Clarkson’s Farm: Former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson on opening a new pub whilst managing a farm

Back-breaking labour is often left unrewarded when the harvest comes in, with the TV star frequently barely breaking even on his crops, livestock, and farming side hustles.

Yet, instead of making his next Diddly Squat farm investment something that’ll be a guaranteed win, he’s opted to start another similarly-doomed business. That’s right: Clarkson’s opened a pub.

“There are so many things that you discover about opening and running a pub that you wouldn’t even consider,” says the 65-year-old motoring presenter.

“When you and I go in a pub, you ask for a pint, you get a pint, you sit down, maybe have some pork scratchings or something, and it doesn’t look that difficult. But there’s an enormous amount of regulation on food hygiene and safety.

"And then you’ve got staffing. You’ve got to try and find chefs, you’ve got to find waitresses, and that’s all very complicated.”

It can’t have been much of a surprise to Doncaster-born Clarkson that running a pub – albeit one that fosters his ‘Farm to Fork’ beliefs, as does his infamous Farm Shop – wasn’t going to be easy.

In 2024, the year in which Clarkson bought and opened The Farmer’s Dog in Oxfordshire, more than 400 pubs called ‘last orders’ for the final time and shut their doors for good, citing rising costs and customers’ reduced spending power.

But, full of faith in Britons’ notorious drinking habits, Clarkson pushed ahead anyway – and we’ll be treated to a front-row seat to all of the relevant trials and tribulations in the fourth series of Clarkson’s Farm. “We were trying to open it way too soon,” Clarkson reveals.

“I wanted to try and capture the August Bank Holiday Weekend, which meant that we were trying to open it at the exact same time as I was doing the harvest, so I’d spend all day trying desperately to get the pub open and dealing with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of problems…

“Then you get home absolutely knackered, and you have to get into your tractor and do grain carting through the night. So it’s not really a secret (that) the stress was so bad.”

Running a pub is “more stressful than running a farm”, Clarkson now knows, but his vision behind the business – “somewhere where farmers could go, if it’s raining on a Tuesday afternoon and they can’t work on their farm, they could come and have a pint and meet other farmers” – is what kept him going.

Farmer Kaleb Cooper, who is Clarkson’s right-hand man and brings his farming expertise to all of the boss’s hair-brained ideas, agrees with the sentiment.

“I think it’s really good for the community to go there and visit people and just see friends and have a chat,” says the 26-year-old, who has been farming since he was 13.

“Farmers use the pub way too little, because they think they’re too busy all the time. Actually, they need to start using it a bit more and just go for a pint and a chat. It’s important we talk.

"We’ve all got the same worries and the same stresses. So therefore we ought to talk to each other about it. And whether that be money issues, whether that be the weather, we have to talk and then you feel a little bit better, or you make a joke out of it.”

While Clarkson is trying to manage a farm and a new pub, Cooper has been busy with his own ventures – a nationwide tour of his one-man show about farming. While he says the tour was “great”, it did take him away from the farm, leaving Clarkson to fend for himself.

“There was so much rain we couldn’t really do much farming anyway,” Cooper says. “It’s never ideal to be away, but because of the weather it was a perfect time to not be on the farm.”

When harvest rolled around, the two butted heads once again – particularly due to Clarkson’s “incompetence”, as Cooper puts it. “Jeremy and I argued quite a bit in harvest because it was so stressful for me trying to do my very best again as a contractor,” he says.

“It was pretty tough mentally. The problem with the harvest was because I’m still young, I’m 26, I think a lot of people can doubt me sometimes. And I doubt myself sometimes because I think everyone does ask themselves if they’re doing things right.

"Jeremy really enjoys doing the harvest, but he’s a pain. Life would be easier if he wasn’t there during harvest, just because he’s a bit incompetent.”

By his own admission, Clarkson’s attempt at solo farming when Cooper was away was “a slow-motion accident”.

“I did do some of the farming for the first time ever, completely on my own, with Kaleb not being around,” he says. “I had to take care of the pigs on my own. I had to take care of the cows on my own, and I had to get the crops planted on my own…

“When you’re doing it completely on your own – well, things had to be redone a few times… When you have planted an entire field and it’s taken days – it shouldn’t have taken days, but it did take me days – you finally get it in, and then three weeks or a month later, absolutely nothing grows out of it.

"That’s a slow-motion accident, and it’s extremely disheartening when you’ve worked your socks off and nothing grows. Nothing. Not one single thing grew out of the soil.”

“That, in terms of farming,” Clarkson adds, “was my big wake-up call.”

Clarkson’s Farm series 4 comes to Prime Video on Friday, 23 May.