Jeremy Clarkson‘s Diddly Squat Farm is targeted by cattle thieves who stole eleven of his sheep.
Police are investigating the theft on the Cotswolds property – along with the first Top equipment presenter demands the animals’ return and warns thieves of further raids, saying: ‘We are armed.’
Clarkson heard about the suspected nighttime raid when he went to count his flock with his co-star Caleb Kuiper.
They discovered that only 16 of his 27 easy-care sheep were in the remote Cotswolds field.
Clarkson spoke of his anger at the theft, telling The Sun: “It’s a farm. We are armed. So they know.’ He added: ‘It p*****s me off. Honestly, it just turned me off.”
He said the sheep at the market were worth more than £2,000, while lambs were worth up to £8,000 for meat – adding that he was now concerned that other livestock may have been stolen from the farm in Oxfordshire.
Clarkson believes the sheep, which featured in series five of his Amazon Prime show, were taken at night or on a day when no camera crews were present.
When asked if he believed the show had made the farm a target, he said: “You’re more likely to be a target than less, but I still don’t think they were stolen because they’re on Diddly Squat. How can you [stop it] if someone is determined to steal your cattle?’
Jeremy Clarkson says 11 sheep of the easy-care breed were stolen from his Diddly Squat farm
The sheep have been featured on the Clarkson fronts of the Amazon Prime series
Last month, Clarkson said the harvest at Diddly Squat was ‘f*****’ due to the scorching summer.
The farm and pub owner posted on Instagram a screenshot of the BBC weather forecast for nearby Chipping Norton, showing a temperature of 29 degrees Celsius, with the caption: ‘Harvest already f*****. Might as well enjoy it now.”
Filming for a sixth series has begun in recent months and it seems likely that the focus will be on this year’s record-breaking weather and the challenge it poses for farmers.
The 1,000-hectare farm previously produced traditional crops including wheat, barley and oilseed rape, in addition to potatoes, mustard and clover.
But Clarkson said earlier this summer that he deliberately left 200 hectares uncultivated this year because planting wheat or barley would have guaranteed financial losses.
He warned that it is becoming “simply impossible” to make money growing food and warned that more farmers would have little choice but to use their land for other purposes.
Clarkson on Wednesday at the premiere of the new series The Grand Tour
In 2021, Clarkson told The Times that avoiding inheritance tax had been “the crucial thing” in his decision to buy the land in 2008. He only started editing it himself in 2019.
During a 2024 protest against Keir Starmer’s government’s proposed tax reforms, he said he had effectively bought it ‘to shoot’.
The government had proposed introducing a 20 per cent levy on inherited farming assets worth more than £1 million from April this year, ending the 100 per cent tax relief that had been in place since the 1980s.
But after months of protests from farmers – including tractors bringing traffic to a standstill in Westminster – the government raised the threshold to £2.5 million.
In its first year, the farm – originally bought by Mr Clarkson for £4.45 million – made just £144 in profit, before making less than £15,000 in the year 2023 to 2024 and losing £5,000 in the year 2024 to 2025.
Last year he wrote: ‘If these figures are typical, it means farmers are working twice as hard as everyone else and not even getting the minimum wage.’
Earlier this year, Clarkson said he had been diagnosed with “aggressive” prostate cancer, which was caught early.
He later told The Sunday Times that a PSA test in April showed no sign of cancer and that he was in remission.
On Wednesday he attended the premiere of the latest series of The Grand Tour, where Francis Bourgeois, Thomas Holland and James Engelsman will take over from him, James May and Richard Hammond.
