Clarkson's Farm (2021) s05e03 Episode Script

1
[soft folk music]
[Kaleb] I'm so excited.
[Jeremy] I know, you've been bouncing
around like a three-year-old
for a month over this.
- [Kaleb] Have you ever been?
- No!
[Kaleb] Oh, it's so good.
[music continues]
Did you really have your hair cut
this morning?
Seven o'clock this morning.
To go to an agricultural machinery show?
Well not necessarily,
I was getting my hair cut anyway.
It was falling every six weeks.
But then I thought, if I'm going,
I may as well book it
on the Wednesday in the morning,
have my hair done and go.
I've been to probably
fifty motor shows in my life,
in Detroit, Geneva, Tokyo,
London, Birmingham,
- and I've never had my hair cut to go.
- That's why you always look scruffy.
- [Jeremy] Lisa's gonna be furious.
- Why?
[Kaleb] Oh, 'cause you've got this.
I've nicked her car. She said last night:
"I've got to go to London tomorrow."
- [Kaleb] What's she driving then?
- So I said:
"Are you going on the train or driving?"
She said: "Well, no, I'm gonna drive."
And I was drawing breath to say:
"I need your car to go to Birmingham."
[Kaleb] You didn't have
it in you to say, did you?
- I just went, "Oh, OK."
- [Kaleb] And then you took her car!
Well, we left before she was up.
- [both laughing]
- So she's going to come out
[soft music]
[birds chirping]
[engine revving]
[soft music]
[Jeremy] Every January for a few days,
fields right across the country
have no farmers in them.
Because this is the time of year
when they go to Birmingham for LAMMA,
the annual farm machinery show.
[Jeremy] Look at the amount
of pickup trucks going to the NEC.
Now this is a proper Look at this
chap here, he's got it all worked out.
No styling happened
with that roof on his pickup.
[Kaleb] No, but it's designed to fit in
a lot of dead sheep.
[Jeremy] Exactly.
[rock music]
[Jeremy] Once inside the vast halls,
Kaleb became as excited
as I used to be at motor shows
when I was eight.
[Kaleb] Oh, look at the CR9!
That's where they
had the CR11 last year.
This is a smaller version of it.
I can't work out why they've got
This as a CR9-90.
I know, it says that.
[Kaleb] It's nice, isn't it? I like
the colour. Has it got black rims?
- [tractor dealer] Yes.
- Oh, look at that!
And it's got the blue round the outside.
That's cool that, hey? That's me.
That's a bit of me that.
- [Jeremy] What is?
- [Kaleb] That.
Well, look at it: blinged up.
[Jeremy] I, meanwhile,
felt like my sister used to feel
at motor shows when she was eight:
completely baffled by everything.
What's that?
This is a great start.
[Jeremy] A mower.
Nearly. It's a mulcher.
- Oh, is it?
- Yeah.
What's that?
[Jeremy] Erm Muck spreader?
No. That's a straw blower.
What's that there?
[Jeremy] Pile driver.
Log splitter.
What's that one over there then?
[Kaleb] It's a tedder.
- It's a what?
- [Kaleb] It's a tedder.
So you mow your grass, you come through
with a tedder, flips it back over.
- You see what I mean?
- [Jeremy] No.
[man] Kaleb, how are you doing?
- Are you well?
- Yeah, not bad, mate.
- Where is the old, er
- There he is.
Ah, you old sort! How're you diddling?
- [Kaleb] Are you all right?
- Yeah, not too bad.
Kaleb, just endlessly stopped
by big-boned men with stout shoes on.
Pauses only
to tell me things that make no sense.
[tense music]
[Jeremy] Later in the morning,
I lost my guide
[woman] It's nice to be able
to give people that opportunity
[Jeremy] because he'd been booked
to take part in some sort of
rural TED talk.
[Kaleb] Hello, everybody. I'm Kaleb.
Probably best known
as I'm on "Clarkson's Farm".
But of course I've got my own theatre
tour that I did beginning of the year.
Erm, also got three books out.
[Jeremy] As he humbly
introduced himself
Stuff on social media
[Jeremy] I walked around in a state
of complete confusion.
[experimental music]
What is that?
And what's that?
And that?
Oh look, a lunar rover.
See, this is what it's like
when you walk round without Kaleb.
It's like being in a I don't know,
a market in Cambodia where you just look
at all the things and think:
"Oh, is that a fish? Is it a plant?
I dunno."
[Jeremy] Eventually, I arrived in a hall
full of futuristic high-tech equipment,
where I expected to
be even more baffled.
But, once the salesman
got his teeth into me,
I became quite intrigued.
[salesman] Have you ever seen
something like this before?
[Jeremy chuckling] No. Er, what is it?
[salesman] It's a seeding
and weeding machine.
It's an autonomous vehicle,
electrical driven. It's, er, powered
- [Jeremy] I'm guessing solar.
- Powered by the solar, yeah.
In Denmark?
- [salesman] Solar.
- Solar?
What, on June 7th in 1981
there was a sunny day there.
[salesman] Exactly!
But what if there's no sunshine?
Which does happen.
It does actually run twenty-four seven.
It has a battery pack in the back,
so it's running in the night too.
[Jeremy] So then,
how's the weeding and seeding
[salesman] Basically,
this is a seeding machine,
it's a weeding machine,
and it's all done by GPS.
[Jeremy] God, how accurate is it?
Accuracy between 8 and 10 millimetres.
Oh my word. What's the phallus?
[salesman chuckling]
This one? That's the GSM antenna.
- [Jeremy] So what's that then?
- That's the GPS antenna.
And the last one here,
that is the rain gauge.
So if it suddenly starts raining,
let's say one millimetre of rain,
it will just stop the operation
to avoid damaging the crops.
And then you of course get a message back
saying, OK, it's stopped due to the rain.
- Oh, you can talk to it?
- [salesman] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you're looking on your phone
or your tablet, on an app,
then you can see, you know,
if it's running out of seed it will stop
and send a message back:
"Hey, Jeremy, I'm out of seeds."
So my recommendation
is to choose the high-value crop.
It could be onion
or beets or red beets or
Onions? Are onions high value?
I would say so, yeah.
[Jeremy] If you filled those up
with onions
[salesman] Yeah.
[Jeremy] How big a field would it do
before it ran out?
You can seed at least five hectares,
that's no problem.
So that's what? Twelve acres.
We're doing five hectares a day.
That's brilliant.
[Jeremy] Meanwhile,
over in the TED talk,
Kaleb was in full life-coach-guru mode.
[Kaleb] Dreams don't work unless you do.
I take that with me all the time.
And no matter what you do,
if you keep working hard, and again,
dreams don't work,
unless you can make that happen.
So I think actually believe in yourself
and actually just go "Yeah, you are good
enough" straight away from the get-go.
Don't ever believe that you're not.
And if you're not, it's fine,
you're just not meant to be doing
that certain thing.
[experimental music]
[Jeremy] Back in the future,
having been bewitched by a machine
that could plant crops
without the need for a tractor,
I'd now found a tractor
that had no need for a driver.
So this is probably
the first in the market
that is a fully autonomous tractor
that we can let go
night and day unattended.
- So it just runs?
- Runs night and day.
Set it off, go to bed,
get up in the morning, job done.
You set it up to drill?
[salesman] Yeah, cultivate.
Standard rear linkage.
So you've got
all your existing implements on.
Standard hydraulics. Front linkage.
Just everything that you need.
[Jeremy] How fast
will this one go along?
Is it just like a normal tractor speed?
Yeah, so nought to 12.6 km/h.
OK. So fast enough to do normal farming.
[salesman] Absolutely,
normal work, yeah.
- So it can do normal farming.
- [salesman] Yeah.
Without Kaleb.
A tractor with no aggravation.
Imagine that.
Oh, no Kaleb?
No Kaleb. Just imagine.
[epic music]
[Jeremy] My mind was now racing
with all sorts of new ideas.
Which, the following day,
I couldn't wait to share with Charlie.
Farming
does what it does year in and year out.
Yeah.
[Jeremy] We are reaching a point
where that's just not working anymore.
The climate's changing
and we have a truly idiotic government.
So, it's like beating your head
against a wall.
Idiotic government
and it never stops raining.
There's no point
doing what you do year in, year out.
The definition of idiocy
is doing the same thing
over and over again
- and expecting a different result.
- Yep.
We've now reached a point where farmers,
I think, have to say:
"We have to do this differently."
- Yeah.
- So
There it is.
- [Charlie] An Agbot?
- Yeah.
[chuckling] You're gonna have
a driverless tractor?
[Jeremy] I'm not a very good
tractor driver,
I've come to understand that
after five years.
I can't plough,
I can't cultivate, I can't drill,
I can't attach anything to it still.
Once that thing's plodding around
doing cultivating or drilling
or whatever job you've given it
[Charlie] Yeah.
