Jeremy Clarkson’s move into farming has had us all gripped, with hordes of viewers tuning in to his Amazon Prime series to see him getting the hang of running Diddly Squat Farm.
The Top Gear and Grand Tour star bought the property in the Cotswolds in 2008 and his TV series about him turning his hand to agriculture launched in 2021. It went down a storm and a second series followed in 2023, with a third run dropping this month.
But while he’s had his share of successes, Jeremy’s efforts haven’t all paid off and he’s had a few farming mishaps over the years.
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We have a look at a few of the things that went wrong at Diddly Squat Farm.
Wasabi ‘disaster’
Jeremy apparently thought he’d be raking it in when he came up with the idea of producing wasabi, believing he’d be one of the few doing it and that there would be a sizeable market just waiting to snap up the Japanese root.
However, it didn’t go according to plan and it ended up appealing more to the star’s own pheasants than to anyone else. They gobbled it up at every opportunity, and it caused them to start sweating and “squawking”.
Writing in The Sunday Times, Jeremy admitted: “This was by far my biggest disaster, I noted the fact that only one chap in all of Britain was growing it and saw this as an opportunity rather than a warning that it might be impossible.”
Rotting potatoes
The TV star might have thought it was tough to go wrong with the humble potato. After all, they pretty much grow themselves without any help don’t they?
But it turned out that growing them wasn’t the issue, it was more a question of how many to grow. Producing potatoes was one of Jeremy’s first real steps as a farmer and he managed to grow 16 tonnes of the veg.
But as it happened, it was an odd number, as there were too many for him to sell himself but not enough to sell to supermarkets who would take huge quantities. By the time the broadcaster’s farm shop was up and running, a lot of the produce had rotted.
Piglet tragedy
There was tragedy for Jeremy when his plans to breed pigs went wrong. The farm did successfully welcome piglets but a clip released ahead of series three showed the star talking about one of them being “weak as hell”. And in moving scenes his partner Lisa was seen in tears as she cuddled two of the piglets, who appeared to have passed away.
He told the Sunday Times that what happened with the piglets was “unbelievably sad”.
“We had a catastrophically high level of deaths and I was desperately worried we were doing something wrong, but it turned out we weren’t, it was just that pigs are bad mothers – the Sandy and Black particularly so,” he explained.
Injuries
(Image: jeremyclarkson1/Instagram)
The star has certainly had the odd bump and scrape since he started heading to the farm as well as the studio. In 2020 he opened up about trying bee-keeping, admitting that although he covered up in protective clothing, the insects still found their way in.
“The bees aren’t so bad but it’s just they hate me,” the Mirror quoted him as saying. “Even though I wear my full bee suit they worked out how to get into it.”
He also had a near miss with some equipment, saying on The Jonathan Ross Show: “I got this thing called a telehandler, it’s like a JCB thing. I thought, ‘I’ll just use its front to push the post in.’ I actually got Kaleb (Cooper) to go in and it got halfway into the ground and the fence was leaning on it and it flicked back.
“How it didn’t take my leg off… I didn’t walk properly for a week.”
Exploding booze
(Image: Country Life/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Jeremy also got into a pickle with his booze last year. The star launched his Hawkstone alcohol in 2021 with the Cotswold Brew Co and it got off to a good start. But in July 2023 he had to warn fans that it was possible that some of his bottles of cider could actually explode.
Taking to X at the time, he posted: “F*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f***. There’s been a massive cock up and as a result, there’s a very slim chance, some of our Hawkstone CIDER bottles might, there’s no easy way of saying this, explode. If the cap has the code L3160, open it underwater, pour it away and get in touch for a refund. Info@Hawkstone.co.”
Saying how sorry he was, the celeb said on the upside, “the beer is fine and still delicious”. He added: “As is the cider, in bottles that are unaffected,” he added. “Which is almost all of them.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
