Kaleb Cooper, the farm manager on Clarkson's Farm, worked out his own hourly rate from the farming side of his business and it came to fifty pence. He said so on a podcast. His books pay rather better. Kaleb is not a television character. He is a working contractor who was farming in the Cotswolds before the cameras came and will be when they go, and he has done the sums that most farmers do in their heads and keep to themselves. - Hourly rate from farming, by his own count: 50p. - Hourly rate for the woman who stacks the shelf his wheat ends up on as a loaf: at least £12.71. - Price of the loaf: about £1.40. - What the wheat in it earns the farmer: about 10p. - The farmer's profit on it, measured in 2022: 0.09p. The whole chain is paid before the man who grew the thing. The supermarket takes its margin, the miller his, the baker his, the haulier his, the fertiliser company its, and what is left when the harvest has been through all of those hands is the farmer's. His share has been shrinking for decades, because he is the only link who cannot pass the cost on. He cannot hold out for a better price for long either. The seed, the fertiliser and the diesel were paid for months before harvest, and grain costs money every week it sits in the shed. Selling direct is the one place it is different. A farmer who sells off his own farm, through his own shop, to a customer who drove there, keeps far more of the price. That is why Diddly Squat had queues out onto the road, while Clarkson's first year of actually farming the place made him a profit of £144. Kaleb is in his twenties and has three children and is one of the best farmers in Oxfordshire, and his trade pays him about a 25th of the legal minimum wage. The country wants its food cheap, and it has got exactly that.

The lowest point of land in Britain is a cast-iron post in a Cambridgeshire wood, and when it went in the ground it was level with the ground. Stand next to it now and it is four metres over your head. It is at Holme Fen, south of Peterborough, and in 1851 this was the edge of Whittlesey Mere, the largest lake in southern England. A syndicate of landowners drained the lake that year for farmland, and the engineer, who knew what happens to peat when you take the water out of it, drove an oak pile through 22 feet of it down to the clay and cut the top flush with the turf. A column from the Crystal Palace replaced it. Then they stood back and watched the land go down. Nine inches in the first year. Eight feet by the 1890s. Today the ground around that post is 2.75 metres below sea level, and the post is a ruler nobody asked for, sticking out of a birch wood with guy ropes holding it up because the soil that used to hold it up has gone into the sky. That is what drained peat does. It dries, it shrinks, and it oxidises, which means it turns into carbon dioxide and leaves. Peat takes a thousand years to lay down a metre. Under the plough it loses a centimetre or two of that every year, and the Fens have been under the plough since the Dutch engineers arrived in the 1600s. Peat soils farmed for crops are among the largest sources of carbon dioxide in Britain's whole land sector, and the fields doing it are growing lettuce. Because that is what the Fens are for. A third of England's vegetables come out of this one flat black square: half the lettuce grown in Britain, three quarters of the celery, the carrots, the onions, the potatoes, the leeks, the beetroot. The bag of salad, the celery sticks, the chips. Every field of it is a few millimetres lower than it was last January, the pumps run day and night to keep the sea out of a landscape that is now beneath it, and the water the crops need is forecast to run short within ten years. Before the drain this was eels, wildfowl, reeds, summer grazing, and a fen that had been quietly stacking carbon since the ice left. The cattle came and went on it for 5,000 years and the ground stayed where it was. The salad has been on it for 170 years and the ground is four metres down. The post is still measuring.