[Jeremy] You can be getting on
with something else.
And it doesn't make mistakes.
[quietly] Unlike me.
Erm OK.
You have to mark out obstacles
in the field as well, presumably?
We haven't really got any obstacles
in our fields.
We don't have trees. We've got
one telegraph pole that I hit in
- There are five in that field.
- [Jeremy] Yeah.
Will it lift everything?
It looks quite compact.
Well, they must have written
what its lifting capabilities are.
Did you not ask?
No. I just thought
it looked really cool.
And, that brings me onto
seeding and weeding robot.
But that's gonna do the planting?
Ah, not of the onions and beetroot.
We don't grow onions and beetroot.
- We're growing onions and beetroot?
- Yeah.
Why onions and beetroot?
'Cause that's what this can do.
[Charlie] So, the tech does it,
so we're growing it?
I wanna see if it does it.
[soft rock music]
[Jeremy] While Charlie went off
to source this new kit,
I decided to go to the Netherlands
to look at the high-tech farming
that they're doing over there.
[music continues]
At first, this felt odd,
because normally, when I'm
on a road trip with a film crew,
I'm accompanied by Hammond and May,
who are also seasoned globetrotters.
This time, though, my companion wasn't.
Is the air like the
same here, in France?
Is it different?
Do you smell different, like
Do you know what I mean?
Like, is it dense? Is it
Is it different?
[Jeremy] No, it's not. It's the same.
It's gonna feel weird leaving England.
- We haven't left it yet.
- I know, but
You're still in Oxfordshire I think,
actually.
- I know, I think we are!
- You haven't even left Oxfordshire yet!
I know,
but that's what's going through my mind!
You know when we go over there
it's an hour ahead?
- Is it?
- Mm-hmm.
How?
- What?
- How?
It just is.
But how?
Apart from Portugal:
France, Spain, Italy, Germany,
all of Europe, really,
is an hour ahead of us.
Will I get jet lag?
No, it's only like when the clocks
go back and forwards in England.
Oh, OK.
[rock music]
[Jeremy] As "Ranulph Fiennes" and I
headed towards the Channel Tunnel,
I explained the thinking
behind our fact-finding mission.
[Jeremy] So, when I was at LAMMA,
I started to realise
we've got to get more tech.
- We've gotta get more modern.
- The future.
Well
Here's the deal.
I once did that programme
Who Do You Think You Are?,
where you trace your family tree.
[Kaleb] Mm-hmm.
And I discovered that I'm from
this family called the Kilners, OK?
My great-grandmother was a Kilner.
And they had this huge company
that made glass, huge, massive.
They had two factories, each of which
covered an area of 17 acres.
Holy moly.
- They're big.
- Wow.
If you bought anything in the world
that was in glass,
so a Gin Sling in Singapore,
a bottle of pills in Texas,
it almost certainly came in a bottle
made by the Kilners.
- Yeah.
- They were massive.
- Anyway, they didn't modernise.
- Right.
And all these little glassmakers
were coming along
- using modern technology.
- Yeah.
And before you knew it,
Kilners had gone 'cause they didn't
- They were stuck in the past.
- They were stuck in the past.
And they were wiped out.
And they were wiped out really quickly.
So I think Diddly Squat's
got to get a bit more techy.
- [Kaleb] Yeah.
- That's what I'm saying.
[Jeremy] And in Holland,
they're very fastidious in their
farming, as far as I can work out.
I was reading the other day they're
the most efficient farmers in Europe.
- Really?
- The Danes and the Dutch, yeah.
[upbeat rock music]
Twelve miles.
I've got butterflies.
- Have you?
- Yeah.
[rock music continues]
What number plate's that then?
- [Jeremy] Dutch.
- [Kaleb] Is it?
"NL"? What does it mean?
Netherlands.
[Kaleb] "P".
[Jeremy] Portugal.
Denmark, "D".
[Jeremy] Germany.
- For a "D"?
- Deutschland.
You'd have thought they'd put a
"G" on it for Germany, wouldn't you?
You'd have thought
they'd put a "G" on it for Germany.
Yeah, but they call themselves
Deutschland, remember.
Why?
- That's what they named themselves.
- 'Cause everyone hates Germany.
[rock music continues]
Leaving England!
Have you seen my passport?
Look how shiny it is.
- [Jeremy] Shinier than mine probably.
- Look!
[Jeremy] Oh, blue!
You've got a blue one!
Let's have a look at your passport.
Yeah, you look like a crim.
