Diddly Squat: A Year on the Farm, by Jeremy Clarkson
“Why Every Farm Needs a Flamethrower.” “Shearing Jean-Claude Van Lamb.” “Mowing My Meadow with a Lamborghini Tractor.” “Sheep Are Vindictive. Even in Death.”
These are chapter titles from Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat: A Year on the Farm. They are easy evidence that this is not a typical farming book.
Clarkson is a British television star known for hosting a show that comedically reviews high-end automobiles (readers are thus unsurprised when he chooses to buy a mammoth tractor built by the Italian supercar designer). In 2006 he bought a thousand acres in the Cotswolds, and when the pandemic hit, the farm was a great place to be. With his land manager retiring, he decided he could do the farming himself.
Naturally, hilarity ensues. Much of the whole point of the experiment — which was also filmed for an eight-part series on Amazon Prime — is to paint Clarkson as a dupe who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Clarkson and the television producers largely succeed in this endeavor. He can’t fit his gigantic tractor into his barn. When planting, he puts the tram lines in the wrong places — to the chagrin of his farmhand, who gets made fun of at the pub. Sheep happily frolic back and forth over his fences.
He struggles to understand what farmers are even talking about — another chapter title is “Help! I Can’t Understand a Word of Farmers’ Agri-Jargon.” This is particularly funny in the video version — the local dialect of one of his farmhands is literally incomprehensible to American and Clarkson’s ears alike.
And yet, Clarkson isn’t actually a fool. Behind the ridiculous antics are some honest observations on modern agriculture and the lives of farmers (more so in the book than the video series). Outsiders are often the most insightful observers, and Clarkson has his share of epiphanies — some that Acres U.S.A. readers will nod their heads with and others that they will shake their heads at.
For one, he quickly discerns the difficulties of being a farmer. “Since I began, I’ve learned that it is completely impossible to attach anything to my tractor and that the weather will always do something you weren’t expecting, and don’t want. I also learned that whatever you plan on doing with your day on the farm you will invariably end up doing something else, that sheep are an expensive nuisance, that wasabi isn’t commonly grown in the UK for a reason, and that the government is endlessly annoying.” Amen and amen.
Clarkson also correctly recognizes the difficulty of fulfilling the farmer’s many roles. A farmer is “a vet, an untangler of red tape, an agronomist, a mechanic, an entrepreneur, a gambler, a weather forecaster, a salesman, a labourer and an accountant.” He adds, honestly, “And I am none of those things.”
He discovers how dangerous a farm is. “It’s said that deep-sea diving off an oil rig is dangerous work and soldiering is worse. But the fact is the fatality rate among people in agriculture is almost twenty times higher than the average for all industries. And when you sit in a planting machine you can see why.” I would echo this sentiment — operating a tractor and a chainsaw are far more dangerous than most of the day-to-day things I did in the military.
The economics of farming also quickly become obvious to Clarkson. He names his farm — and this book — Diddly Squat because, he says, that is how much money he makes farming it. He learns how unprofitable commodity farming is, and even when he sets up a shop on his land, he struggles to make a profit — not to mention recognizing how inconvenient it is for consumers to support local farmers compared to shopping at a grocery store.
Clarkson is not an environmentalist — there are lots of Greta Thunberg cracks — but he ends up doing things that are actually environmentally friendly, like stuffing his house with wool instead of mad-made materials (in part, admittedly, because the price of the wool on the market is so low) and building rewilding ponds and adding bees. He knows intuitively that farming with nature is the right thing to do.
He also has good intuition on Hayek’s knowledge problem — the idea that no person or group or people (i.e., the government, no matter which side of the political spectrum) is capable of having enough knowledge to be able to competently plan or run the economy. Who should run Britain’s farms and countryside, according to Clarkson? “Not the government, obviously. The government can’t be trusted to do anything properly.”
However, Clarkson’s solutions to some of the problems he capably identifies are questionable. In answer to the question of who should be in charge of British agriculture, Clarkson suggests … rock stars and the super-rich. Because farmers are too prone to try to squeeze every pound from their fields, whereas those with expendable wealth would maintain the beauty of the countryside.
Most troublingly — and sacrilegiously, depending on your perspective — Clarkson believes that the only thing that prevented crop failure during the extreme weather swings of 2020 was Monsanto, et al. “It’s thanks to their efforts, not God’s, that you’re going to have bread on your table this year.” This statement is so dissonant to my ears that it’s hard to know where to even begin … But perhaps with Clarkson himself, several pages later: “[W]hen you take the art and the history and the simplicity out of farming, I suspect you may end up with a lot of food that doesn’t taste very nice.”
In other words, whether from lack of clear thinking or simply trying to be provocative — definitely some of both — Clarkson’s message is mixed. Perhaps the takeaway is that many people unfamiliar with farming have such views — seeing the virtue and beauty in traditional methods of farming with nature, but being too scared to really do it for fear of higher food prices. Clarkson is also evidence of the complexity of the insider/outsider predicament: as an outsider, he discerns some things that farmers do simply don’t make sense; but not having the experience of an insider, some of the solutions he comes up with are just as irrational.
One word of warning: potential readers should be aware that this book contains quite a bit of crude humor — and the Amazon video series even more so. And not everyone will find it funny. People have different senses of humor, and Clarkson’s might not do it for you. But for those looking for an entertaining read that combines the occasional word of wisdom — along with just as many ludicrous proposals — Diddly Squat is a good choice.
