Jeremy Clarkson has ‘sleepless nights’ over cost of farming

ICONINSIDER — Jeremy Clarkson has had sleepless nights over the struggle to make money from his Diddly Squat Farm.
The 64-year-old star – who shares his trials and tribulations on Amazon Prime Video series ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ – has an estimated net worth of £55 million, but the soaring cost of farming means he has been facing a battle to get a profit.
He’s quoted by the Daily Mail newspaper as saying: “Last year before the harvest we had to lay out £108,000 on diesel, fertiliser sprays, and the seed itself.
“That’s fine if the weather is okay because you’re going to make that money back. But you have a hell of a lot of sleepless nights when you know that one rainstorm could wreck the lot.
“I’ve noticed that farmers are quite sanguine; they go, ‘Well, you can’t control the weather’ and they sort of roll with it, but I’m too Yorkshire for that.
“I lie in bed after spending £100,000 hoping the weather’s good and, guess what? The weather was absolutely terrible, all year, every single month.”
The former ‘Top Gear’ presenter insisted “everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong”, with an enforcement notice from the council meaning he had to close his Diddly Squat Farm restaurant due to complaints from residents about traffic.
He added: “On top of all of this there was the pretty little restaurant that we opened earlier in the summer to sell the food we’d grown and reared on the farm.
“But after just six weeks, the council served us with an enforcement notice telling us it had to close.
“With the restaurant shut down we could no longer afford to keep all of the cows.”
In a bid to turn things around, the new series of ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ sees Jeremy and his assistant Kaleb have a competition to try and make the most money out of unfarmed land.
He explained: “It was a case of, can we make five pounds here and a bit of money there.
“I started harvesting blackberries, planting mustard, and using tiny little pockets of unfarmed land around the place. We harvested the nettles which normally are just a nuisance and tried to make them into soup.
“I got pigs into the woods: woods are normally empty of cash, no money comes from them, so I just did little bits and bobs.”

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