Kaleb Cooper, the farm manager on Clarkson's Farm, worked out his own hourly rate from the farming side of his business and it came to fifty pence. He said so on a podcast. His books pay rather better. Kaleb is not a television character. He is a working contractor who was farming in the Cotswolds before the cameras came and will be when they go, and he has done the sums that most farmers do in their heads and keep to themselves. - Hourly rate from farming, by his own count: 50p. - Hourly rate for the woman who stacks the shelf his wheat ends up on as a loaf: at least £12.71. - Price of the loaf: about £1.40. - What the wheat in it earns the farmer: about 10p. - The farmer's profit on it, measured in 2022: 0.09p. The whole chain is paid before the man who grew the thing. The supermarket takes its margin, the miller his, the baker his, the haulier his, the fertiliser company its, and what is left when the harvest has been through all of those hands is the farmer's. His share has been shrinking for decades, because he is the only link who cannot pass the cost on. He cannot hold out for a better price for long either. The seed, the fertiliser and the diesel were paid for months before harvest, and grain costs money every week it sits in the shed. Selling direct is the one place it is different. A farmer who sells off his own farm, through his own shop, to a customer who drove there, keeps far more of the price. That is why Diddly Squat had queues out onto the road, while Clarkson's first year of actually farming the place made him a profit of £144. Kaleb is in his twenties and has three children and is one of the best farmers in Oxfordshire, and his trade pays him about a 25th of the legal minimum wage. The country wants its food cheap, and it has got exactly that.

There is a mountain of unworn clothes in the driest desert on earth, large enough to be photographed from space. It grows by 39,000 tons a year and almost none of it will ever rot. The Atacama, in northern Chile, is a place where it may not rain for a decade. On its edge is a duty-free port called Iquique. Every year about 59,000 tons of clothing arrives there from Europe, America and Asia. It is last season's stock that never sold, and the bags people leave at charity shops. Dealers pick through it for anything they can resell across South America. Two thirds of it is worthless. Nobody will pay to ship it back out, so lorries drive it into the desert at night and tip it. The local landfill refuses to take it. The reason given is that the clothing does not biodegrade and is full of chemicals. Most of it is polyester, which is plastic, and in a place with no rain and no soil life it will lie there for centuries. Some of it is set alight, and the smoke drifts over a town of 100,000 people. In 2025 a Chilean court ruled that the dumps had done serious damage to the land. For most of history this could not have happened. Clothes were wool, linen and leather. They were worn out, handed down and patched, and at the very end a rag merchant paid for the scraps. In Yorkshire, from 1813, old woollens were shredded and spun into new cloth. Anything left went on the fields, where wool breaks down in months and feeds the grass. Nobody ever had to find a desert for worn-out wool. We invented a fabric that cannot die, and then we started making it to be thrown away.