I was coming into the very southwest of England, into the county called Cornwall, where there was a lot I wanted to see and do, including a visit to farmer I’d been looking forward to meeting here named Jeremy Oatey. Before going to the airport, a colleague at the Canola Council of Canada asked me the kind of favour any Canadian farmer might have asked too.
“Find out what he thinks of Jeremy Clarkson,” I was asked.
Clarkson, as most of us know, made a career out of testing and talking about fast cars on TV programs Top Gear and The Grand Tour. In a new series, called Clarkson’s Farm, he takes up farming — with a lot of help.
Clarkson gets into the challenge of farming as it relates to logistics, environment, pests, economics, regulations and more, and his show has been a hit on Canadian farms. And when I ask Oatey, he assures me U.K. farmers like it, too. People there say farmers are “whingers,” Oatey says, so Clarkson’s “telling it as it is” scores with farmers and is why the National Farmers Union named him “Farming Champion of the Year” in 2021.
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For me, though, I was more inspired by Jeremy Oatey, a farmer from Torpoint, Cornwall.
On the ground
Cornwall is one of the poorest counties in England. The economy is largely based on tourism, rounded out by primary industries — a few farms, a few fishing boats. The tin mines that made Cornwall famous are long gone. Some cities have other industries. Falmouth is attractive and has a couple of businesses that build and restore luxury yachts. St. Ives is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, with beaches, surf, pubs and hundreds of holiday apartments.
When in St. Ives, I wonder why my ancestors left. Then I look again at downtrodden towns like Redruth and it makes more sense. Bigger opportunities were elsewhere. However, Jeremy Oatey showed me again that people with ambition to farm and an open mind can succeed anywhere.
Oatey chose to farm. He didn’t inherit a farm. He came into farming with education and farm management experience, and he connected with experts to take full advantage of opportunities to improve profits and reduce risk. Success in farming is not based so much on location, but on adapting to the unique advantages that each location presents.
The Cornwall town of Torpoint is across the Tamar River from Plymouth, where the Mayflower and its Pilgrims set sail for the American coast in 1620. And just outside Torpoint is the 300-year-old majestic grey behemoth, Antony House.
Here, Tremayne and Charlotte Carew Pole and their children reside in the family estate, the sort of house and grounds where — to give you a sense of its grandeur — Disney filmed its 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland.
Also on the manor grounds is Jupiter Point, a launch site for the D-Day invasion in 1944. In fact, from Jupiter Point I could throw a stone to the Brecon in permanent wet-dock in the middle of the river. Royal Navy recruits spend their first night on the Brecon to get a taste of life aboard ship.
But to Country Guide readers, more interesting than all of this is the 1,000-acre working farm.
I was on a three-week tour of Cornwall, homeland of my ancestors the Whetters and the Harrys.On April 13, I boarded the Number 12 double-decker bus at the town of Stratton — Harry territory — destined for Torpoint. I disembarked in nearby Saltash at 9:23 a.m., and two minutes later saw a Ford Ranger Wildtrak pull up. That is when I met Oatey for the first time.
The pickup was spotless. So was Oatey. He is slightly taller, thinner and older than me, but not by much in any respect, with a red striped shirt, grey polar fleece vest, blue slacks and brown leather boots. He pays me a respectful greeting. A British greeting. Not the boisterous “Welcome to Canada!” I might deliver, followed by a generous and detailed two-hour tour of his remarkably diverse farming operation.
Cornwall was having a wet stretch and Oatey was a month behind planting spring barley. “This has been our wettest 18 months in 150 years,” he told me. You could tell. Crops were stressed. Low areas had standing water. Fields were streaked with muddy tracks.
Cornwall’s roads are nuts. Most back roads are 1.5 cars wide, crowded between eight-foot hedges. You can’t see who or what is coming around the corner — bus, tractor, sheep, hiker — and if you meet an oncoming vehicle, one of you has to back up to a passing bulge.
Oatey drove me out of Saltash and along these back roads to his home farm. We pulled up to a yellow steel shed in a tight cluster of other farm buildings. Not much open space in these yards. “I don’t know about you, but I could murder a coffee about now,” Oatey said and we got out of the truck and moved into the farm boardroom.
While the farmer version of George Clooney made me a Nescafe, I looked at the plaque for his “Arable farmer of the year” award, which he received from Farmers Weekly in 2013.
