Jeremy Clarkson: My harvest hymn — with added Chinese chemicals

Many of us will remember that Mungo Jerry song featuring the line, “Have a drink, have a drive. Go out and see what you can find.” And of course we all realise you can’t even think that any more. And nor, really, is it considered acceptable to follow up with: “If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal. If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.” Times have moved on.

Of course lots of lyrics now feel as if they’re from another aeon. Clair by Gilbert O’Sullivan especially. But you might think it’s impossible for the lyrics in a harvest festival hymn to become out of date. “We plough the fields and scatter. The good seed on the land. But it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand.” Absolute timelessness. It was true ten thousand years ago and it’s true now.

No, it isn’t. God doesn’t water the land any more. The coal-fired Chinese power stations do that. And he doesn’t feed it either. That’s handled by CF Industries, which makes all the chemical fertiliser that farmers use on their fields.

We don’t even scatter seeds any more, because that’s wasteful onanism. We drill them into the ground, at precise intervals and at a precise depth using a computer-controlled, £40,000 seed drill. That’s towed behind a £250,000 Case tractor, which was built in the factory where they used to make Tiger tanks. Not much Goddishness going on in any of that.

There isn’t even any ploughing any more. In the olden days farmers would turn the top layer of soil over using a plough so that the weeds were buried. And because they were deprived of sunlight they died. It was a lovely, natural, rosy-cheeked way of creating the perfect seedbed for the following year’s crop.

But then along came Little Miss Thunberg and her merry band of Packhamites, who decided that 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon is stored in the planet’s soil. And that if you turn this soil over with a plough, all of it will be released into the upper atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. Which is bad. So the lovely, natural method of killing weeds had to stop. And instead farmers had to use chemical sorcery from Monsanto, BASF and the Zhejiang Xinan Chemical Industrial Group.

Farmers didn’t mind, if I’m honest, because ploughing is extremely expensive. You simply would not believe how much diesel is needed to drag a two-tonne land anchor through a muddy field. Using weedkiller instead is much cheaper.

• Farmer Clarkson: My latest crop? Cricket bats

Or rather it was. But weedkiller prices have gone up dramatically in recent years. And from where I’m sitting it doesn’t really seem to work any more. Every year Kaleb goes into the fields like a rural Terminator, hosing down the weeds with his ungodly chemical sorcery and then, a few weeks later, Cheerful Charlie walks me through the same fields, pointing out the brome and the black-grass, which is easy to spot because it’s purple and green and completely immune to anything the world’s chemists can throw at it.

So this year Charlie said we should become medieval and plough the fields instead. Selfish? Well, yes, this will shoot a tonne of CO2 into the troposphere and that’s obviously bad. And I’ll use four times more diesel than I would if I used weedkiller. So that’s not good for the environment either. But here’s the kicker: I wouldn’t be pumping any chemicals into the soil.

So that’s the choice — soil or sky? You have to hurt one of them if you want to eat. I went for the sky and rented a plough.

I settled on an eight-furrow monster for two good reasons. Number one: the bigger the plough, the faster you get the job done. And number two: none of Kaleb’s tractors would be powerful enough to pull it, so we’d have to use my 270bhp Lamborghini. Which would annoy him. Even admitting that it’s better than his tractors gives him a hot flush. Sometimes he vibrates with fury when he goes near it.

The only drawback to this cleverly wrought large plough plan was that, because Kaleb refuses to drive my tractor, I’d have to do the ploughing.

This is something I’ve done before. It was on Top Gear about 200 years ago and I did very well. Partly this was because my competitors in the ploughing competition were James May and Richard Hammond. And partly because one of the two judges was a really good friend of my mum.

In real life, though, things were different. I couldn’t hitch the plough to the tractor without help. I couldn’t do a three-point turn when it was attached. And I couldn’t make the tractor move when the furrows were in the sodden soil. All four wheels just sort of spun. So I had to lift the plough slightly, which meant I wasn’t ploughing. Or wiggle the steering wheel, which made big holes and, when it worked, caused me to set off in a new direction. It began to look as if a drunk, blind man with no arms was doing the ploughing.

All the time I was watching the fuel gauge plummet like the depth gauge in a holed submarine, and wondering if it might be cheaper, easier and kinder to the environment to use chemical weedkiller instead.

This is farming. Only last week I discovered that approximately 18 billion slugs have come to live in the fields where I’ve planted spring barley. If I adopt a live-and-let-live rewilding attitude and do nothing they will eat the lot and, next year, there will be no Hawkstone lager. As that makes no sense, I therefore have to pepper the field with slug pellets, which will kill them. Great. But these pellets will also kill all the worms. So what’s the answer? There isn’t one.

Similarly, I have signed up to the government’s eco-friendly grant scheme and will be planting things that aren’t food in three fields. They’re good for the soil and they’re good for my bank balance. But it means I’m not growing stuff people can eat. I know one chap who has taken 60 per cent of his farm out of food production and he’s not alone. So yippee. All that stored carbon and all of that fixed-in nitrogen.

But what if you want some bread? You’ll have to get a loaf made from wheat that was grown abroad. And how’s that good for global warming? And will it have been grown under the same stringent rules that we have here? Or will it have been fertilised with human faeces? You face a choice then. Do you want net zero in the UK? Or do you want to eat a Mexican’s turd?

Do you want lager or worms? Do you want healthy soil or a healthy sky? Do you want bees or orangutans? These are the questions I’m facing every single day. It’s a multiple-choice world of no right answers.

Which brings us back to another harvest festival hymn.

All things bright and beautiful. All birds that must be plucked. No matter what we choose to do, we’re well and truly.