Behind the scenes of how I acquired Jeremy Clarkson to go inexperienced

At 6ft 8in tall, I have always had a vested interest in legroom, but that has been the limit of my interest in cars. Similarly, until the age of 35, I had never given much thought to where my food came from or grown any myself.

So the odds were slim of me ending up in the Oxfordshire countryside alongside Jeremy Clarkson, watching his wheat harvest while cameras rolled for the latest series of Clarkson’s Farm.

But here we were. A field of his had been farmed using an unconventional – or ‘regenerative’ – method, to supply a company I had co-founded: Wildfarmed. And I was awaiting a grain sample to see if it would be good enough to be of bread-making quality.

This was Jeremy’s first attempt at a Wildfarmed field, in which he didn’t use any pesticides and where two crops, wheat and beans, were grown at the same time.

It’s not organic – some fertiliser is used – although as we shall see Jeremy’s first Wildfarmed crop mainly relied on bath salts. This new way of doing things can take some getting used to.

Jeremy’s crops are no different to most in being grown using a largely predetermined plan of fertilisers and chemical sprays. ‘We just spray all the time,’ he said when Jeremy, his advisor Cheerful Charlie and I sat around the terrace table at Diddly Squat to discuss the idea of trying a different approach on part of the farm.

The best way I could think of to illustrate the Wildfarmed philosophy was to dig a hole under the nearby hedge and compare it to the soil in the field; it was dark chocolate versus milk chocolate.

That dark colour from the hedgerow is the colour of life, the result of a 500-million-year partnership between plants and the creatures of the soil universe. 

That’s why healthy plants grow abundantly along hedgerows without the need for any chemicals, and why a football-pitch sized area of this uncultivated soil can store hundreds of thousands of litres more water than the soil in a conventionally farmed field.

The question was how we could get Jeremy’s field soil closer to its hedgerow origins and turn food-producing fields into rich habitats for the insects, bees, and birds of which so much has been lost that the UK is in the bottom 10 per cent of countries worldwide. Jeremy, a binocular-carrying member of the RSPB, was keen to get started.

It was September and the wheat would have to be in the ground quickly, in a field that for decades had been farmed with the full armoury of chemicals.

The soil would be no different to any addict going cold turkey; it would be a bumpy ride, and the farming involved would be a radical shift from the chemical-based system towards which farmers have been pushed since World War Two.

Fast forward a few months, and Jeremy was striking a Nelson-esque pose, holding a small telescope called a Brix monitor. Using a kitchen garlic crusher, we had squeezed out a couple of drops of juice from the leaves of the wheat onto the lens of his Brix machine.

Hold it up to the sun, and it’ll give you a numerical read-out which is a pretty good proxy for how healthy the plant is. Orientating the device towards the watery sunlight in search of clarity, he complained: ‘I thought farmers were supposed to drive tractors.’

Our task that day was to compare the health of the Wildfarmed wheat with that of the weeds that were starting to come through. The situation was looking ominous. There’s a type of weed call a cleaver – the one that clings to your clothes using tiny hooks and was the inspiration behind Velcro.

Cleavers, like many weeds that are a problem for farmers, love fertiliser. That’s why they’re present in such numbers. As the soil-health improves and we’re more careful about how much fertiliser is used, their numbers will calm down.

It was while I was explaining this that Jeremy suddenly held aloft handfuls of different weeds from the Wildfarmed field and the neighbouring conventional field, declaring ‘Cato versus Kaleb’. Kaleb Cooper, the other star of the show, who’s been promoted to farm manager in the new series, was apparently sceptical of these new methods; the pressure was on.

As I said, I’m an unlikely farmer. As one half of electronic music duo Groove Armada, I’ve had the good fortune to make albums and perform all over the world. Fifteen years previously, late one Saturday night, I had been in my natural environment, DJ-ing on top of a Greek temple, with a mankini-clad micro-light pilot dropping confetti on the crowd.

The next morning, sitting in an eastern European airport, I picked up an article about the cost to our health and the environment of today’s food system. At the time I was living in rural France, but completely detached from the countryside, with no understanding of even the most basic seasonal cycles of farming.