I had connected with Oatey through Ruth Wills, a farm media specialist and freelancer with Farmers Weekly, the popular British farm magazine. I told Wills I was headed to Cornwall and she gave me Oatey’s name and email, and he quickly replied “yes” to my request for a visit.
Oatey has a title — managing director — of Agricola Growers, the farm corporation he started with his wife, Sarah, in 2004. It is, like most farms, a family operation. Their daughter Elizabeth runs the vegetable peeling business. Their son William is operations manager for the “combinable” crops business — wheat, barley and oilseed rape. They have two other managers: Allan oversees field production of potatoes, onions and daffodils and Rosalie is the agronomist.
In a country as old as England, Oatey is, somewhat surprisingly, a first-generation farmer. Farming was, however, familiar to him. His father worked as an agricultural technical specialist, advising on farm management, fertilizers and agronomy all across Cornwall. Charlie Ireland, the farm advisor for Jeremy Clarkson on the reality TV show Clarkson’s Farm, has basically the same job.
Oatey always wanted to “go farming,” he says. After high school, he worked on a dairy farm for a year then went to agricultural college. From there, he worked for a farm management company. Later, while working as a farm manager for a private landowner, opportunity struck. Antony House asked the landowner to also run their farm. “He felt he was too close to retiring to take it on,” Oatey says, “so he suggested they offer it to me, which they did.”
In the intervening years, Agricola has expanded to 4,000 acres and 12 landlords. The corporation doesn’t own any land. Land rents are around £130 per acre for longer-term tenanted land and seasonal rents to plant potatoes can be £325-350 per acre. Land prices in the area are £7,500 to £15,000 an acre. (At the time of writing, one British pound was worth $1.75 Cdn.) A large proportion of Oatey’s land is farmed on a share basis with the landowner.
Because I work for the Canola Council of Canada, I asked a lot of questions about oilseed rape production. OSR is a yellow-flowered brassica napus crop that produces oil basically identical to Canadian canola.
OSR is primarily a winter crop. Oatey plants the last week of August or first week of September, and harvests 11 months later. Good yields are around four tonnes per hectare, or just over 70 bushels per acre. “We can generally do quite well with OSR, but last year had one to 1.5 tonnes per hectare taken off the yield because of hail and heavy rain,” he says.
Oatey grows OSR every sixth year. He wants at least a three-year break because of clubroot, stem canker (blackleg) and sclerotinia stem rot.
The farm spreads granular phosphorus and potassium fertilizer on a variable rate basis, and applies nitrogen in liquid form at the cotyledon stage and again in the spring. They use Greenseeker to assess the nitrogen need and apply variable rate. Soil organic matter is 3.2 to eight per cent across the farm. Land gets lots of manure from their livestock operations and compost from their onion-peeling business. (More on that in a bit.)
OSR senesces naturally with the July heat and they straight combine at eight per cent moisture with two John Deere T560i Hillmasters.
With high input costs and such a long season, OSR can be a risky crop. “Farmers have to spend two thirds of the input costs before they know they’ll have a crop,” Oatey says. As of April, the farm had made three fungicide applications and would soon apply a fourth before petal drop.
Agricola grew four OSR cultivars in 2024: Aurelia and Annika from Limagrain, DK Exposé from Bayer and Matrix CL from DSV. “We usually sow a mix of conventional and hybrid varieties but are moving to mainly hybrids now as they seem faster establishing,” Oatey says. “Where we have charlock issues we use a Clearfield variety.” Charlock is a mustard weed. Herbicide-tolerant systems based on GM traits are not allowed in the U.K. or most of Europe.
Europe, including the U.K., also banned neonicotinoid seed treatments — products widely used to protect OSR from flea beetles. This dramatically reduced OSR acres in the U.K., Oatey says, “but stem flea beetles have not been as bad around Antony.”
Oatey also shared, “We’re using insect pesticide less and less, and it seems the less we use, the less we need,” he says. “We feel that insecticide affects the beneficial insects as well as the pests. If we can leave that environment undisturbed, we will.” They will, however, spray insecticide when necessary. Pesticide use is not a decision U.K. farmers are allowed to make on their own.