You're middle name's Wayne,
I didn't know that. How ridiculous.
- What do you mean "how ridiculous"?
- Well, it's just funny.
[tense music]
[Jeremy] Once we cleared
passport control,
Wayne started asking me
about the actual tunnel.
[Kaleb] How deep is it?
Erm
Well, it's un it's not
It's underneath the bottom of the sea,
if that makes sense?
So it's quite deep.
I mean, psychologically
you know you're under the sea,
but it's only the same
as being in a tunnel.
Well, you've never been in a tunnel,
have you? No.
No.
[chuckling] Oh God.
How many trains are down there?
I don't know.
- How many carriages does it pull?
- Don't know.
- How many cars does it fit on a carriage?
- I don't know.
When was the Titanic?
When was the Titanic?
OK, so this was after
This was obviously
- Well after.
- Yeah.
This was 1988.
[tense music continues]
- Holy shit, how wide is it?
- [Jeremy] The train's quite wide.
[Jeremy] And here we go,
we are mounting the train.
It's weird to think this is
the first train you've ever been on.
And I bet not many people
are able to say that the first train
they ever went on was a Eurostar train.
You can get out, stretch your legs.
I'm gonna stay here.
- What? You don't wanna get out?
- [Kaleb] No.
- You do look nervous.
- I fucking am!
How do they put oxygen down there?
- What do you mean?
- Well
How do they get oxygen
flowing through the
It just goes
It's not sealed at the end.
If there's two holes at either end,
it's full of air.
I know, but surely
you've gotta push the air down there?
- No.
- Air rises up.
No, it doesn't.
Air goes in any direction it wants.
And if you go so far under the sea,
air doesn't travel through water.
You're not. No, but either
end isn't under the water.
We're going into a hole
which is above the ground,
above the waterline
[voice fading out]
[voices fading in]
Let's say this is the sea, yes?
- The hole starts here
- Yeah.
And here, and goes down like this.
The air is only gonna fill here.
There's air in the tunnel, Kaleb.
I promise there's air.
You don't need scuba outfits to cope.
There will be air.
Ooh, we're moving.
Here we go.
Here we are.
[tense music]
[Jeremy] Luckily,
the tunnel didn't spring a leak
or run out of oxygen
on that particular journey.
And half an hour after setting off,
we were in France.
[Jeremy] You're abroad!
I'm out of England.
[chuckling] It feels weird, dunnit?
- [Jeremy] Well
- Just think five years ago, though.
I know, five years, you'd not been out
of Chipping Norton. Now look at you.
You're like James Bond.
[chuckling]
[tense music continues]
[Jeremy] We crossed
the border into Belgium
and eventually reached our
overnight halt in the city of Bruges.
Which I was keen for Kaleb to see.
[Kaleb] Oh wow.
[Jeremy] This is what abroad is like.
- Everywhere is like that.
- [Kaleb] That's very pretty, isn't it?
[Jeremy] Yeah. Abroad is pretty.
I thought you'd be
like Karl Pilkington coming abroad,
but you're not,
you're actually liking it.
Well, it's nice.
I dunno, it's the views, look at it.
[Jeremy] Yeah, it's really nice.
So they've actually got
some of Jesus's blood in there.
- [Kaleb] The actual blood?
- It's the only example in the world.
[Kaleb] How do they know it's his?
[Jeremy] Well, now, let's not get
bogged down with how they know things.
[Kaleb] I mean, it's like barred up.
[Jeremy] Well, it would be.
Imagine if you stole Jesus's blood.
[Kaleb] What'd it be worth?
[Jeremy] I think if you took it to
the market at Chipping Norton and said
"This is Jesus's blood",
they probably wouldn't believe you.
- They'd tell me to fuck off!
- [both laughing]
[Kaleb] Oh look!
[Jeremy] Now I like this bit here
where you can see down the canal, look.
That's really pretty.
[Kaleb] Wow.
[Jeremy] It's so beautifully lit,
isn't it?
[Kaleb] Oh, look.
Have they got crocodiles here?
[Jeremy laughing]
- [Kaleb] What?
- No, they don't have crocodiles here.
[soft rock music]
[Jeremy] The next morning,
we set off to the Dutch border
to meet our first high-tech farmer.
And I was very much
looking forward to this.
What he's doing
is very old-fashioned farming:
know your farm,
know every square inch of your farm,
but use modern technology
to get the best out of it.
I've got really excited
about this streamlining Diddly Squat.
- It needs it.
