Jon Burkholder

A man who spent thirty years reviewing sports cars has taught this country more about its own food than every minister, union and campaign of the last fifty years combined. Here is what five series of Clarkson's Farm put in front of the public, and not one line of it is opinion. - A thousand acres, worked flat out for a year, made a profit of £144. Under forty pence a day. - By year six the same farm was losing money, weather and prices turning a projected £37,000 into a five grand loss. - A crop can drown in the field after months of work and take everything with it, and nobody is coming to help. - The farmer is the only man in the food chain who sells at a price he does not set. The supermarket sets it. He takes it or he takes nothing. - The council can shut his restaurant, refuse his car park and stop him selling his own food off his own land. - The subsidy he was told to lean on can be closed overnight, the big estates first through the door, the small farms locked out. - One outbreak of bovine TB can lock a farm down for months, banned from buying or selling a single cow, through no fault of its own. - Rear pigs with real care and the butcher's maths can still make them a loss, so the animals go and the loss stays. - The margins are so thin that a rich man buys farmland not to earn from it but to shelter money that earns elsewhere. The shelter exists precisely because the farming does not. Now hold that against the story you were sold. Greedy farmers. Subsidised for doing nothing. Wrecking a countryside they are somehow also the custodians of. There is no profit. That was the reveal. A show that set out to be funny accidentally filmed the slow strangling of the people who feed us, and the country watched it happen and finally understood what its cheap food actually costs. Clarkson has now admitted the plainest part out loud: it is the television money keeping Diddly Squat alive, and most farms do not have a television show. Britain grows about sixty per cent of its own food and the average farmer is past sixty. That is why both numbers are heading the wrong way. It took a Lamborghini tractor and a man doing it for a laugh. Fifty years of earnest campaigning could not manage it.