Where does our food come from, and what challenges do the people who grow and raise the food face? TV personality Jeremy Clarkson sought to answer those questions in the show Clarkson’s Farm, which debuted in 2021.
This British documentary series that follows Jeremy Clarkson’s journey as he attempts to run his 1,000-acre farm in the Cotswolds. The show’s brutally realistic portrayal of farming challenges and its success in raising awareness of the British farming industry, and farming across the world.
Let’s dive into its importance.
Why is Clarkson’s Farm Important?
Clarkson’s Farm shines a light on the often overlooked challenges of farming, presenting the difficulties farmers face due to weather, sustainability, and bureaucracy in a humorous yet realistic manner.
It pulls no punches, and gets you to understand and empathize with the real human beings who put the food on your plates. In many ways, each episode you watch on the farm contains life and death stakes that carry a vested interest for the audience.
If we continue to make life miserable for farmers, we’ll soon inherit a world without food.
Now in its third season, I cannot think of a series that makes you actually feel as much as life on this farm. Every episode has its laughs, but the honest reality of the people who are bringing food to the world are underpaid, overworked, and facing a changing climate that’s made life even harder.
You leave with an urgency to find ways to help and to buy locally.
The show also humanizes the industry, fostering appreciation for the hard work of people who help Clarkson run the farm, like Kaleb, Gerald, and Charlie.
Just seeing the people who make mass food production possible changes our detached attitude from piling produce in your cart at the grocery store.
So why else am I saying this is the most important show on TV?
As human beings, with an endless news cycle and a a lot of doom and gloom, we often lose sight of the very meaning on life. And I think that meaning lies within the each hour of life on the farm.
The meaning of life to me is death.
As you watch the passing of the seasons, you see the endless cycle that we call life on this planet. Things grow, they get harvested, and they feed the ecosystem and people.
For me, our time on this earth is the same. We’re born, we experience the season of our lives, and hopefully our impact fosters the nourishment of others and leaves this place better than the way we found it.
If that’s the goal, then a show about how we can do a small part to make life better, is important and necessary.
Let’s face it, life can be unkind, cruel, and seem pointless. It is easy to become nihilistic when terrible things happen all over the globe.
Making the world a better place sounds like an insurmountable goal, but acting on a small scale, within our community, and helping the people around us, feels like something we can do every day in our lives and still be happy.
We’re not all cultivating food, but we are cultivating a life worth living. A life that makes death much less sad, because at the end we’ve helped make the world a more fertile and inviting place through the good work we did during our seasons on earth.
That’s what happens on this farm, and it’s a lesson I think we all need to take into account.
And it’s why I believe it’s the most important show on television.Of course, aside from all this, the show has sparked vital conversations about food production, environmental practices, and supporting farmers. Additionally, it simply provides quality entertainment, which can be hard to come by in the present world.
And that in and of itself is incredibly important for giving us lived worth living.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Author: Jason Hellerman
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