- It does.
We're busy fools at the moment.
That's a good way of putting it.
Oh I know why.
I know why we're busy fools.
- Why? 'Cause of me? Is it me?
- Yeah.
Yeah, I thought it might be me.
Well, I wanted to try
lots of different types of farming
Agreed, but you wake up and go:
- "I know, today pigs."
- Yes.
"And we're gonna put 'em in the furthest
place on the farm away from the farm."
Yeah, that was a mistake. And
they've eaten and killed all the trees.
"Oh no, what about goats?
Let's get some goats.
- Yeah. Now, where are we gonna put them?"
- Well, I like the goats.
"We'll move them around
and fence it off an area
to build that shelter
three thousand times a year."
But, they're great animals.
"I know what we're gonna do now.
I want chickens in that wood over there,
but I don't wanna see their huts so put
them on the other side of the fence."
Yeah, I did do that.
"But we'll only get fifty and
have them all in three different pens."
- Yeah, we did do that.
- "That's not a bad idea that."
[chuckling] I did do that!
Well, they're three different types.
They can still run together.
[soft rock music]
[Jeremy] On the way,
we stopped to fill up.
Well, let's have some Super 98.
[Kaleb] Super, yeah?
[Jeremy] And as the petrol station
had a chip van,
I introduced Kaleb
to Belgium's national dish.
'Cause the French fry
was invented in Belgium.
[Kaleb] Was it?
[Jeremy] Yeah. You're never more
than six feet from a bag of chips.
Hi, mate. What are they?
- [waiter] Meatballs.
- [Kaleb] Meatballs?
- [cook] Cow.
- Cow?
- [Kaleb] Beef.
- [Jeremy] Beef.
[Kaleb] Oh, OK, yeah.
I'll have one of those
and a bag of chips.
- And then you've gotta put mayonnaise on.
- [Kaleb] Why?
[Jeremy] You've seen Pulp Fiction.
"Pop picture"? What do you mean?
Pulp Fiction.
- What do you mean?
- [laughing] Oh God.
[Kaleb] Thank you very much.
- [Kaleb sighing with pleasure]
- Meatballs.
[Kaleb] Thank you very much.
[Jeremy chuckling]
Thank you. Oh no, I've gotta pay you.
How much is it?
It's, er
You know your earlobes
are completely see-through?
[both chuckling]
[soft rock music]
[Jeremy] After "Wayne Ramsay"
had given his verdict on the meatballs,
we reached our first farm,
which straddles
the Belgian and Dutch border.
And there, we met its gigantic owner,
potato farmer Jacob van den Borne.
I told you everyone in Holland was tall.
He's very tall. I feel very short now.
- Yeah.
- Even taller than you!
[music continues]
[Jeremy] Jacob's farm
is about the same size as Diddly Squat,
but judging by the amount of equipment
he has in his city-sized sheds
[Jeremy] Jesus!
[Kaleb] It's unbelievable.
[Jeremy] it was clear he was more
successful at turning his acres into cash
than we were.
[Kaleb] You've got parking spaces
in your sheds for your tractors!
[Jeremy] And look at those trailers.
Look at them.
[Kaleb] The sprayers, though,
that's unbelievable.
That's your chemical sprayer
and that's your liquid fert.
Er, actually, it's a twin-tank system.
[Kaleb] Oh wow, look at that.
- So we do nine thousand litres of
- Unbelievable!
It's two sprayers in one, Kaleb!
Oh wow!
- [Jacob] So we can do two sprays
- Look at his little face!
- in one go.
- That's unbelievable!
[Jeremy] You're going to need
a trolley for your cock.
[Kaleb chuckling]
[Jacob] So this is variable rate.
The tyres' inflating system.
[Jeremy] So you can let the tyres down
and pump them up
while you're driving along?
[Jacob] Actually all my tractors,
most of them,
also have inflating tyres.
[Jeremy] OK, if everything in here
is half a million euros,
which it probably is,
except for the stuff that's more
There's ten million quid in this shed?
- [Jeremy] Twenty million euros?
- [Jacob] In here?
- [Kaleb] Well, yeah.
- [Jacob] Oh yeah.
[Kaleb chuckling]
[Jacob] And again, a two-tank system.
And look, I'm gonna be boring,
I'm gonna talk about this floor.
This floor is designed so that air
can come up from underneath it.
So if you store potatoes
or whatever you want to store on it,
they're ventilated from underneath.
[whispering] How much does that cost?
[Kaleb] I can smell the potatoes now.
