Jeremy Clarkson has admitted a major decision he made about the future of Clarkson’s Farm has left a key member of staff worried they’re ‘out of a job’.
The former Top Gear presenter, 65, has been leading the Amazon Prime Video farming series ever since its debut in 2021 – running for four seasons now.
Clarkson’s Farm focuses on daily events at the TV host’s Diddly Squat farm in the Cotswolds, giving an inside view into the state of farming in modern Britain.
One of the TV show’s rising stars, Kaleb Cooper, was already working on the Chipping Norton farm before Jeremy took over, and has stayed on ever since.
However, Jeremy’s decision to invest in a driverless tractor has left the 26-year-old farm hand worried that he’ll be ‘out of a job’ in the near future.
Explaining his choice, the former BBC host said that leaving the tractor to get on with drilling and rolling the fields will give him and Kaleb more time to do other jobs.
In The Times, he said: ‘It normally takes 20 hours with a three-metre cultivator to prepare the 200 acres we use every year for growing pasta and lager.
‘And then it takes about 10 hours to plant the actual seeds. That’s 30 hours of me just sitting there, in a bouncy tractor, going up and down endlessly.
‘I miss bits. I cock up turns and corners. An autonomous tractor would not make mistakes like this and it would not get bored. It doesn’t need to stop for a wee and it does not need to sleep.
He continued: ‘Kaleb hates it. He says it’ll put him out of a job. [But] I’ve pointed out – he could turn up at someone’s farm, set it off, and then go to someone else’s farm with his normal tractor and get paid twice.’
It’s natural for Kaleb to be worried considering the Clarkson’s Farm series has seen him go from earning 50p an hour on some days, due to the unpredictable nature of farming, to becoming a millionaire.
In 2022, he revealed: ‘I was working for myself. It’s like a little bit of a new business idea that I’m doing, buying calves in and then feed them on milk, which costs me about £200 a calf, then selling them at nine months.
‘I’m trying to get a profit and see if it will work. I worked it out the other day, do you know how much my hourly rate is, how much I pay myself? 50p an hour.’
However, Kaleb quickly got to work turning his screen time into more cash in his bank, first releasing a book titled The World According to Kaleb, which sold 150,000 copies.
Two more books followed – Britain According to Kaleb: The Wonderful World of Country Life and Life According to Kaleb – before a UK tour got under way.
His tactics were clearly working in 2024, as his company Kaleb Cooper Productions Ltd’s 2024 annual filing hit £908,860 in cash and assets.
That was an an increase of £242,000 from the previous year. His second firm Kaleb Cooper Holdings Ltd also has more than £46,000.
Watch Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video.
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