Kaleb Cooper: ‘The arguments with Clarkson are real – now the camera crews just walk off’
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If the last outing for Clarkson’s Farm was about the battle between Diddly Squat and West Oxfordshire district council, its third series offers a new conflict: the proprietor versus Kaleb Cooper. Jeremy Clarkson’s latest scheme is to split his 1,000 acres between them to see who can generate the most dosh.
The inevitable bickering will, no doubt, prove to be another ratings success for Amazon Prime – and much of that is down to the affable 25-year-old Cooper. He is the undisputed breakout star of the show, and has published a bestselling book, recently finished a live stage tour and attracted 2.3 million followers on Instagram. His success is such that he tells me: “I get naked pictures every now and then on a Saturday.” Women or men? “Both. I think everyone’s drinking at eight o’clock.” Not bad going for a chap who “got a nosebleed” when he once had to stray nine miles from his hometown.
I meet Cooper in Clarkson’s manager’s office, where the walls are adorned with magazine covers, Top Gear mementos (one is signed “you big c---s!”) and a certificate of Clarkson’s honorary doctorate of engineering from Oxford Brookes University. We talk about the fractious relationship between Clarkson and his “yokel” which is at the heart of the programme.
Cooper tells me that the pair are pally (texting each day and going for regular pints at the Chequers in Chipping Norton, or the Swan in Ascott Earl, both near to the show’s location), but the squabbling is real. “If I’m wrong with Jeremy, I’m not admitting that I’m wrong. Bugger that,” says Cooper. The viewers “probably only see about 30 per cent of the arguments,” he adds. “The cameras stop, and then all of a sudden we’re still arguing. Even the camera crew now just walk off.’”
In the new series, another scuffle – not involving Clarkson – occurs when Cooper finds an interloper on his land – Andy Cato, half of Nineties electro outfit Groove Armada, who now runs a rewilding business with ex-TV and radio presenter George Lamb. (I later hear Cato calls Clarkson “Peter Pan with a rosé belly.”) Cooper has “drilled that field every year for eight years; I’ve sprayed it, I’ve combined it – so therefore when someone else goes in and drills my field, I get very annoyed … I wasn’t impressed,” he says – a feeling he makes no attempts to hide in the show. “But at the same time I can see the logic of what they’re trying to do” [with regenerative farming]. “Even if I don’t agree with it.”
Naturally, Cooper is very aware of the difficulties that farmers have faced in the past 18 months, where record-breaking rainfall has battered production and bottom lines, and frankly robbed many of a way to spend their days. Three of his peers are struggling badly, he says; one told him the other day that he “felt like shooting myself”. Cooper went round right away for a cup of tea, then called him the next day, and the next. “Just talking, asking that one question a day is a lifesaver, I think.”
He is well aware that if he couldn’t farm, “my mental health would be really bad. I think farming saved me as a person from a young age, so therefore I probably owe my life to farming.”
Cooper is pleased that the show breaks down just how much farming costs, and how little help is offered by the Government. In this series, he heads to No 10 to meet Rishi Sunak and leaves thoroughly unimpressed, although he does admire the Prime Minister’s hair. “They talk in a scripted text,” he says of politicians. “If I go to 10 Downing Street and a politician says ‘I’m going to do this’, you know for a damn fact it’s never going to get done.”
He would like to see less reliance on cheap imports, and more support for growers. If we continue to produce less of our own food, and another pandemic and global conflict hits, “what happens? England’s at war with itself.”
Cooper, who began selling eggs aged 13, has had his life transformed by Clarkson’s Farm, both in terms of his profile and in bringing his net assets to £338,000. Still, he maintains nothing has changed. A trip to the NTAs last month was “pretty s---”, given he thought he was attending the National Tractor Awards, and not the National Television Awards.
It’s hard to tell how much of this is schtick. Cooper is clearly no fool, his cheerful ignorance often employed for laughs during our conversation, as in the show. He is certainly smart enough to stay out of the various skirmishes. The new series – filmed in 2022 – shows the farm’s restaurant being closed down following a row with local planners, and Lisa Hogan (Clarkson’s partner) being rapped on the knuckles for selling goods (an avalanche of branded candles and chutneys) from outside the stipulated radius.
Cooper says he doesn’t like to get involved in such things as “I don’t really understand all that stuff,” but thinks “the council can’t back down now because they know they’ve messed up.” The show portrays them as bureaucratic in the extreme. Do they want to make an example of Clarkson, or are residents tired of having their country lanes clogged by Diddly Squat tourists from around the globe? (The barn is covered in graffiti left by visitors from Florida, Denmark and, erm, Leicestershire.) Cooper plays this down. “I still walk around Chadlington [the nearest village] and no one ever shouts abuse at me; no one ever comes up with a pitchfork …”
Despite having his own business, Cooper is not close to owning land himself. “Everything’s through the roof, and I don’t want to move away from the place I love most.” It is “frustrating,” he adds, to be priced out of his hometown; from the land he tends for 18 hours a day. “That’s why I’m so busy doing everything possible to get to that dream [of buying a farm]... I’m going to do it one day.”
All of Cooper’s thoughts are about money, and how to make more of it. He was recently told to jot down the business ideas that keep him awake; on one occasion, it ran to seven pages. Clarkson has called him “easily the most entrepreneurial person I’ve ever met”. Does he feel successful?
“I think I’ll feel like I made it when I’ve bought a farm,” he suggests. At that point, “I can actually relax a little bit and spend a little bit more time with family” (he has a fiancée, Taya, and two children, two-year-old Oscar and Willa, 10 months).
Cooper is unsure where this drive comes from, though the raised eyebrows of others have played their part. “All my life I’ve been told that you can’t do that” – whether it be school, the tour, owning a farm. “I’m going to do this to prove you all wrong.”
Nevertheless, he doesn’t know what’s next, with the state of agriculture a constant concern. “I want to say that I’ve got a future in farming, but is there a future in farming?”
I suggest some other alternatives: Hollywood (“I haven’t got a passport”); a waxwork at Madame Tussauds (“what’s that?”). He has recently grown to like the idea of setting up a contracting business in Australia – one of his jotted-down 3am thoughts. It is some way to go for a man who has never taken a train (“scary”), but Cooper’s Farm Down Under would surely be Amazon gold dust. “I’ve got to get brave enough to do any of that,” he mulls, at once excited by, and terrified of, the prospect. But “it’s in my mindset”.
The first four episodes of Clarkson’s Farm, Season 3 are on Amazon Prime Video from May 3, with episodes 5-8 released on May 10
