- Well done, Jeremy.
No, well done him and Kaleb.
Can I insist, Charlie, that we buy it to grind up in the mill and then we can send some of the flour back to Jeremy to sell in the shop? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Well, no, we've got to haggle.
No, no, no, I've sorted that out.
What do you mean, you've sorted it out? You may know about car prices, but I know about wheat prices.
How much is it then? It would be around the £180, 185 mark.
That's fantastic news.
So, it's gold star, to be honest.
I'm gonna go and bathe in it.
Thanks, Paul.
That's actually good news.
With the harvest done and Charlie now crunching the numbers, I caught up on the post, where I found the results from the latest tests on my bottled spring water.
Um "22 degrees and 37 degrees bacterial results have failed.
So, the water is not in a sellable state.
For your reference, the TVC count should be zero and they were found to be 10,000-plus.
" That's not a fail, that's a catastrophe.
Ten thousand? This meant I had to get to the farm shop sharpish, to remove the water from the shelves before anyone bought it.
And luckily, I had just the machine for the job, because I'd been reunited with an old friend.
Welcome, everyone, to the new Diddly Squat fast response vehicle.
It's great to have it back.
The fact is, if it can handle the roads of Madagascar, it can definitely handle the fields of Chipping Norton and it is doing.
Weird that I've never driven this car at more than eight miles an hour.
Now look at me.
I'm literally saving lives here, doing this.
I've come to get the water.
Why? It's got shit in it.
- Sorry, what? - It's got shit in it.
It says it's got no shit in it.
It says it's got no shit in it, but that's not strictly accurate.
It's full of it.
I don't know what it is, it's bacteria, it's not actual feces, it's bacteria.
But we'll flush the system out with detergent, get it tested again.
What are they? Mushrooms.
- What? - Mushrooms.
Big mushrooms.
Big? - Bloody hell.
- You know what you do? You slice them up and dip them in egg and you fry them and it's like a mushroom toast.
No, but that's a mushroom.
Yeah, that's a big mushroom.
Our field mushrooms here.
Look at that! They're fantastic.
Everything was fantastic at the farm shop, as we were finally starting to see some fruit from our labors.
Orangutan-friendly vegetable oil made with our own oil seed rape was already on the shelves.
And a couple of days later, our lambs were back.
- Your shoulder boned and rolled.
- Yeah.
The breast, which is like your scrag for just roasting.
Your chops.
Your liver and your kidney and mince.
So, I delivered that, reared it, fed it, nurtured it.
- You did.
- Loved it.
Loved it.
You've killed it and chopped it up.
Chopped it up for you, yes.
Ready to eat.
It had cost £5,000 to raise and butcher the lambs, but they were so popular with the locals So, you want two whole lambs, basically, so it's four halves.
Yeah, yeah.
It looked like we might even get a couple of hundred quid back.
See you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for coming.
Hope you enjoy.
Who needs supermarkets? A thing, a thing has worked.
Morning, morning.
- We've got seven left.
- Good.
That's all we've got, seven, - and it's only half past 11:00.
- Excellent, okay.
Anyone else here for lambs? The shop is incredibly busy.
And it'll be such a shame if we have to shut it down because the milk is from eight miles away, which is in Gloucestershire and we're only allowed to sell stuff from Oxfordshire.
This had been my first-ever farming year.
But even so, I decided to celebrate in the traditional way.
So, I met with Kaleb in my old barn, to hang a wheat sheaf on one of its oak beams.
It's like a celebration.
End of harvest, hang it up.
And along with the hanging of the wheat, there was something else to celebrate.
Did they use a pair of these to do it? It looks good.
It doesn't look good, it looks ridiculous.
Did you pay money for it? Yes.
It's not How have I done that? How can I not even do this properly? I would go up the ladder, but I can't.
Why not? I got shot.
What? I was shot in the leg.
What, you've really been shot? Yeah, honestly, yeah, yeah, I was with a group of mates in a circle, playing footie and he got his air rifle and "accidently" shot me in the leg.
- You're kidding? - In my shin.
- No.
- With an air rifle? A .
22 air rifle, from about four meters away.
Bloody hell.
Scabbing over now, look, the pellet's still in my leg.
The pellet is there.
But he was a mate who shot you? Yeah, a mate of mine, yeah.
So, he got his gun out, loaded it and then he pointed it at you.
- Yeah.
- And what did you say? "Don't point that gun at me, you dickhead.
