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Jeremy Clarkson has revealed that the fourth series of Clarkson's Farm will document his attempts to revive the Great British pub with a farm to fork menu at its heart to support UK farmers.

Episodes one to four of the popular farming show landed on Prime Video earlier this week, and the whole season is due to focus on how Mr Clarkson came up with the idea to buy a pub in the Cotswolds, which he named the Farmer's Dog. 

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Clarkson opens the Farmer's Dog pub

With another brainstorming idea coming in the form of opening a pub, the former Top Gear host revealed why it was important to bring extra revenue to Diddly Squat Farm while supporting British farming at the same time.

"We were not allowed to have a restaurant on the site, but I still liked the idea of having a farming co-operative where all of the local farmers come together and we would pay proper money for their products, be they, pigs, cows, chickens," Mr Clarkson added.

A pub supporting British farmers

"So I thought the best thing I can do is buy one of the many, many, many pubs which are for sale round here, well, across the whole country.

"So I bought a pub which had a restaurant in it so that we could put the farming co-operative back together and then serve only British produce. 

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"I only wanted to serve food and drink that was grown or reared in the UK. We said no coffee, no ketchup, no Coca Cola. You can find people in Cornwall who grow tea and black pepper. 

"They are not part of the co-operative as such, but we are supporting British growers and rearers, and that was my goal."

Challenges of running a pub

The former Grand Tour host has revealed running a pub is a lot more harder than he originally thought.

"When you and I go in a pub, you ask for a pint, you get a pint, you sit down, maybe have some  pork scratchings or something, and it does not look that difficult," Mr Clarkson added.

"But there's an enormous amount of regulation on food hygiene and safety. And then you have got staffing.

"You have got to try and find chefs, you have got to find waitresses, and that's all very complicated. 

"And then it turned out that the pub I bought is in the 14^th century. So it is not on gas, there's a dribble of electricity and it gets virtually no water at all. 

"If you run a sink, you are out of water. And if you are dealing with more than three people a day, which we are, it completely does your head in."

And the finer details involved in running a pub can also be challenging.

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"Then we were trying to open it way too soon," the Diddly Squat farmer added.

"I wanted to try and capture the August Bank Holiday Weekend, which meant that we were trying to open it at the exact same time as I was doing the harvest, so I would spend all day trying desperately to get the pub open and dealing with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of problems.

"Where do you store the lavatory paper? And how do you keep the food chilled? And how do cellars work?

"And the length of the pipe from the cellar to the bar, and if it's more than 20 feet, you are losing 40 pints a week.

"Then you get home absolutely knackered, and you have to get into your tractor and do grain carting through the night. So it's not really a secret the stress was so bad."

A place to take a break and talk

And owning a pub has led Mr Clarkson working, perhaps, the most hours he has worked in his life.

"Twenty, twenty four sometimes, literally, round the clock," he said.

"I like hard work. If I do not do something constructive in a day I can't really get to sleep that night.

'Running a pub is more stressful than farming'

"But that was silly, and it did actually mess my heart up. It is very stressful running a pub.

"It is more stressful than running a farm. 

"You are on your own on the farm, which is why there's so much unhappiness in farming, because you are dealing with it all on your own.

"The benefit is you do not worry about other people, whereas with the pub, you've probably got 80 people working there. So it requires more attention running a pub.

"I called people who have got pubs, like myself who don't come from a pub background, and they all said, ‘Don't do it. Don't do it.

"It is too stressful, and there's absolutely no money in it. 

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"In fact, you lose money'. I ignored all of them, and they were absolutely right!"

Mr Clarkson said his vision for the pub was designed and created for farmers and a place where people could meet and talk.

"I wanted somewhere where farmers could go," he said.

"If it is raining on a Tuesday afternoon and they cannot work on their farm, they could come and have a pint and meet other farmers. 

"One day it was absolutely bucketing down, and it had been solidly for four months. And farmers were desperate.

"They simply could not get anything planted in thousands and thousands of acres of sodden fields. 

"I went to the pub with a few other local farmers and Kaleb [Cooper].

"We sat at the bar, and by sharing the problem over a pint, we found we were actually making one another laugh. You know that gallows humour that the British are extremely good at it, finding mirth in adversity. 

"When we came away afterwards, we only had a pint or two but by going to the pub, you just had a moment of levity in an otherwise troubled week, and it was a good thing. 

"It sounds almost twee to say it, but that's kind of what I wanted. 

"At the core of my pub is a place where you could go and just for an hour or so, forget your troubles, which is the point of a pub."

Importance of the great British pub

Mr Clarkson said the pub is a hugely important and symbolic place for communities which needs extra support from Government.

He added: "There's a lot of legislation that's completely unnecessary, and taxes. But it is the same for everybody in every business.

"Particularly in rural areas, the pub seems to have a more important role? 

"The pub is the hub.

"If you have a village, and as we know there's no village bobby anymore, there's no village doctor, because he's in a health centre 30 miles away and can't get to see him anyway, there's no village shop, as often as not, there's no village vicar.

"You tend to find that they share three or four parishes.

"If you lose the village pub, what exactly is a village? It's just a collection of houses. People massively overuse the word community these days, but there certainly isn't a community if  there's no hub to it, and the pub is the hub."

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