Inspired by the article, however, I built a greenhouse and for the first time in my life, planted some seeds. When I saw the miracle unfold of these seeds becoming plants, and food, I was hooked. Eventually I would sell the rights to the songs that I’d written (a musician’s pension) to finance buying a farm.

The early years were humbling. High hopes disappeared under blankets of weeds. Year two, we came under attack from the air – our newly planted fields ravaged by pigeons. I would go on to experience a decade of painful lessons in just how hard farming can be, how lonely, and the vast array of skills it requires.

But the years of dark clouds and endless experimentation had a silver lining. Our farm was awarded a national prize for farming innovation, and I began to encounter farmers all over the world growing abundant food while restoring soils and ecosystems. Wildfarmed was setup to support this kind of farming. Which is how I came to be involved with Jeremy’s field.

The first decision had been to use some older, taller wheat varieties; they produce less grain but would do a better job during this transitional year of shading out the weeds. Nevertheless, we’d need to keep the wheat in better health than the weeds, the cleavers, that could so easily overwhelm everything. This is where the bath salts came in.

Just like human health, it’s about using nutrition before problems set in, rather than chemicals or drugs afterwards. But the key to success is precise timing.

That’s why early one morning we assembled around the rainwater tank used to fill up Kaleb’s sprayer, to prepare the nutritional boost of bath salts – magnesium sulphate – for the Wildfarmed crop.

It’s a crucial nutrient for the plant to be able to photosynthesise, and all plant health depends on this ability to turn sunshine into energy. Any nutrients must be applied first thing in the morning when the tiny holes that cover plant leaves are open and able to absorb them. As the day gets hotter, these holes close.

But there was no sign of Kaleb and, through the crackle of farm radios, I gathered he’d been dragged into the never-ending drama that seemed to surround the potatoes.

I could only look nervously at the rising sun whilst listening to Kaleb’s expletives in the potato field on the walkie-talkie. Mid-morning, an exasperated Kaleb arrived, to find that someone had broken the valve that transfers water into his sprayer. The heat of the sun was increasing with every passing minute. Kaleb tried everything to replace the valve, culminating in a tug of war with Cheerful Charlie on the other end of the pipe.

By the time we applied the salts, it was late morning, the sun was at its zenith, and the moment to get the necessary impact from this nutrition was slipping away.

Meanwhile, the cleavers marched on. With the first hint of spring warmth in the air, the time had come to have another go at them, using a simple but effective weed control device, not dissimilar to a rake.

It’s a job for a small, lightweight, GPS-equipped tractor. The GPS guidance, like a car navigation system but more accurate, protects the soil and crop by avoiding driving over the same place twice.

Jeremy was keen to operate in the familiar confines of his Italian cab, the downside being that his Lamborghini is a very large, non-GPS tractor.

Hitching the weeding machine to the back of the tractor should be the work of an instant. If you know your way around one tractor, you quickly know your way around them all. Except, I discovered, Lamborghinis.

I was unable to help as Jeremy radioed repeated SOS calls to Kaleb and flicked switches and levers like a scene from the mid-flight crisis of Apollo 13.

While this went on, I had plenty of time to admire the back wheels. It’s an enormous machine. As I mentioned, I’m 6ft 8in, but the back wheels are taller than I am.

With all that size comes weight, and in the same way that you wouldn’t choose to drive this over your allotment before planting summer vegetables, it’s not great for the soil in the field either. To make matters worse, despite its baffling complexity, it doesn’t have that vital GPS.

Finally operational, we headed down to the field – where the XXL Lamborghini passed multiple times over the same spot. I looked on with a veteran local farmer, a man of few words, who said simply: ‘There won’t be much corn left.’

It was about this time that I heard from Cheerful Charlie that Jeremy wouldn’t be receiving the environmental payment to which he was entitled on his Wildfarmed field because the deadline had been missed.

This wasn’t a good omen, particularly in the first year of a cold-turkey transition away from farm chemicals. Claiming these payments isn’t easy for farmers – imagine the worst form you have ever had to fill in, add your most frustrating encounter with a chat bot, and multiply by 100 – but at the minute it’s the only way Jeremy could be paid for all the environmental benefits he is providing whilst growing a Wildfarmed crop: avoiding river pollution, creating a pesticide-free, flower-rich nature habitat, and significantly reducing CO2 emissions.

Yet for all our sakes, we must make sure farmers are rewarded for these aspects of food production. Because we can’t carry on as we are.

In his book Ravenous, the government’s former food tsar Henry Dimbleby describes how the post war so-called Green Revolution of fertiliser and pesticide-based farming saved lives by increasing production in the short term, but over time, mountains of cheap grain led to the creation of a food processing industry that has profoundly changed the way we eat.

‘We have changed our diet to match this system and this diet is now making both us and our planet ill,’ he says.

He describes how poor diets cost the UK economy an estimated £74 billion a year. The NHS spends the same amount just on diet-related diabetes as on our entire national legal system. Over the past 30 years there has been an 80 per cent increase in under 50s with cancer. The litany of health problems goes on and on.

Meanwhile, British farmers are going out of business at an alarming rate; one in 20 left the dairy sector alone last year. For farmers to produce affordable food in nature-rich landscapes that can withstand the wild weather ahead, they need to be rewarded not just for their crops but how they are grown.

Back at Diddly, the Wildfarmed way of growing crops involved bringing in sheep. For the past ten years I have used sheep and cattle to graze wheat, both in France and, since 2021, here where I now farm in Oxfordshire.

It might sound odd, but wheat is a type of grass, and, like a lawn, will come back stronger from being cut. Grazing cereal fields was customary practice for millennia. It provides food for the animals in winter and free in-situ fertiliser for the crops. But there comes a point when the grazing must stop because, unlike a lawn, we need a wheat field to produce the seed that we harvest.

The original idea to graze Jeremy’s Wildfarmed field had been abandoned because the winter had been too wet; the animals would damage the soil and the crop, and we had now got to a point in the season where the wheat was close to its seed producing phase and had to be left alone.

Except, when I drove over to have a look at the field one day, there were the sheep, looking me straight in the eye, calmly chewing through their Wildfarmed bounty. I tracked down Charlie, who was cheerfully optimistic that the grazed area would be the highest yielding. I didn’t share his optimism.

While these new systems might take a little time to bed in at Diddly Squat, or any other farm, there’s no doubt that regenerative farming can work on a large scale. 

Wildfarmed, founded with my friends, former financier Edd Lees and former broadcaster George Lamb, is today a community of 110 farmers supported by over 500 customers – bakeries, restaurant chains and household-name supermarkets – who buy their high quality Wildfarmed flour for a premium.

As harvest approached, Jeremy and I stood by the hedge dividing his Wildfarmed field from one of his conventionally farmed ones. ‘It’s all right for us to try new things,’ said Jeremy, looking at the bean flowers and bees in the Wildfarmed wheat, ‘you and I have alternative sources of income.’

The poignant moment when Cheerful Charlie announced an overall farm profit of £114 at the end of series one of Clarkson’s Farm, is the reality with which more and more farmers are confronted. Let’s not forget that this tiny profit came after Jeremy had spent tens of thousands of pounds on chemicals.

The risk in farming is huge, and to my mind the only way to reduce that risk is better soil and getting nature rather than chemicals to do more of the growing.

But collaboration is the key to the successful execution of this new kind of farming. Given Kaleb’s introduction to Jeremy’s Wildfarming plans was seeing me in a tractor and asking, ‘What the f*** is he doing in my field”, there is some road still to travel on that front.

‘I’ll always look after Doncastonians,’ said Jeremy, in response to Kaleb’s complaining at harvest time. More than our shared South Yorkshire roots, a season at Diddly left me feeling that looking after his corner of the Cotswolds really matters to Jeremy. As to whether you can grow bread-making wheat using only Epsom Salts, you’ll have to watch the programme.