Jeremy Clarkson tries out driverless tractor on Diddly Squat Farm
23rd June 2025
Jeremy Clarkson has recently shared his latest farm machinery purchase, a driverless tractor. While he is very happy with it, Diddly Squat farm manager Kaleb Cooper worries that it can put him out of the job.
In his latest column for The Sunday Times, Mr Clarkson revealed that he leased an AgBot T2, an Agxeed machine that is made in the Netherlands and uses German engineering.
He wrote: ‘I have never really seen the point of a driverless car. Sure, it can find its way into town, negotiate all the roundabouts and it can then park itself neatly in a space it’s found. But then what? It can’t go into the shop and buy your groceries.
‘A driverless tractor, however, is different. Because when it gets to the field that needs to be drilled or cultivated or rolled, you don’t need to be there at all. It can just get on with it.’
The Cotswolds farm owner explained that it normally takes 20 hours with a 3m cultivator to prepare the 200 acres he uses every year for “growing pasta and lager”. Then it takes about ten hours to plant the actual seeds.
‘That’s 30 hours of me just sitting there, in a bouncy tractor, going up and down endlessly. And even though I’ve now had five years of practice, I’m still not very good at it. I miss bits. I cock up turns and corners.
‘I hit gateposts, and most years I bounce along for hours, not realising that the hopper is empty and I’m busy planting nothing at all. Then I’ve got to work out where it ran out, which is not easy because it’s usually dark and cold and I just want to go home and weep,’ Mr Clarkson wrote.
He added that a driverless tractor would not make mistakes like this, and it would not get bored like he usually does.
Taking romance out of farming away
Mr Clarkson explained that the tractor includes a 156-horsepower diesel engine, which drives a generator that is then used to power the tracks.
Because the machine has tracks rather than wheels, it can turn in its own length and does less damage to the soil.
It can also pick up eight tonnes on the back and three on the front; it has a reserve fuel tank in its weight box, and using guidance from both American and EU satellites, it can position itself anywhere on the farm to within 2.5cm.
Farm manager Kaleb Cooper, however, does not share Mr Clarkson’s enthusiasm. In his opinion, driverless tractors will put him out of business.
Mr Clarkson explained: ‘Kaleb hates it. He says it’ll put him out of a job. I did point out, though, that if his contracting business had one, he could turn up at someone’s farm, set it off and then go to someone else’s farm with his normal tractor and get paid twice. Double dipping.’
The TV presenter and farmer explained that there are only 80 of the machines in the whole world. Each of them has a special name. Mr Clarkson’s tractor is called Dawn Mountain.
Mr Clarkson added that according to some people, even though AgBot appears to be impressive, it does take some of the ‘romance’ out of farming.
‘I’m sure they’re right. It does, in the same way that back in the 1920s the tractor took out some of the horse-based romance,’ Mr Clarkson wrote.
Will it work?
The Diddly Squat owner has also explained that before the driverless tractor started its unstoppable work, a company representative visited the farm and produced a map of what the farmland looks like underground.
‘For the first time we could see without using a digger or a shovel where the soil was meaty and good and where it was thin and pathetic. And now we have fed this information into the drill that will be towed behind the AgBot so that it knows, precisely, where to plant a lot of seeds and where to go easy.’
Mr Clarkson concluded his column by saying that he cannot be entirely sure if the machine will work as expected.
‘We aren’t going to know until the harvest and, even then, it’s impossible to be sure because if we get a good yield, that might be down to some other factor like the weather.
‘It’ll probably be ten years before we really know, and by then Rachel Reeves will be the new owner of Diddly Squat and it’ll be full of houses and wind turbines.’
The latest season of Clarkson’s Farm launched at the end of May. Click here to read more about season four of the much-loved farming show.
READ MORE: Clarkson’s Farm: Alan Townsend updates fans following heart surgery
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