Jeremy Clarkson has revealed a “gruesome” loss at his Diddly Squat Farm after a difficult year.
The 65-year-old bought the 1,000 acre farm in Chadlington, near Chipping Norton, in 2008.
But it was only in 2019 that the former Top Gear and Grand Tour star began to actually farm it.
All his efforts were filmed for the hit TV Amazon Prime TV show Clarkson’s Farm which has broadcast four series with a fifth being filmed.
In his first full year, his farm famously made only £144 in profits largely due to the pandemic, significant expenses and poor weather.
Now, Mr Clarkson has revealed his losses for the past year (2024/25) were even worse.
He said in his Sunday Times column: “The upshot is that Cheerful Charlie came round last week with the figures, and in the farming year of 2024-25 I’ve lost about £5,000.
“Which is pretty gruesome considering that last year, when it didn’t stop raining, I made less than £15,000.
“If those numbers are typical, it means farmers are working twice as hard as anyone else and not even getting the minimum wage.”
Mr Clarkson continued: “In the past they were of course cushioned from weather events by government subsidies and grants. But those are now being phased out.
“Sir Starmer wants to spend the nation’s cash on bicycle lanes and transgender lavatories and, when it comes to food, he can’t see why people don’t do what he does and simply import their avocados from Ecuador.”
Last financial year, the journalist-turned-farmer has been vocal of the problems farmers are facing across the country, as well as his own business.
This includes the dry and hot weather. It was the driest spring in over a century and England’s warmest June on record, with the Thames Valley area being put in ‘prolonged dry weather’ status by the Environment Agency.
As a result, when it came to harvesting, Mr Clarkson said his crop yield was down, too.
Speaking on his durum wheat, he said: “In a reasonable year I’d expect to get six tonnes of grain per hectare.
“But in large parts of the farm I wasn’t even getting two.
“And straw? We will need a lot for bedding for the cows over the winter and what we’ve got wouldn’t even fill a Hoover bag.
“God knows what they’re going to sleep on. And God knows what they’re going to eat because we don’t have much hay or silage either.”
Looking to the future, Mr Clarkson said there isn’t much hope: “It gets worse because next year there’s the risk that the weather will do something bonkers again, and the certainty that all of Rachel Reeves’s exciting new taxes will come into being.”
