The Times Magazine 17farming is if your mum and dad are farmers,
so you can have the land come down
the generations.”
That was not the case for Cooper. His
mum, Rachel, is a dog groomer, and his dad,
Mark, a carpenter. “My dad wanted me to
follow in his footsteps. I remember him taking
me to the building site, where I was supposed
to be a gofer for him, but I’d just stand at the
gate and watch the tractor go up and down all
day, ploughing. As a little kid, I had a pedal
tractor and I used to dig holes everywhere,
and cart all the soil from there to there, and
move it back again. It would keep me busy
for three days.”
His parents split up when he was 12; he
lived with his mum while his brother, Kieron,
then 10, lived with his dad. “Tough times.
That was when I started getting into farming.
It was a distraction from everything that
was happening. Probably kept me sane, to
be honest.”
His parents, while not farmers, had
purchased a small piece of land a few years
earlier – four and a half acres in Heythrop,
a few minutes down the road.
For his 13th birthday, his mother bought
him three chickens, the eggs from which he
sold door-to-door. “I could make about £7 a
week profit, so each week I bought another
couple of chickens. By about three months
in I had 450 chickens. I used to get up in the
morning, go and let them out, go back at
night, feed them, clean them out. The only
reason I went to school was because I was
selling the teachers eggs.”
At 14, he bought three sheep, bred them,
had the lambs slaughtered, then sold those on
his egg round too. At 15, he bought his own
tractor – for £5,500 – even though he wasn’t
legally allowed to drive it on the roads for
another year.
After studying at agricultural college, he
launched his own business, Kaleb Cooper
Contracting, which provides all manner of
farming services – topping, mowing, hay
turning – and now employs his brother,
Kieron, his best friend, Jack, and his partner,
Taya. “She’s going to be managing the
chickens and doing the paperwork, and she’ll
jump on a tractor in the summer when need
be.” Their son, Oscar, is a fan of the tractor
too: “The vibrations and the movement of the
tractor just send him straight to sleep, so
if he can’t sleep, I take him out and just drive
round and round the field.” He plans to
employ some apprentices later this year.
“I taught Jeremy, for God’s sake – well, I say
‘taught Jeremy’; I nearly taught Jeremy – so
why couldn’t I teach an apprentice? They
have to be better than him, haven’t they?”
We hop in Kaleb’s big white truck – one of
several, though he cautiously declines to list
all his vehicles for me – to the Swan Inn atSwinbrook, one of ten local pubs that will be
serving Hawkstone cider, which will also be
sold online and at Clarkson’s Diddly Squat
Farm Shop. It’s an extremely upmarket pub,
the sort that serves pheasant rillette and
cavolo nero. Steve, the flat-capped, gilet-
sporting Geordie landlord, tells us that
they had the king and queen of Sweden in
yesterday. I doubt as many diners recognised
European royalty as look up from their lunch
when Cooper ambles in.
“Your life must have changed quite a bit,”
observes Steve, as we test a couple of pints
of Hawkstone cider (crisp, fruity, but not too
sweet, and to my admittedly inexpert palate
eminently drinkable).“I got famous, suddenly, and I got all these
offers and I didn’t know what to say yes to,”
Cooper tells me. He did a McDonald’s advert,
in which he learnt more about the fast food
behemoth’s efforts to be sustainable, but, when
he posted it to social media, he was branded
a sell-out by fans. Burnt by the backlash,
“I just didn’t want to do anything. I said no
to everything. Now, everything I do, I have
control over.”
As fans of Clarkson’s Farm will know,
Cooper had, famously, never read a book.
He’s read one now: Clarkson’s. “And I thought,
why don’t I just write one? How hard can it
be?’” His publishers lent him a Dictaphone.
“In the tractor, that’s where all my thoughts
come. Normally, I sit in there and I think
of better ways to earn more money, but
I recorded all my thoughts, then I would
type them up at home.”The World According to Kaleb, due to be
published in October, is available now on pre-
order. “It knocked Jeremy’s book off the top
for a bit, and it’s not out yet,” he says, gleefully.
He won’t reveal the contents, but one can
hope he might touch on subjects as varied as
his loves (“I’m an apple snob. I like Pink Lady
the best, and I can’t eat apples that squeak on
my teeth”), his phobias (“I have a massive fear
of balloons”) and his haircare regime. Having
showcased a perm in the later episodes of
Clarkson’s Farm, he is currently “growing it out
for the next style”, the details of which he will
also not reveal. I liken him – quite charitably, I
think – to his Cotswolds neighbour and former
hairstyle adventurer, David Beckham. “What
do you mean, ‘Farming David Beckham’? I’m
better looking,” he protests. “I like to think of
myself as the farming version of Steve Irwin.”
He is wary of saying anything potentially
divisive – “I can see what’s happening with the
government and farming and that, but I try
and stay out of politics” – but he does believe
that farmers “get a hard ride. They get blamed
for everything – for killing all the insects, for
releasing all this carbon when they plough,
when there’s Dave flying his little private
plane around for three hours.”
And he sees supermarket shopping, as
opposed to buying from local producers where
possible, as not only detrimental to farmers,
but a false economy. “Why do you go to the
supermarket to buy milk for 80p instead of
paying £1? The farm’s just up the road. And
you’re telling me you can drive to Aldi or
Co-op for less than 20p?”
Cooper’s longstanding ambition is to own
his own farm, which he estimates will cost at
least £3 million for about 200 acres (Clarkson
has 1,000 acres, “but he bought that in 2008”,
Cooper notes). But, thanks to a diversity of
new roles, including charity work and talks for
young farmers, there are other ambitions too.
“I want to be Kaleb Cooper MBE,” he says.
“Marcus Rashford did it quite easily, so why
can’t I?” As he tells his young farmers at his
talks, “Dreams don’t work unless you do.”
He’s a grafter himself, happily working
18-hour days, and that won’t change, he
assures me. After our lunch, he’ll be off to
someone else’s farm to spread some fertiliser.
And, with Hawkstone cider, “I will be loading
the lorries with my apples; I will be driving the
apples to the press; I will be planting the trees
myself; I will be going to the pubs to try to
make the deals. It’s exciting, and I run on
adrenaline,” he says.
“I don’t want it to get to a point where I am
no longer sat on a tractor. I want to be that
person going, ‘Yes, I’m on my way,’ and then
getting on a tractor and spreading their muck.”
But, he concedes, “I do need to get a PA.” nhawkstone.co‘AT 13 I ONLY WENT TO SCHOOL
TO SELL THE TEACHERS EGGS’
AVA LO N
At the Big Feastival, 2021