3 weeks ago
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Jeremy Clarkson has been plagued with anxiety about the current financial situation facing farmers - and now he believes that British food production could grind to a halt altogether.
Talking in his latest book, Diddly Squat: Home To Roost, he revealed that one of his niggling fears is "everyone starving to death". "I lie awake at night worrying about soil. We are told that in just 90 years, we'll have killed it, and it will be unable to produce any more food," he wrote.
Addressing global warming, he continued that there might not be "much point worrying about the sky". Jeremy chillingly predicted: "By the time that's warmed up enough to make a difference, we will all have starved to death."
The star, who had a heart scare last month, added: "Perhaps we should all stop getting our knickers in a twist about how we are killing the planet, because one day, when it is good and ready, it'll kill us." Jeremy has good reason to be fearful about the future of farming, after revealing that he made just £114 in profit in his first year at Diddly Squat.
Though he has lucrative TV projects such as Clarkson's Farm to fall back on - a huge hit on Amazon Prime - many other farmers rely exclusively on their agricultural profits. Meanwhile, Labour's Rachel Reeves recently introduced a substantial rise to inheritance tax for farms valued at more than £1 million, threatening Jeremy's hopes of passing Diddly Squat down to his children.
He recently publicly urged his fellow farmers to "hang on in there for five years" in the hope that Labour might be ousted in the next election.
Meanwhile, rising production costs have meant that his Cotswolds pub The Farmer's Dog, which prides itself on using only home-grown or local produce in its kitchen, is struggling financially too.
Jeremy had admitted months earlier that he'd considered selling up and abandoning the farm last year.
"I’ve tried farming conventionally and it didn’t work. I’ve tried diversifying and that hasn’t really worked either."
“And I’ve tried with sheep and pigs and cows and that has been a bit of a disaster as well. So I arrived at a crossroads. And I was not sure which way to turn," he explained.
To make matters worse, Jeremy was also struck down by a health crisis when one of the major arteries providing the blood supply to his heart became "completely blocked".
After being taken ill during an exotic holiday, the former Grand Tour star, who recently declared himself "too old and fat" to continue his televised journeys with supercars, had to be taken to hospital.
He'd worried he could be "days from death" but thankfully, he hadn't had a heart attack and has since had a stent fitted to restore him back to health.
English (US) ·