Walker: "I nearly bought a wool jumper in town. £140. Nice work if you can get it." Farmer: "I got about £2 for the fleece." Walker: "£2?" Farmer: "Per sheep, per year. Clipped it off her in two minutes, rolled it, bagged it, drove it to the depot. The cheque for the whole flock didn't cover the diesel." Walker: "Then who's getting the £140?" Farmer: "Not me, not the shearer. He costs me more per sheep than the wool fetches. I pay to have it taken off." Walker: "So you lose money shearing." Farmer: "Every year. And I can't not shear, or she cooks in July and the flies eat her alive. The wool's a welfare job that used to be an income." Walker: "Sell it yourself, then. Cut out the middleman." Farmer: "Not allowed. By law it goes through the board. Has done since 1950. I can keep a fleece for the wife to knit with, and that's about the extent of my freedom." Walker: "So where does it go?" Farmer: "Washed in Bradford, if we're lucky. Shipped to China, spun, knitted, shipped back, and sold to you with a label about heritage. By the time it's in the window there are eleven people between us and I'm the only one who met the sheep." Walker: "That's mad." Farmer: "My grandfather paid the rent on the wool cheque. I pay a man to take it away. Same sheep, same hill, same jumper in the window. Only the price of the farmer went down." Walker: "What would fix it?" Farmer: "You buying the jumper. And asking them where the other £138 went."

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.