Does Clarkson farm?

Is Jeremy Clarkson Really a Farmer?

Clarkson’s Farm is back for its fourth season, and so far like the previous three seasons it is excellent. It has all the drama and action and humor of the previous seasons, and delves deep into questions like “will Jeremy ever get this ‘farming’ thing sorted out?’ ‘Will the locals ever stop hassling him?’ and ‘Will we ever be able to understand Gerald?’

But having grown up in an agricultural setting, I think an interesting question is floating around the edges of this show: is Jeremy Clarkson a farmer?

What Makes a Farmer?

As a mild expert in this area, I have to honestly say that we don’t have enough information. In part, because the question of “what is a farmer?” is incredibly difficult to answer.

For example, according to the USDA “a farm is defined as any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year.” (Set aside the fact that this show is British and the USDA is irrelevant in this case.) This is a tricky definition to work with–let’s say I start growing mushrooms on my little quarter-acre lot and selling them for $3000 a year. Does my small lawn now count as a “farm”?

Farm Operator

If defining a farm is a challenge, so much more so a farmer. Again the USDA says that “a farm operator is a person who runs the farm, making day-to-day management decisions. An operator could be an owner, hired manager, cash tenant, share tenant, and/or a partner. ” In other words, the “Farm operator” could theoretically live in New York City and work at the top of the Empire State Building, but if they’re making the farm decisions by Zoom they still count as a “farm operator.”

In Clarkson’s Farm, we meet two people who do not own their own farms but who are farm laborers for hire (Kaleb and Heather). They are not “farm operators,” since they have to run management decisions by Jeremy, but they are certainly the experts whose knowledge he draws on.  Do they count as “farmers”?

Presumably Isn’t Slopping Pigs

See how tricky this gets? (Especially since it’s the kind of question that only a couple of us actually care about.)

For what it’s worth I don’t think the show gives us enough information to really answer the question. What it comes down to is whether or not he is actually doing the work of farming in any kind of regular way. Yes, it shows him feeding the pigs and drilling the barley. But does he do this regularly? Or just when the cameras are on, and hired hands come in and take care of it the rest of the time? I assume that there has to be some outsourcing to others, given that he spends time filming his various other projects and presumably isn’t slopping pigs on those days…

Excellent Television

Obviously, none of this is the point of Clarkson’s Farm. The point is an interesting reality show with a rural English twist that makes for excellent television and which highlights an aspect of life which nobody–Englishman or American–really gets to see anymore: what goes into operating a farm. Which means you should watch it without falling into tricky definitional questions and enjoy it for the solid show that it is.

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO