My Lamborghini is bigger than yours

If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you’d end up with.

Jeremy Clarkson in his Lamborghini tractor on his farm in the Cotswolds. Picture: Emily Clarkson.

Back in 2008, I bought a thousand-acre spread in Oxfordshire and employed a local man to do the farmering. But last year he decided to retire, so I thought I’d take over myself. Many people were surprised by this, as to be a farmer you need to be a vet, an untangler of red tape, an agronomist, a mechanic, an entrepreneur, a gambler, a weather forecaster, a salesman, a labourer and an accountant. And I am none of those things.

Still, I was confident I’d manage. Man has been farming for 12,000 years, so I figured it must be in our DNA by now. You put seeds in the ground, weather happens and food grows. Easy. Unfortunately, though, I could not have picked a worse year to begin. We had the wettest planting season on record. Then there was the uncertainty about Brexit. And then, just as the sun came out, everyone was told to go indoors and stay there, which has had a catastrophic effect on prices.

Despite the problems, however, everything seems to be growing quite well. And as there’s so much to do, I’m not wandering around the house glugging wine from the bottle and watching reruns of Cash in the Attic. I’m a key worker. And better yet, I still have something to write about in this column: my tractor.

I could have bought a Fendt. Everyone says they’re the best. But obviously I wanted a Lamborghini, so that’s what I’ve got. An R8 270 DCR, to be precise. Lamborghini was a tractor-maker long before it made cars, but the business was sold ­– along with the rights to the name – in 1973. Today they’re made in Germany but they still look Lambo-mad. If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you’d end up with.

It’s huge. Even the front tyres are taller than me. You have to climb up a four-rung ladder to reach the door handle and then you climb up some more to get into the cab, and then up again to get into the seat. It’s so vast, in fact, that it wouldn’t fit into my barn. I therefore had to build a new one. Every single farmer type who’s seen it says the same thing: “That,” they intone with a rural tug on the flat cap, “is too big.”

The farmers are quite right. It is too big. Not only will it not fit into my barn, it won’t fit through the gate onto my driveway, so I’ve had to build a new driveway. It is also too powerful. The straight-six turbo diesel produces 1050Nm of torque. This means that when you attach a piece of equipment to its rear end it is immediately ripped to shreds.

Not that I ever try. I just know that if I did, you’d be reading about yet another farmer walking into Emergency with his severed arm in a bag. To put cultivators and rollers and drills on the back, I’ve therefore had to employ a man called Kaleb. Who also says my tractor’s too big. He reckons his Claas is better. We argue about this a lot.

I concede the Lambo is a bit complicated. There are four gear levers, for a total of 48 forward and reverse gears. Happily, there are only two brake pedals and two throttles. But I did count 164 buttons before I opened the armrest and found 24 more. None of them is labelled, which is a worry as all of them are designed to engage stuff that could tear off one of my arms.

I’d never been terrified at 40km/h before, but in that tractor I really was. Since then, I’ve driven it very slowly... into six gates, a hedge, a telegraph pole, another tractor and a shipping container. I think I’m right in saying that I have not completed a single job without having at least one crash. Doing a three-point turn at the end of a cultivating run? I’m bad at that; I always go through the fence.

I’m also very bad at “drilling”. This is the word we farmer types use for “planting”. Mainly this is because, to do it properly, you must install the type of computer NASA uses for calculating re-entry angles. That’s another aspect of farming I can’t do. Which is why some of my tramlines are 3m apart and some are in an entirely different county.

However, despite all this, when I’m trundling along with the aircon and radio on, I start to understand why Forrest Gump was happy, after all his adventures, to end up on a tractor mowing school playing fields. I’m especially happy when the engine is under load, because of the stupendous noise coming from the 18cm-wide exhaust pipe.

And when I finish a paddock and I climb down the ladder and sit on a fence I’ve just broken to enjoy a bottle of beer and a chicken sandwich, I can look back at the work I’ve done and feel a tiny bit proud. It’s not nursing or doctoring, but growing wheat and barley for food and beer is somehow a damn sight more rewarding than driving around corners while shouting.