[Jacob] This is what our storage room
looks like.
[Kaleb] Holy shit!
[Jeremy] Jesus H Christ.
[Kaleb] Shall we have a
game of football, or three?
[Jacob] This shed can hold 6,500 tonnes
from the 32,000 tonnes of potatoes
that we can store in total.
[Kaleb] Fucking hell.
[Jeremy] You know we could put
all our barns in this barn.
- [Kaleb] I know.
- [Jeremy] And my house.
- Yeah, and all of Chadlington.
- [Jeremy chuckling]
- [Jeremy] So, another Fendt?
- [Kaleb] Yeah.
I should explain. We keep seeing Fendts,
lots of Fendts, huge Fendts.
They really are the sort of
most expensive tractors you can buy.
They're like
high-end Mercedes-Benz tractors.
And he's got three in every shed!
All from that.
'Cause he's adopting the future.
[Jeremy] Unsurprisingly, Jacob also has
one other piece of equipment.
I had chips for breakfast.
Chips again. Oh, thank you very much.
[Jeremy] After Kaleb had finished
his second breakfast,
Jacob then explained
how he'd made his farm so successful.
And when I went in my fields,
when I started this,
I took over the farm
from my father in 2006,
I went to one field
and I harvested
30 tonnes on one spot of potatoes.
The other part, same field, same seed,
everything the same,
90 tonnes.
That's a difference of 60 tonnes
in one field.
And what was causing that?
[Jacob] And that's what we're gonna
figure out.
So in 2009
we then started precision farming.
A lot of people talk about
[voice fading out]
[Jeremy] All farmers like to know
the quality of their soil.
But Jacob takes this
job to another level
by using specially developed equipment
to give him ultra-precise readings
from under the ground.
So everything in the soil that conducts,
so organic matter,
that's water, that's nutrients,
every part in the
soil that is conducting
is giving me the data back.
Do the scan, process that data
and you'll get that map.
- Oh, is that a field?
- That's one of my fields.
[Jacob] The red spots there
are more conducting
and therefore bigger in yield.
[Jeremy] Once he knows where the weakest
and strongest patches of soil are,
Jacob can then programme his tractors
to fertilise and seed
each part of the field
according to its need.
My tractors I programme to be
automatically detecting soil.
Then, they do the job, and at the end,
when my driver drives off the field,
the tractor recognises,
"Oh, you're done!"
So you tell the tractor
to do different things
in different parts of the field,
the same field?
Yeah.
Seeding, fertilising,
that's all "variable rate".
[Jeremy] And when it comes
to tackling unwanted weeds,
he doesn't carpet bomb the field
with herbicides like we do.
Instead, he uses his high-tech maps
to do precision spraying.
We can actually detect those spots
and actually only kill those weeds
without touching the rest.
So they're spraying, see, it just goes
and when it sees a weed, "choo".
That's future.
So if you're not spraying
the chemicals onto the crop
So you will have a higher yield.
And then you're saving maybe four
grand a year on our herbicide bills.
[Jeremy] So you're not wasting money
on any
not even a square metre of the field.
- This is NASA levels.
- [Jacob] Reduce that.
[Jeremy] And Jacob's methods don't stop
at soil mapping and programmable tractors
because he now uses drones
to spray the fields.
If you look into the future
in fifty years or something,
we will have tractors,
but a lot of it will also be drones.
[Jeremy] And he had to deploy
some admirable cunning
to get round some very strict EU laws.
[Jacob] There was only one problem,
Jeremy.
It's not allowed to
fly drones in Europe.
It's not allowed to
fly them by computer,
it's not allowed to let them swarm
and let them work together.
There is actually
You cannot do anything.
So did you know what we did?
I started an airport.
- What?
- Yeah.
I can fly whatever I want
as high as I want.
What, you've made your farm an airport?
[chuckling] I made my farm an airport!
That is so cool.
[soft rock music]
[Jeremy] Outside, he offered
to demonstrate his spraying drone,
which was not what you'd call small.
[Jeremy] Jesus!
If you crash-landed that
on a playground
Yeah, you'd be
- [Jeremy] It would be on the news.
- [Kaleb chuckling]
[Jeremy] How much spray does it?
[Jacob] So we have a tank of 50 litres.
And how much would this field need?
And that will be one hectare
and we can do that in 8 minutes.
I normally spray about 125 to 150 litres
a hectare.
So you could programme it
to come back to the yard,
you just top it up and it goes back out
to whatever field you're doing.
