The Times Magazine 15n his local supermarket on a recent
afternoon, “in my wellies and overalls,
straight from work”, Kaleb Cooper was
picking up groceries for his one-year-old
son, Oscar, when he was accosted by a
woman he’d never met. “She shouted
over, ‘Are you still farming?’” He looks
bemused at the memory. “I said, ‘Er,
yeah, I’m still farming.’ She said, ‘Oh, I
thought you’d be in Hollywood by now.’”
He’s not. He’s in Chipping Norton,
Oxfordshire, the bucolic Cotswold market
town (population 6,337) where he was born,
raised and ideally prefers never to have to
leave. The furthest 23-year-old Cooper has
ever been is London (three times, grudgingly),
and he “hated it, f***ing awful”. “I got a
nosebleed when we went to Stow,” he says
(Stow-on-the-Wold, 18 miles away, is over
the border in Gloucestershire). He doesn’t
own a passport.
So it’s safe to say that an imminent
relocation to Los Angeles seems unlikely.
Cooper, however, does have more Instagram
followers than many Hollywood A-listers (a
million and counting), is regularly mobbed
at festivals and agricultural shows, gets asked
for selfies by celebrities, and has resorted to
hiding in the toilets of his local cinema to
avoid being recognised.
The undisputed hero of the Amazon series
Clarkson’s Farm, Cooper – a bearded, baby-
faced young farmer with a fondness for
experimental hairstyles – immediately
endeared himself to a global audience when
the series launched last summer with his
exasperated put-downs of his cack-handed
employer, Jeremy Clarkson.
The irascible former petrolhead presenter,
a blow-in from London who suddenly fancies
himself as a character from The Archers,
has gained a new fanbase with the series.
Humbled by the challenges facing farmers- bureaucracy, Brexit, the sadistic British
weather – the man who called Greta
Thunberg a “spoilt brat” and roundly rejected
the scientific consensus on climate change
has become an unlikely environmentalist:
rewilding, keeping bees and building owl
boxes, delivering lambs, and speaking up for
the embattled agricultural community whose
ranks he has now joined.
But it is Cooper, his sharp-witted farm
worker, who steals the show as he cleans up
the incompetent Clarkson’s messes, dragging
him – and his oversized, flashy £40,
Lamborghini tractor (“an ornament”, according
to Cooper) – out of ditches while mocking
his slapdash crop-planting and regularly
admonishing him as a “f***ing idiot”. Clarkson,
for his part, calls Cooper a “rural halfwit”.
Today, lolling against a tree, in a navy
jumper decorated with cream labrador hairs,
jeans and brown deck shoes, Cooper is no less
forthright – sceptical about standing in an
orchard in spring, among juvenile trees with
no fruit on them, or against a dry stone wall
(“Is that what everyone in London thinks
the countryside looks like?”) – and no less
scathing about his boss.
Is Clarkson really as hopeless as he appears
to be? “He’s useless. I’ve tried my best. I’m still
trying.” Not that he’s hopeful that the 61-year-
old presenter will improve much. “He has got
better with the tractor,” he concedes. “And it
is a really hard job, but you just have a knack
for it. You’re either a farmer or you’re not a
farmer.” (Cooper, delightfully, pronounces
“farmer” with triple the number of Rs it is
traditionally spelt with.) “I mean, Johnny
here,” he continues, motioning to his business
partner, Johnny Hornby, whose orchard weare standing in – “imagine him going out
there, trying to farm. That would drive me
mad, trying to teach him. He can’t even put
an umbrella up.”
Cooper was not impressed by Clarkson’s
characterisation of him in his recent bestseller,
Diddly Squat – A Year on the Farm. “He
referred to me as a tractor driver. That’s
f***ing shit – I’m a farm manager. I’m the
boss. It’s Kaleb’s Farm, secretly.”
But in spite of the barbed repartee, the pair
are “really good friends. We’re always together,”
he grins. Is it a different dynamic off screen?
“No. We argue just as much. Probably more,
because we don’t have a film crew stopping
us.” Filming for season two of the series is
under way. “It’s going to be good. That’s all
I’m going to say. It’s going to be good.”
Mostly, says Cooper, his newfound fame as
Clarkson’s better-skilled sidekick is a positive.“This morning I was up at 5, delivering hay,
and then at midday I’m standing here with an
apple, throwing it up in the air for a picture.
Do you know what I mean?” And he tries to
respond to as many messages from fans as
he can. “I find it very bizarre, when people
message me and go, ‘Is the fertiliser price
as bad there as it is in Texas?’ And I’m like,
‘Where’s Texas?’ People are like, ‘Oh, we’ve
got snow here.’ I’m like, ‘We haven’t got snow.
Where have you got snow?’ ‘Alaska.’”
Among a clutch of other projects the series
has led to – including a forthcoming book,
and “a big thing coming out very shortly for
young people” – Cooper now has his own
cider company (hence the apple) with partners
including Hornby, an advertising executive
who previously worked with Tony Blair.
The unpasteurised, locally(ish) produced
Hawkstone cider – made from apples grown
no more than 60 miles from the presses and
fermented for six months in aged oak barrels- was inspired by the enormous success of
the Hawkstone lager that Clarkson, a man
having a serious Midas moment right now,
launched last year.
“I spent the last two years planting Jeremy’s
spring barley for his beer and to be honest
with you, I cannot stand beer,” confesses
Cooper. “But I do like cider.”
It is testament to his passion that Cooper
agreed to travel all the way to Ledbury,
Herefordshire (an hour and 10 minutes away;
multiple nosebleed miles), to partner with
Weston’s, which has been brewing cider on
traditional presses for 150 years, using apples
from Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and
Worcestershire. One of Cooper’s aims with
Hawkstone is to support Oxfordshire farmers
by using their apples too, and he is planning
an apple festival in the autumn, to which locals
can bring apples from their gardens to add
into the mix. “Everyone can bring their apples
out of their garden. I’ll give them a pork or
bacon roll, we’ll have a drink of the cider that
we made previously and then go from there.”
The cider has been produced to please
Cooper’s own palate. “I don’t like a dry cider,
to be honest with you,” he says. “But when I
go to the pub, if I order a very sweet cider
I normally get killed: ‘Oh, you wuss. You girl.’
So I’ve made this cider that looks manly but
it’s got a hint of sweet in it.”
Nothing is wasted; the pulp left over from
the cider production will be used for animal
feed, says Cooper, and when the cider turns
a profit, he plans to reinvest it in planting
more orchards.
Cooper, whose enthusiasm for his industry
is infectious – “I can’t explain how much
I love it. Just talking about it, I want to get out
there and sit on a tractor and do something” - has wanted to be a farmer for as long as he
can remember. “The best way to get into
I
‘OFF SCREEN JEREMY AND
I ARGUE JUST AS MUCH.
PROBABLY MORE’
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Cooper and Clarkson on Clarkson’s Farm