A third visit to "Clarkson's Farm" which sees the divisive television presenter try to operate his Oxfordshire Farm, and demonstrate the difficulties that the farming community are currently up against as the subsidies, that have previously been a lifeline for some farmers, are coming to an end.
This year Jeremy has come up with an idea. He makes Kaleb Cooper Farm Manager and puts him in charge of the traditional farming of the fields, what and when to plant, fertilise and harvest. That only makes up about half the land he owns though. So, Jeremy is going to take the rest and see what he can get from it. This includes growing mushrooms and mustard and harnessing the existing nettles and berries that grow anyway. He also plans to utilise a wooded area to raise pigs and borrow goats to clear out areas of brambles. The two then compete to see who generates the most profit at the end of the year.
The pig rearing is perhaps one of the key elements of this series, and definitely its most emotional, as a high percentage of their first litter are killed by their mothers who, in their exhausted state, accidentally squash them against the side of their pen. The handling of corpse after corpse of dead piglets is desperately sad. Their method of fixing this for the second round is quite ingenious, a halo ring around the inside that keeps the pig from pinning the offspring. It's another year that looks all the way through like it's going to be disastrous, as again the weather doesn't play ball though the competition all hinges on just how high Kaleb's yield is going to be.
There's no big movement back towards some of the contrived elements that occurred in the first season, though the decision to buy a hovercraft, for essentially just one scene, feels like it's headed that way.
I'm interested in seeing what happens next, particularly if there's an improvement in the field that the (frankly bizarre) combination of George Lamb and Andy Cato from Groove Armada experimented on this year. I do wonder how many more seasons it'll run for though as really, we should be settling into the good techniques now and how much more experimentation can there be. I'll be back for season four though.