Cotswolds farmer and TV personality Jeremy Clarkson has described a heart-wrenching ordeal at his Diddly Squat Farm, which he candidly discussed ahead of the release of new episodes of his Amazon Prime series, Clarkson’s Farm. In a revealing chat with The Times, Clarkson shared the tribulations faced while attempting to diversify into pig farming, reports Northants Live.
He expressed his fondness for pigs over other farm animals, considering renaming his property Piggly Squat, and remarked: “Pigs are my favourite animals we’ve had on the farm by a long way. I know that cows are great, but pigs are easier to manage and very endearing.”
Yet, the upcoming series will show the grim challenges of pig rearing, despite prior warnings from Charlie Ireland, the farm’s agricultural advisor, who cautioned “pigs need round-the-clock care”.
Tragically, it was the piglets’ own mothers causing unintended harm, leading to their deaths. Reflecting on the impact of this loss, Clarkson said it left his partner Lisa Hogan deeply affected. He said: “I reckoned the pigs would provide something that’s sadly lacking in farming today – a bit of genuine happiness.
“Instead, it was almost unbelievably sad. I’ve never seen Lisa so upset. The film crew looked shell-shocked. We had a catastrophically high level of deaths and I was desperately worried we were doing something wrong, but it turned out we weren’t, it was just that pigs are bad mothers – the Sandy and Black particularly so. That’s why it’s a rare breed.”
He had high hopes that his pigs would outperform other ventures on his 1,000-acre Oxfordshire farm. The wool from his sheep wasn’t worth the cost of shearing, and his cows became uneconomical when the local council forced the closure of his farm restaurant, which served the beef.
However, he believed pigs could be more profitable: “A cow has one calf, whereas the last bout of births we had, one of our pigs had fourteen piglets. That’s a lot of money.” Yet, it wasn’t just pig fatalities causing issues. “Behind the scenes everything that could go wrong has gone wrong,” he said after citing the hottest June and wettest March in memory as being being the culprits for ruining his potato and spring barley crops.