" You hadn't had a row or anything? No, no.
I've been, like, best friends with him since primary school.
He said it was an accident, so it must have been.
Well, how can it be an accident, to point an air rifle at someone and then pull the trigger? Don't know.
My next conversation, I suspected, would be equally troubling, as the time had come to sit down with Cheerful Charlie and find out how much money the harvest had generated.
We're all We're all done.
End of the harvest.
- Well done.
Good.
- Well, thank you.
How's it feel? It's It's Well, I'll let you know in a minute, 'cause you're going to tell me the figures.
You're going to give me the moment of truth.
Well, as you know "As we know," here we go.
It hasn't been a great year for for farming, generally.
I read in The Times yesterday, it's the worst year for farmers since 1976.
Dry summer.
I know, I remember it well.
It was the year of my O Levels.
It's why I haven't got any.
So, we're just gonna look at these top boxes.
Look at the blue.
And now I'm gonna frighten you.
Last year, we made £226,000 from crop sales.
That's before any costs.
So, £226,000.
- Yeah.
- And this year's 137.
So, £90,000 lower from the same area.
It is nine -Which is quite incredible.
So, you know.
-Well, "incredible" is one word.
- That is £90,000 down.
- Yeah.
It's It's enormous.
Forty percent lower.
£90,000 gone because of the weather.
So where are the costs, because how much -Here are the costs then, so we spent -We spent - £14,000 on seed.
- On seed.
£34,000 on fertilizer and £20,000 on sprays.
So, £68,601.
And then there's £68,457 of costs.
That's Kaleb, that's the machinery.
So, you've made £144 profit from the arable farm.
So, the fact of the matter is this, farming seven days a week for a year, on a 1,000-acre farm, has generated an income of £144? Correct.
Fortunately, at the moment, we have this subsidy.
When that goes What are farmers going to do? I mean, honestly, what are they going to do? The ones who don't have Amazon film crews following them around and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? To top up the income? I mean, what do you do when the subsidy starts to go down? There will be there's gonna be a sea change to the, rurally, you know, the countryside.
There'll be 30 percent less farmers, probably.
But that's where we are with farming in this day and age.
And the next time a farmer moans about the weather put your arm round him and buy him a pint, because he's not moaning about it 'cause it's a bit miserable working in the rain, he's moaning about it 'cause it's crucifying.
I was now in a quandary.
I'd worked bloody hard all year and my reward was £144.
Even with the grants and subsidies added in, I'd have been far better off selling up, putting the money in the bank and living off the interest.
And yet the past year had been absolutely brilliant.
I'd done so many things I didn't think that I'd be able to do.
I'd become a shepherd.
A tractor driver.
A shopkeeper.
A midwife.
A key worker.
An engineer.
And a conservationist.
All in the company of Diddly Squat's endlessly happy, endlessly dysfunctional family.
But could I really go through the whole cycle again for less than 40 pence a day? It's a question that crops up almost immediately at our harvest festival picnic.
If there's anything I'm gonna go for, it's one of them whatsanames.
No, those.
- One of these.
- That's the one, yeah.
So, is it a year and a day since we started farming? It is.
Just over.
So, the big thing I've got to work out now is, I've got a choice, realistically.
I can either go back to London and resume my old life Yeah, do that.
You haven't heard the "or.
" No, no, no.
Do that.
I think I don't want to go back to London now.
- Ever? - No, I'm happy here.
You like London, let's just You know, you love London.
And London suits you.
- And, um - You've got friends in London.
Yeah, you've got friends in London, you know loads of people.
You've got loads of friends here.
He wants me to stay.
Because I am a cash cow to him.
If you weigh it up, weigh-hey-hey, I'd go farm.
I think you're happy here.
You're right, I am happy here.
I said, back when we were lambing, that I've never been happier.
Remember, we had all the lambs coming and it was quite a nice day, I went, "I've never been happier at work than I am now.
" - Really? - No.
-Look at the colors.
- It is stunning.
- Autumn's coming.
It's always stunning on the farm, actually.
Whatever the day, there's always something that's absolutely beautiful.
The thing is, the show's now over.
This one.
- Cheers, guys.
- Which is sad.
But thank you very much for all your help over the last year.
Cheers.
All of you, thank you very, very much.
Thank you for being so patient with me.
-I'm gonna get in that tractor now.
You're gonna come back with me and put the cultivator on it and I'm gonna go cultivating now.
I thought you was going to a party tonight, you said.
In London.