The schemes
U.K. farmers have quite a few rules when it comes to pesticide and fertilizer application. The pesticide industry established the BASIS program to set professional qualifications for application of agricultural pesticides. FACTS is a sister program for nutrient management. “To spray anything on a crop, farmers need sign off by a certified agronomist,” Oatey says. Rosalie helps the farm make quick pesticide and fertilizer decisions.
The U.K. government’s Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) has dozens of schemes that pay farmers to protect soils and wetlands, plant crops for birds and insects, and protect or plant trees and hedgerows. Agricola participates in a few of them.
For one example, the farm planted fields to legume fallow to improve soil and provide habitat for pollinators. After the crop flowers, they “top it” to prevent seed set then leave it. It can’t be grazed. The scheme pays £600 per acre per year. The farm commits to one or two years, then can put the field back into annual crops.
Some schemes have had “slightly perverse effects,” Oatey says. One that paid £240 per acre per year to convert farmland to permanent cover for birds and pollinators had landowners converting all their land, taking it out of farm production. It seemed like the right business choice when land rent is £130. “So the government limited that scheme to 25 per cent of land holdings,” Oatey says.
Impressively, though, farmers and industry leaders created Red Tractor two decades ago to restore consumer confidence in British agri-food. It came on the heels of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow,” crisis in the cattle herd. Red Tractor sets standards and uses independent assessors to make sure the 50,000 participating farmers meet those standards. (The U.K. has about 110,000 farmers.) “This provides assurance to consumers that Red Tractor food and drink is safe, traceable to British farms, and is farmed with care,” says a Red Tractor spokesperson.
I asked what farmers get from the scheme. “Red Tractor provides them with access to multiple markets while preventing them being subjected to multiple assessments and differing standards,” the spokesperson says. “Additionally, the U.K. government’s Food Standards Agency (responsible for food safety) recognizes Red Tractor, meaning farming members benefit from fewer government inspections.”
Ruth Wills says participating farmers are “sort of” paid more because they have more markets for their produce. “You are more limited if you aren’t in the Red Tractor scheme,” she says. “There has been a lot of research recently about whether consumers actually take any notice of the logo. Results mostly point to no. The products aren’t more expensive because of the logo and the prices people pay in the supermarket don’t trickle down to farm level.”
Oatey says Red Tractor may be optional, “but if you want to sell something direct to customers, you’ve got to have it.” However, he says U.K. farmers think they’re held to higher standards than farmers from other countries that export into the U.K. Oatey says the National Farmers Union is reviewing the scheme to make sure “it is relevant to food safety and not a case of mission creep,” he says. “The results are widely anticipated. Farmers are starting to push back.”
Working the schemes
Agricola participates in Red Tractor because the farm sells a lot of product directly to food processors. Oatey delivers OSR by truck to the ADM oilseed processing facility in Erith, southeast of London. He sells through a farmer-run rapeseed co-operative. “The co-op can often pull from a large area, so it can agree to sell a fixed tonnage knowing that its members can supply it, even if one farmer has trouble,” he says. “The co-op lowers supply risk.”
He grows Maris Otter, a 1960s malt barley variety, for Cornwall’s St. Austell Brewery, about 60 km from the farm. They use that malt for Tribute, the brewery’s signature ale.
The farm also grows potatoes and onions for the county’s traditional pasties, and Agricola, through its side business HF Produce Limited, cleans potatoes and peels onions for five Cornish pasty bakeries.
The farm also grows oats for human consumption, peas for livestock feed, and 180 acres of daffodils. It harvests half its daffodils to sell as cut flowers in U.K. and European supermarkets and half as bulbs sold in the U.S. Agricola harvests bulbs every two years but one planting produces five years of cut flowers.
Finally, Agricola has livestock — 1,400 breeding ewes and 150 cattle. It finishes cattle for Tesco’s, a large U.K. grocery chain, and for McDonald’s. Most of the herd are Angus-cross. They also have a small herd of Devon cattle that produce smaller carcasses and dark-coloured beef sold to specialty butchers.
But Oatey always has an eye open for opportunity. I think back to Clarkson, but Oatey changes the topic to something even more incredible.
To put the finishing touches on this massively diverse farm operation, Oatey converted one “inconvenient” field to a fenced dog-walking park. People pay £6 per half hour. They book online and get a code to access the park for their time slot.
“It runs itself,” he says. “I can’t believe it really.”
