CROP GEAR!
Clarkson swaps fast cars for tractors in new farming show
HE’S best known for his love of fast cars – and apparently having little concern for the environment.
Jeremy Clarkson, however, will exchange turbo-cars for tractors to film a farming series for Amazon.
The former Top Gear host, 59, is now so environmentally aware that he wants to share a ‘warts and all’ look at life on his 1,000-acre Chipping Norton farm in the series, I Bought A Farm.
While he continues to front the streaming service’s motoring show The Grand Tour, Clarkson will film the first
‘We’ll be showing it warts and all’
episodes of the agriculture programme this September. It will air next year.
He said it will be much more hardhitting than the BBC’s Countryfile and other nature programmes.
‘This is not Kate Humble – much as I like Kate Humble – with 20 acres, bottle-feeding a lamb. Or a TV presenter who grows veg in his back garden. This is actual farming: Life, death and form filling,’ he told the Sunday Times.
‘We’re not making Countryfile. We’ll be showing it warts and all. For example, I have no view on badger culling in terms of whether it’s necessary, but if it’s happening we will not shy away from putting it in the programme.’
It seems his main concern is food supply shortages. ‘Scientists calculate we have just 90 years before we run out of food, because of soil depletion. That’s just 90 more harvests,’ he said.
Clarkson recently claimed the Oxfordshire farm had made him ‘carbon-neutral’ because it consumes more carbon dioxide through photosynthesis than he has generated on the racetrack.
He and his partner Lisa Hogan, 47, spend much of their time at the farm cottage and plan to build a larger home on the site. As well as growing wheat, barley and rapeseed oil, Clarkson has created new habitats by replanting and clearing streams and ponds.
Despite once describing himself as a ‘passionate meatarian’, it seems Clarkson has now given up red meat altogether and is moving towards a vegetarian diet. ‘I do eat chicken,’ he said. ‘But that’s just a vegetable with a head.’