Clarkson’s Farm may face actuality TV competitors from Jeremy’s glam ‘famous person’ co-star
Jeremy Clarkson may soon have a new reality TV rival – his old farmhand Harriet Cowan. She has become a huge star since stepping in for Kaleb Cooper when he took a break from Clarkson’s Farm to do a nationwide theatre tour.
Fans loved the glamorous all-action ex-NHS community nurse, who worked on dad Eddy’s farm around her shifts and eagerly threw herself into any task.
They also lapped up her rapport with Clarkson as she mocked his tractor-driving skills, rolled her eyes at his work ethic and moaned about his grooming standards – even trimming his bushy eyebrows for him.
After starring in the fourth series in 2025 she has taken a back seat on the show since Kaleb’s return. Now Harriet, who gets 500 marriage proposals a day online, has written a book and bought her own 100-acre cattle farm, upon which she plans to put a butcher’s shop on-site.
She says she is too busy for any full-time return to Clarkson’s Farm.
Harriet with Jeremy Clarkson(Image: Instagram/ @harrietcowan_x)
Though she remains big pals with Jeremy – whose show she says has done more for real farming than countless series of the BBC’s Countryfile – telly chiefs say her operation will be a shoo-in to attract the Clarkson-style TV treatment.
One exec said: “I can see Cowan’s Farm coming to a TV near you very soon.
“Harriet’s a superstar. She’s great on camera, extremely glamorous and yet really eager to dive into the filthiest, muckiest, most revolting aspects of farming life.
“Women admire her and men want to marry her. She’d give old Jeremy a right run for his money.”
Harriet, 25, whose smallholding is in Belper, Derbys, learned to drive a tractor at 12 and caught the attention of Clarkson’s Farm’s makers after posting videos of her hard-working life on Instagram shot from a camera gaffer-taped to the inside of her cab.
Harriet has been dubbed a ‘superstar’(Image: Dave Benett, Dave Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for The Jockey Club)
“Kinda chic to have absolutely no work-life balance,” read one message.
Harriet now boasts 1.4m followers who tune in to see her battling the effects of the ‘scary’ drought and dangers of farming life.
She recently sliced off the end of one of her middle fingers in a log-splitting accident, leaving it an inch shorter. Surgeons sewed it back.
“I didn’t feel it at first,” she said.
“I had so much adrenaline. But I was holding the log and had long nails so I couldn’t see where my finger ended.”
Harriet Cowan is being tipped to land a TV show of her own(Image: Jam Press/@harrietcowan3)
She also had a fingernail pulled off by a sheep – but is still a regular at her manicurist.
“I’m a bit of a girly girl, always going out,” she said.
“So I like my nails. I like my lashes. I like doing my hair.”
Though she had never heard of ex-Top Gear host Jeremy, 66, when she agreed to join his show, she soon recognised it as great TV for capturing the reality of farming.
She was surprised how far away the camera crew stood to let farmers farm. Even her tense rivalry with Kaleb – captured on camera – was real.
“I understand why he was p***** off. And I’m not going to lie, he was,” she said.
Harriet Cowan(Image: harrietcowan_x/Instagram)
“But it wasn’t because of me as a person or me as a woman. It was because he’d been away for so long on a tour bus.
“He’s like me – he’s a homebody. Eight weeks driving around, not with family, or being on a tractor. Then you come home and find out someone else has been doing your job?
“I’d be p***** off. But me and him are great now. He just needed to get back into farming. The air cleared completely and we’ve worked together loads.
“We realised we’re both just farmers and now we’re great friends.”
Harriet, whose book Life on the Farm comes out on September 10, said she did the show for the same reason she launched her social media sites – to encourage other women to farm.
“I thought well, if a young girl sees it and thinks that’s what she’d like to do, she might see me and go, ‘If Harriet can do it, I can as well’,” she said.
She admitted her vast social media following included the odd creep.
Kaleb Cooper
“I must get about 1,000 DMs a day and probably 50% are just men being like, ‘I wish I could marry you’,” said the star whose boyfriend James Booth is a young farmer.
But the rest were farming wannabes following her every adventure.
“The other 50% are young girls seeing me farming and thinking, ‘I’d like to do what she does’,” she said.
“And they’re who I do it for.”