I don't wanna do that, though.
I know, 'cause you
like driving tractors.
Yeah.
But as a man who's about
to embrace the future,
I need to be looking at this shit.
[Jeremy] Once its tank
had been filled with weed killer,
Jacob punched in all the information
it would need for its spraying flight.
[Jeremy] Lots of codes.
[Jacob] How many litres
are we gonna spray,
which pressure, which droplet size.
[engine revving]
[futuristic techno music]
And it's spraying now. See?
[Jeremy] Oh wow!
[Jacob] So it's now doing the first run.
Stops at the headland.
Makes the turn.
[music continues]
- [Jeremy] I'm amazed.
- [Jacob] And I'm not
- It's doing it by itself.
- You're not touching anything.
[music continues]
[Jeremy] Bloody hell!
I'm just so embarrassed by our drone.
Which is just pathetic.
[Jacob] This is actually
how 80% percent of the world
- is going to spray their crops.
- Has to.
Come on, Kaleb, that is impressive.
[Kaleb] And if it's really hot
on a summer's day, look, I can't
I'm ginger,
I can't stand outside and hold that.
- I need to be in a cab.
- [Jacob] You can sit in your car.
- You can sit in the car.
- [Jeremy] Sit in your car.
If I apply to have an airport
at Diddly Squat,
there will be one objection from him.
[all laughing]
So he's done that field in five minutes.
And then he'll come and land
where he started?
[Jacob] Automatic landing.
[engine revving]
Fucking hell, Kaleb, that is impressive.
- And also, think how quiet that is.
- [Kaleb] My tractor's quiet.
Not as quiet as that.
[Jeremy] Reluctant though he was about
welcoming in the new world order,
as we drove away,
Kaleb had to give Jacob his due.
- That's serious farming.
- Mmm.
- Yeah, that man was a serious farmer.
- He was a serious farmer.
[Jeremy] If he's got 32,000 tonnes
of potatoes a year
at £250 a tonne,
that's £8 million
worth of potatoes every year.
Yeah.
- I mean, the kit was just ridiculous.
- Yeah.
There's so much information
that's gone into my mind.
[Jeremy] So, having introduced Kaleb
to some brilliant Dutch farming,
I decided,
as we headed towards our overnight halt,
to introduce him
to some brilliant Dutch music.
["Radar Love" by Golden Earring playing]
Listen to that bass.
[Kaleb humming]
I've been driving all night
My hands wet on the wheel ♪
It's got that country feel to it.
There's a voice in my head ♪
[Jeremy singing along]
That drives my heel ♪
It's my baby calling says
"I need you here" ♪
And it's a half past four
and I'm shifting gear ♪
[Kaleb chuckling]
Come on!
When she is lonely
And the longing gets too much ♪
She sends a cable
Coming in from above ♪
Don't need no phone at all ♪
- We've got a thing and that's called ♪
- [Jeremy] Radar love ♪
We've got a wave in the air
Radar love ♪
[Kaleb] Bonjour, monsieur.
Je m'appelle Kaleb.
[Jeremy] You what?
[Kaleb] Bonjour, monsieur.
Je m'appelle Kaleb.
- [Jeremy] Ooh!
- Do you know I learnt that?
[Jeremy] The following morning,
we headed over to our next location.
[cow mooing]
And it was mind-boggling.
[upbeat music]
Because it's a dairy farm.
On water.
Slap bang in the middle of Rotterdam.
[rock music]
- [Kaleb] Hello, hello.
- [Jeremy] How are you?
- [Kaleb] How are you?
- Welcome. Peter. Nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you.
- [Jeremy] Good to meet you too.
Nice to meet you.
Very welcome at our farm.
[Kaleb] This is wicked!
It's the only time
I've ever seen him smile in a city.
[laughing]
[Jeremy] The floating farm
is the brainchild of Peter van Wingerden
and his wife Minke.
And although it's in a city,
don't for one minute think
that it's some kind
of industrial battery-farm operation.
Sea cows?
[Peter] Yeah, correct, sea cows, yeah.
[Jeremy] The cows are free
to wander about in the feeding area
or go ashore for a graze.
And as for milking,
they keep their own timetable.
- Is that walking in to be milked then?
- [Peter] Yeah.
So the cow knows when it wants
to be milked and just walks in there?
[Peter] Absolutely.
So this is completely automated?
You can just go home and watch TV?
