Jeremy Clarkson has said the harvest at his Diddly Squat Farm is ‘f*****’ as the country prepared for the year’s fifth heatwave.
Mr Clarkson, 66, posted a screenshot of the BBC weather forecast for Chipping Norton to Instagram on Sunday afternoon with the caption: ‘Harvest already f*****. May as well just enjoy it now.’
The forecast for the Oxfordshire village – near to where the former Top Gear presenter owns the land made famous by the Amazon Prime series Clarkson’s Farm – showed a high of 29C on Sunday.
Chipping Norton is set to endure heat of up to 33C this week as Britain faces a fifth heatwave of the year, while temperatures could reach 36C in parts of East Anglia and the South East.
Mr Clarkson’s farming show, which has been filming for a sixth series in recent months, has featured candid reflection on the difficult realities of British farming and will likely focus on the impact of this year’s hot weather.
Last week the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warned the Government that Britain could face food shortages because of the long warm and dry spell.
Tom Bradshaw, the NFU’s president, said low rainfall and record-breaking heatwaves which have dried soil could lead to fewer products on supermarket shelves.
He told BBC Radio 4 that the Prime Minister should give farmers tax breaks for water storage systems on their land to prepare for future hot weather.
Jeremy Clarkson posted the forecast for Chipping Norton on Instagram, saying the harvest at his Diddly Squat Farm near the Oxfordshire village was ‘already f*****’
Mr Clarkson, pictured with farmer and star of Clarkson’s Farm Kaleb Cooper, has been candid about the tight margins of farming on his Amazon Prime show
Aerial images showed cars parked on scorched ground near Mr Clarkson’s pub, The Farmer’s Dog, on Wednesday
Mr Bradshaw said: ‘Those other countries around the world that we currently rely on to produce our food and vegetables, their climates are changing as well.
‘It does feel like there is going to be shortages of [food] products.
British farmers had already been hit by winter flooding this season, which affected planting, before drought and hosepipe bans compounded their woes in recent weeks.
England and Wales saw their driest July ever recorded, with some counties seeing 1mm or less of rainfall across the entire month, the Met Office said.
Wheat farmers have said their crop is half its normal height and England is experiencing its earliest-ever harvest as farmers bid to salvage their lacklustre yields.
And last month a barley farmer saw two of his fields ravaged by a wildfire.
The blaze at Manor Farm on Hayling Island, Hampshire, left two-thirds of one field blackened and half of another, according to striking aerial pictures.
Mr Clarkson’s 1,000-acre farm has previously produced traditional crops including wheat, barley and rapeseed alongside potatoes, mustard and clover.
But he said in July he had deliberately left 200 acres uncropped this year because planting wheat or barley would have guaranteed financial losses.
He warned it was becoming ‘quite simply impossible’ to make money from growing food and warned more farmers could be left with little choice but to use their land for other means.
In 2021 Mr Clarkson told The Times that avoiding inheritance tax had been ‘the critical thing’ in his decision to buy the land.
Mr Clarkson, whose partner Lisa Hogan (pictured) works in Diddly Squat’s shop, told The Times in 2021 avoiding inheritance tax was ‘the critical thing’ in his decision to buy the farm
But during a protest in 2024 against proposed reforms by Sir Keir Starmer’s government to the tax said he had actually bought it ‘to shoot’.
The Government had proposed imposing a 20 per cent levy on inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1million from April this year, ending the 100 per cent tax relief which had been in place since the 1980s.
But after months of protests by farmers – including tractors bringing traffic to a halt in Westminster – the Government raised the threshold to £2.5million.
Mr Clarkson bought the land in the Cotswolds in 2008 but did not begin farming it himself until 2019.
In its first year the farm – originally bought by Mr Clarkson for £4.45million – made just £144 in profit before making less than £15,000 in the year from 2023 to 2024 and losing £5,000 in the year from 2024 to 2025.
The former Grand Tour presenter wrote last year: ‘If those numbers are typical, it means farmers are working twice as hard as anyone else and not even getting the minimum wage.’
