Jeremy Clarkson has revealed that a decision he made for Clarkson’s Farm has left his colleague Kaleb Cooper worried that “he’ll be out of a job”.
Cooper became an instant star after Clarkson purchased the Diddly Squat farm in Chipping Norton, where Cooper already worked under the previous owner.
The farmer was kept on by Clarkson and quickly became his right-hand man as he showed the Top Gear star the ropes of running a working farm, which is the basis of the hit Prime Video series.
But Clarkson has now made a decision that Cooper “hates” – he’s invested in a driverless tractor.
He said that leaving the tractor to automatically drill or roll the field buys him time to get on with other jobs.
“It normally takes 20 hours with a 3m cultivator to prepare the 200 acres we use every year for growing pasta and lager,” he explained to The Times. “And then it takes about 10 hours to plant the actual seeds. That’s 30 hours of me just sitting there, in a bouncy tractor, going up and down endlessly.
He said that “even though I’ve now had five years of practice, I’m still not very good at it”.
“I miss bits. I cock up turns and corners. I hit gateposts and most years I bounce along for hours not realising that the hopper is empty and I’m busy planting nothing at all.”
He continued: “An autonomous tractor would not make mistakes like this and it would not get bored. It doesn’t need to stop for a wee and it does not need to sleep.”
Cooper is unimpressed, though, with Clarkson stating: “Kaleb hates it. He says it’ll put him out of a job.”
Clarkson said that he “pointed out” to the farmer that if he himself used one, he could use his manual tractor on another farm, “and get paid twice”.
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“He did agree I had a point,” the TV personality said.
Cooper has been basking in the success of the Amazon programme since it launched in 2021.
He previously revealed that he was once earning just 50 pence an hour due to the unpredictable nature of farming costs and profit margins. He is now a millionaire.
Cooper shares two children – Oscar, three, and Willa, one – with fiancée Taya, and announced in February that they were expecting their third child together in August.
