Cotswolds farmer and sometime Grand Tour presenter Jeremy Clarkson has spoken of an ‘unbelievably sad’ disaster on Diddly Squat – involving some new additions. In an interview with The Times on the eve of new episodes of Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime, he revealed what had happened to his efforts to expand his pig farming.
He said he was thinking of changing the name of the spread to Piggly Squat and said: “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.”
However, the new series reveals the shocking reality of trying to raise pigs – having been pre-warned by Charlie Ireland, the farm’s resident expert who said: “Pigs need round-the-clock care.”
It was the piglets’ own mums which were the big problem – accidentally killing their offspring. Jeremy said the result left girlfriend Lisa Hogan distraught: “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 hoped his pigs would be a bigger economic success than other additions to his 1,000 acre farm in Oxfordshire. His sheep cost more to shear than the wool was worth, cows proved uneconomic after the local council made him shut the farm restaurant where the beef was eaten. But he had thought that the pigs might do better: “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.”
But as well as pig deaths, other things went wrong too. “Behind the scenes everything that could go wrong has gone wrong,” he said. The hottest June and wettest March in recent history have wrecked crops of potatoes and spring barley.
The first four episodes of series three of Clarkson’s Farm are available to watch on Amazon Prime from May 3
