Richard

Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money. Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms. Then the eighth. Growing food. Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed. Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming. The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked. Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides. That one difference is the whole business. The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand. Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on. It loses money anyway. And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra's own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government's own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024. Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field. A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.

A farmer in Shropshire is selling his farm this September and nobody has died. Two hundred and twenty acres. A hundred and forty ewes, seventy suckler cows, a shed with one end held up by a telegraph pole, and a tractor bought new in 1994, which is the last thing on that farm that was bought new. His grandfather bought the place outright in 1961. He is 54 and has never had a penny of debt. The books say the farm lost eleven thousand pounds last year. It lost money the year before as well. He is not bad at this. The government's own review, chaired by Minette Batters, found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making in 2024. On paper the same farm is worth £1.9 million. Pasture in his county averaged £8,600 an acre last year, and not a pound of that was set by anything he grows. Two blocks within nine miles went to buyers he has never met. One for solar. One described in the particulars as a natural capital opportunity. His mother is 81 and lives in the bungalow at the top of the lane. When that comes across with the other half of the ground, the two halves clear the £2.5 million threshold, and twenty per cent of the excess is a bill in six figures on a business that has not made money in three years. His son is a radiographer in Telford and is not coming back. He said so once, kindly, and never made his father ask twice. So it goes now, while he can still choose which fields and to whom. He is selling the good ground first, because you cannot raise a bill off the rough. The Treasury collects nothing from any of this. The sale happens years before the tax event, so there is no tax event left to have. What Britain loses is a hundred and forty lambs and seventy calves a year, off ground that will never produce food again, in a country that already imports forty per cent of what it eats and has just had its worst cereal harvest since records began. That is one farm. There are thousands of them, doing the sums at the same kitchen table this month. The beef on your shelf this Christmas will come from Brazil, and the price will be higher, and nobody will connect the two.

Almonds are an environmental catastrophe. People hear that and assume you mean in some abstract, projected, 2050 kind of way. No. Present tense. Happening now. Today, while someone posts about their oat-and-almond-milk morning ritual and refers to it as 'conscious consumption.' - 1.1 trillion gallons of water used annually in California alone - 1,900 gallons required to produce a single pound of almonds - 10% of California's entire water supply consumed during historic drought conditions - Approximately 50 billion bees killed per year from pesticide and fungicide exposure during mass pollination events - Entire Central Valley sections converted to monoculture desert requiring permanent irrigation infrastructure - Fungicide cocktails applied during February bloom, peak bee vulnerability, routinely implicated in colony collapse - Almonds provide essentially no complete protein, moderate oxalate load, and require industrial processing to make palatable - Virtually every almond ever eaten has been shipped internationally at least once The person drinking almond milk in a reusable cup is, on balance, responsible for the deaths of more living creatures before 9am than a British beef farmer manages in a fortnight. But the cow breathed out, so.