[Peter] Exactly. And we have
many cameras over here as well,
so we measure everything: temperature,
wind speed, relative humidity,
if the cow's lying down,
if she's standing up,
if she's eating,
if she's inside or outside,
because it's what we call a free-range
cow, so she can decide herself.
- [Jeremy] How many are there?
- About thirty.
- Thirty?
- [Peter] Yeah.
[Jeremy] Although the farm covers
less than an acre,
its output is staggering.
On the floor below, the milk
is pasteurised or made into butter.
And then below that
[Jeremy] A cheesery?
An underwater cheesery.
How much concrete
have they got in this country?
How does it stay afloat?
Is this floating
or are you mounted to the?
No, it's completely floating.
- It's floating?
- It's completely floating.
So we are now three metres
below the sea level.
Which keeps it cool?
[Peter] The temperature's
completely controlled.
[Jeremy] But even more impressive
is the way this farm and the city
work together.
When Peter goes out delivering
his dairy produce,
he comes back with brewer's grain
from the breweries
and yesterday's unsold stale bread
from the shops.
None of which costs him a penny.
And then that is made
into food for the cows.
[Peter] Look at that.
[Jeremy] And this is what?
A day old? Two days?
[Peter] We were wasting so much bread,
and now it comes to us.
[Jeremy] 'Cause the amount of waste
in a city, when you think.
- [Peter] It's unbelievable.
- [Jeremy] Organic waste.
[Jeremy] As for the grass
that's used to feed the cows,
that comes from a very clever source.
[Jeremy] So when they cut the grass
in the football stadium,
you take the clippings?
[Peter] Yeah, from the main pitch.
The best grass you can get.
[Kaleb] They put seaweed on it
and everything to make it look green,
so therefore the nutrients of that grass
must be insane.
- Yeah, it's really good.
- [Kaleb] Wow.
And 'cause you're here you can just
go and grab it all each morning and
Exactly.
So this is the circularity of the city.
[rock music]
[Jeremy] And this circular efficiency
goes even further,
because Peter has a robot
that collects all the manure
and that manure is then used
to make drinking water for the cows.
[Peter] We take sea water out as well.
- Oh, you've got a desalination plant?
- This is our desalination.
And it goes to this
side of the membrane.
And we heat up
the other side of the membrane
by using the cow dung.
So if you put cow dung in this bin,
we put sea water in here,
it heats up to 35, 40 degrees,
you can feel it over here.
- So we have
- So they're drinking sea water?
Yeah, correct.
[Jeremy] And you use
their manure to desalinate it?
[Peter] Correct.
We're using and reusing everything.
Organic waste from the city
to turn it into proteins again.
So, yes, this is the future of farming.
Fuck! Fuck!
This is just f
My mind is in overdrive right now.
It's about to blow up.
[soft orchestral music]
[Jeremy] Outside, sitting by the solar
panels that power the whole operation,
Peter then showed us
the building materials
he was also making out of the manure.
[Jeremy] So what do you do with this?
[Peter] So this could be an inside wall.
- [Jeremy] Insulation?
- Insulation, yeah.
- So you could have your house insulated.
- [Peter] Yeah.
Your house would be
literally full of shit.
Correct.
- People say mine is anyway.
- [Kaleb] It is.
[Jeremy] I'm rarely amazed.
Lamborghini Revuelto amazed me
and that's been it
for the last year or so.
And that's taking
virtually nothing from the environment.
- [Peter] Exactly.
- [Kaleb] And it's giving more back!
[Peter] It's an almost zero footprint.
[Kaleb] It's amazing.
We actually want to reduce food losses.
Because food losses is dramatic
in the world.
We're losing so much food.
About 30% of all food produced
is lost in the world,
while still
one billion people doesn't have food.
So we need to change this.
And this can only be done
if you produce local.
So what we've established
is Diddly Squat is in the wrong location
because it's in the countryside.
And it's not floating.
It's where there are
fields that's wrong!
[all chuckling]
[soft rock music]
[Jeremy] Obviously, I couldn't relocate
Diddly Squat to the River Thames.
But spending time
with these ingenious Dutch farmers
had convinced me
that if we're going to survive,
we absolutely had to modernise.
[engine revving]
[Alan] This is the remote-controlled toy
you always wanted.
[Jeremy] Oh my God!
[Kaleb] What is that?
We have a problem.
[indistinct chatter]
[Charlie] Are they gonna stay?
[Jeremy] I don't know.
- [Alan] Been a long time! I'm back, mate!
- Alan!
- You're back!
- That's a bit of a man hug, ain't it!
[rock music]