Meet farming’s petrolhead star (no, it’s not Clarkson)
Jeremy’s friend and neighbour happens to be a car nut with a hit rural show too, finds Guy Kelly
UThere is a feeling in the true farming world that Countryfile is ‘farming by Islington’
p a long dirt track in a swathe of English countryside that’s outstandingly beautiful even for the Cotswolds, there lives a part-time petrolhead, most-of-the-time farmer.
Artfully dishevelled and keen on jeans, he is in his early 60s, but would admit he never really grew out of toys – they just got bigger, and more expensive, as the years wore on. He spent much of his career in motoring journalism, driving fast cars and talking at the same time, before deciding to devote himself fully to the land.
He is just as likely to be seen roaring past his Oxfordshire neighbours in a classic Ferrari as a tractor. He has a network of local farming colleagues with far stronger accents than his. And a couple of years ago, he started having his agricultural exploits filmed – a decision that’s resulted in such a devoted following that he’s constantly inundated by fanmail.
He is not Jeremy Clarkson. “Yeah, weird how it’s happened,” says Harry Metcalfe, the man in question, pottering around his kitchen, “me and Jeremy have ended up doing pretty much the same thing... only on slightly different scales.”
The Cumbrian farmer and bestselling author James Rebanks parked his tractors on the BBC’S lawn this week by saying that Clarkson’s Farm had done more for farmers in one TV series than Countryfile had managed in three decades.
“I can report back from within the farming community: they all loved that programme,” Rebanks told an audience at Cheltenham Literature Festival. “[Farmers] have been frankly p----- off with Countryfile for about 30 years because the whole logic is that you can’t make a mainstream, prime-time TV programme about farming because farming is for a niche group of idiots. And what Clarkson has come along and done is gone, ‘Actually, no, everybody will watch a programme about farming, you just need to do it in a certain way.’” That “certain way” was as a fly-onthe-wall documentary, showing viewers the realities of running a farm rather than sunny, staged segments that cherry-pick the more palatable aspects of rural life. That audiences have an appetite for it has been made clear not only by the success of Clarkson’s Farm but also Harry’s Farm – Metcalfe’s smaller, independent, but still outrageously popular farming show on his Youtube channel.
Metcalfe and Clarkson are friends of old – the former reckons they probably first met in the late 1990s, when Metcalfe set up Evo motoring magazine – and now, having navigated the hairpins and chicanes of middle age, find themselves neighbours. In farming terms, anyway. (In normal terms, they’re a 20-minute drive apart.)
If Clarkson is a journalist who became a farmer, Metcalfe is the opposite. He got a diploma from Shuttleworth agricultural college in the late 1970s, after which his first job was as a grain buyer. Over the years, he took bits of land on, bought and sold some properties, became a tenant farmer near Harpenden for a while, then got waylaid by Evo, before buying his 300-odd acres near Burford, in 2002.
He has remained obsessed by cars and motorbikes, collecting “30-something, I don’t like to count”, including rare Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Lotuses, which are kept in a special barn, and in 2007 he started a Youtube channel, Harry’s Garage, where he posts reviews of road trips. That now has just shy of 489,000 followers.
Then, two years ago, having realised that a couple of combine harvester videos had gone down pretty well, Metcalfe decided to set up a second channel, Harry’s Farm, to update and educate viewers on all matters agricultural: machinery breaking down, the truth about grass-fed cattle and climate change, the financial realities of a “bad year”. Each of his videos, which explain why he’s doing things as well as just showing them, attract 100,000 viewers and his audience is growing with each snapshot of rural life.
It was by chance that, up the road, the same thing was happening in 2019: a car nut was starting to bring cameras into his fields and barns, for what would become the inordinately successful Clarkson’s Farm.
“It’s amazing what he’s done,” says Metcalfe. “[Though] he’s lucked out because it was a perfect time to start – we had lockdown and then just a waste of time for farmers at the end, no profit. This year has been much kinder, so I’m intrigued to see how he handles a good harvest…”
Metcalfe, as gentle and affable a man as you could meet (especially among Ferrari owners), explains that it was “a misrepresentation of farming in the media” that encouraged him to show people what really happens on a farm. Presenting with as much an enthusiasm for the science of agronomy as a love of the landscape, he is “much more factual” than his old friend and neighbour, whom he calls “very good entertainment”.
The other difference, as he points out, is scale. When I arrive, Metcalfe appears in his new Land Rover Defender, having just filmed the latest episode of Harry’s Farm, and has his entire production crew in tow. That is to say, his wife, Patricia, is in the passenger seat. Patricia holds the camera (or occasionally, Charlie, one of their 25-year-old twins) and will stop her husband if he’s straying too far into agricultural jargon. Otherwise he does his vlogs in one take, and pretty much makes it up on the spot. No army of Amazon Prime workers teeming around here.
Metcalfe was “driven nuts” watching Clarkson’s persistent mishaps as he learnt the ropes of farming, even if they did make good TV. “I teased him about the Lamborghini because it is a properly s--- tractor, no one in their right mind would buy it,” he says. “It’s like comparing a Morris 1000 to a plug-in hybrid, it’s so old tech, it’s useless…” he vents. “But that’s typical Clarkson, he knows what’s good telly.”
And he fully agrees with Rebanks. “There is a feeling in the true farming community that [Countryfile] is ‘farming by Islington’. It’s not watched by any farmers, really.”
We take a ride around his land, passing a small herd of unimpressed alpacas and a beautifully out-of-place old Rolls Royce (Metcalfe has a 1969 Silver Shadow, but this is a friend’s), and head into a wheat field, where a fellow local farmer, John, is drilling.
“Now this, incidentally, is what a good tractor looks like,” he says, gesturing at John’s top-of-the-range Vendt. “£220,000 for that, the satellites that guide it are accurate to 2cm. Incredible…”
Clarkson would probably do a video trying to drive that tractor to Buenos Aires with Richard Hammond racing him on a skidoo. Or maybe he’d not know how to start the engine, and need Kaleb, his helper, who became the star of Clarkson’s Farm, to help.
But Metcalfe, his cerebral and low-key neighbour, isn’t about that. He likes putting a pedal to the floor as much as any middle-aged man with a car habit, but he made this morning’s video about pre-emergence herbicides. Tens of thousands of people will probably love it, and they will learn. That’s enough for him.
And if Amazon calls, offering a blank cheque to make a series of Harry’s Farm? He laughs, turning the engine of the Land Rover off. “No chance, I wouldn’t want to lose control.”