Do first-time farmers know what they’re letting themselves in for?

Who would be a farmer? The hours are endless. Those born outside the life can scarcely conceive of the workload. Personally, I do not know a farmer working less than a lightweight 60 hours a week, and most are racking up 80. For this you get a pittance. Half of British farmers earn £10,000 or less per annum. Twelve per cent of UK farms make a straightforward loss. Why? Well, take that plasticwrapped loaf on the supermarket shelf… the farmer who grew the

wheat will be lucky to get 20 per cent of the label price, despite working for 365 days a year. Did I mention the lack of annual leave? If you are on or below the national minimum wage yourself, employing farm staff is a dream. Just a dream.

A curious thing, farm financing. Food has become cheap, but the cost of the kit required by farmers has become eye-watering. New tractor? £100,000. Ten-year-old combine? £60,000. And then you pray that the transmission or electronics don’t fail. Farmers do not count sheep in the middle of the night, they count the repayments to the bank. It’s a life on tick.

Such is the lack of money in agriculture that many UK farmers have ‘diversified’ into yurts and yogurt. The real truth of Clarkson’s Farm was not his highlighting the perilousness of UK farm economics, but that he made money from a TV programme about his farm. Proper diversification that.

And no judgment from me; my own second job, done in the moonlight hours, is writing. We have a new flock of free-range Toulouse geese, and I’ll need to make money from penning articles about them, as well as vending their eggs, fat and dressed bodies from the farm gate. Selling local, sustainable produce direct is a better financial way than most.

Farming is by its very nature capricious; the job is subject to weather and disease. Or, as my grandfather, a farmer for 50 years, put it, ‘One bloody thing after another.’ He had it easy. He did not have to cope with the red tape, the rules and regs, of modern farming. (Did I mention that farmers have to triple up as office workers?)

Neither did my grandfather expect his product price to be affected by City speculators, or Instagrammers influencing what’s in and what’s out on the plate.

So, no one in farming is surprised to read of agriculture’s disproportionate suicide rate (a farmer a week). Or that agriculture has the worst rate of fatal injuries in UK industry. A lonely, stressed and tired farmer is a farmer who makes mistakes, behind the wheel of the ATV, penning a bull.

Then again, no one in farming is surprised we all carry on. Someone’s got to produce the bacon to be taken home. Besides, when you lamb under a star-studded night, when you look back over a July wheatfield just harvested, you know you have the best job on Earth.

John Lewis-stempel has farmed for 25 years and is the author of Woodston: The Biography of an English Farm (Doubleday, £20)