[theme music playing]
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[mooing]
[car door slams]
[Dilwyn] Right. The moment of truth.
Right.
Could he pass it on to the rest of the herd if he's got it?
It affects the lungs.
They will cough tuberculin up and spread it from one to the other.
Ultimately, they would infect all the rest of the herd?
-Yes. -All right. I've got you.
And you're looking for what, Dilwyn?
[Dilwyn] I'm measuring the thickness. There's a lump at the top.
Twelve-nine.
What does that mean?
[Dilwyn] If the first number is bigger than the second number then you're OK.
[Jeremy] Twelve-nine? We're happy?
If it was the other way round, you'd be worried.
What do the numbers mean?
[Dilwyn] It's the size of the lumps.
The measurement of the skin where I injected the other day.
[Jeremy] Looks like you're all right.
Come on, moo cow.
[cow mooing]
Fourteen-ten.
[Jeremy] There we go.
-Go on. Go on. -[Jeremy] There we go.
[Dilwyn] Ten-nine.
-[Jeremy] Oh, that's close. -Yeah.
-[Charlie] It's quite tense, isn't it? -Yeah. It's horrible.
I did a test of 400 animals the other day,
and I found a reactor on the last animal.
Everybody was just relaxing...
[Jeremy] 400?
And that was the start of an outbreak.
Fifteen-ten.
[woman] Fifteen-ten.
[Jeremy] That's good.
[Jeremy] The results kept coming up negative.
Ten-eight.
-[woman] Ten-eight? -[Dilwyn] That's OK.
[Jeremy] And soon we were down to the last two cows.
[Jeremy] Now, that's the attack cow.
Go on, go on, go on.
-[cow mooing] -[Charlie] Oh, Jesus.
[Jeremy] Bloody hell.
[Kaleb] You won't stop her.
[banging]
[Dilwyn] Good.
-[woman] Nothing for that one? -[Dilwyn] Nothing.
[Jeremy] Come on, Pepper. Oh, here she comes. Pepper!
[Dilwyn] Fourteen-ten. You got a clear TB test.
[Jeremy] That is a result!
Oh! Fantastic.
[Lisa] So pleased about that.
Well done. Good news.
That is great news, isn't it? That is properly good news.
[Lisa] Yeah.
[soft music]
[cows mooing]
[Jeremy] It was now mid-winter.
And two important events were fast approaching.
The pregnant cows would soon give birth.
And we would receive West Oxfordshire Council's decision
on my restaurant application.
And on that front, Charlie was on the war path.
We're low on flour.
Yeah, we are low on flour. It flies out.
[Charlie] Morning.
Ah, here we go. Charlie.
-[Charlie] How are you? -What are you doing here?
[Charlie] Because I have some news.
You, Jeremy, have received a letter from the council.
Um, it's not actually very good news.
-Um... -There's a surprise.
Is this to do with the shop?
It's to do with the shop.
Why is it written to me, then? You're very much in charge of the shop.
We're going through a whole load of...
[Jeremy] Oh, shit.
[Charlie] It's a planning contravention notice. It is quite serious.
What does that mean?
It's a sort of last warning before we get an enforcement,
which would probably--
-They would enforce closure. -[Lisa] When was my first warning?
-You've had your first warning. -[Lisa] Oh, have I?
-[Lisa] Did I miss that boat? -No, we discussed it.
[Charlie] No. We got a large letter in the summer.
I have to say Lisa has, again,
an Irish attitude to this kind of thing.
[Irish accent] "Ooh, they don't mean it."
Well, I don't care. It's stupid.
Well, it's not. It's... [chuckles]
When we got the planning permission, they were very clear
that produce must either be produced from the farm...
Yes.
Or it must come from producers in the local area.
[Lisa] Yes.
[Charlie] The planning permission says 16 miles,
so that's what we've got to work with.
And they've put a list down here of things that don't meet that criteria.
-Because-- -Well, hold on. What have we got wrong?
Well, I think there are a couple of things that clearly--
-The Arabica coffee. -Yeah, coffee.
-Coffee isn't great in this area. -[Jeremy chuckling]
-Hats... -So I got it from...
Hats and T-shirts.
Hats and T-shirts? I think they must be just down the road.
They're Vietnamese.
-That's Charlie we're talking to. -Ahem.
-Can we get rid of these? -Why?
[Charlie] "Made in China."
[Lisa] I just put that on to make it look more exotic.
'Cause otherwise, it's a bit boring!
[Charlie] Lisa!
This one got through.
[Charlie] But that is their problem. There's a big wall with hats...
-[Lisa] Of issues, yeah. -[Charlie] T-shirts... Yes, of issues!
Just while we've got this bigger planning application in for the restaurant,
I just really think that we need to behave here.
We can't load their gun any more.
[upbeat music]
[Jeremy] Over at the new barn, the mood was much more upbeat,
as the beef whisperer was giving his predictions
about when the cows would give birth.
That one there,
-she's probably about a week off. -[Jeremy] Yeah.
[Kaleb] You see how she's just starting to bag up?
Her stomach's slowly rising.
[Jeremy] All right.
[Kaleb] The one behind probably a week off as well.
In a week's time, we're gonna be very busy.
[Jeremy] Also, the mum's-to-be had a new toy.
[Kaleb] This is cool. The cows love this.
We had 'em on our old farm.
And they proper get into it.
Have you ever used one?
[Jeremy] Well, no...
You go underneath it, yeah?
[groans]
That's good.
[groans] Get your back under that, honestly.
Mr Cow comes...
And give it a bit of a nudge.
-Ooh. -[chuckling] Ain't it good?
Oh.
[laughs]
-[Jeremy] Bloody hell! -[Kaleb chuckles]
[Jeremy] With the meat production line about to kick in,
there was no better time to have a catch-up with Charlie
about how the restaurant planning application was going.
And, as ever, he was a ray of sunshine.
Well, look,
-I think fundamentally I-- -This is not gonna be good.
I think the bit that I'm sort of worried about
is the consultees really being by the book.
You know, it's not just, "Thanks, that looks all right."
They're making comment.
What do you mean, "the consultees"?
Who are they?
So they're environmental health, or local highways,
or the police, for example.
What have the police got to say about it?
How can you live in a country where the police
are allowed to have an opinion on a restaurant?
-Hold on. Cycle storage? -Correct.
-"The provision" as it says here... -Of--
[Jeremy] "...for bicycle parking."
What does that have to do with the police?
So, he is the Crime Prevention Design Advisor.
-What? -That's what he does.
But if we say we're not employing cyclists?
I don't think that's gonna be very helpful.
Do I have to be inclusive?
As inclusive as you can be.
I mean, I am inclusive, just not cyclists. I'm--
Then there's environmental health. And the AONB.
So the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
What conditions are they gonna put on?
And the drainage.
So the West Oxfordshire District Council, they're going to want to see
a flood-alleviation scheme so you don't get surface--
It's 800 feet above sea level, miles from a river.
Why don't they just write back saying "We've got nothing to say"?
Because people have got too much time on their hands, haven't they?
[groans]
[Charlie] OK.
Let's not dwell on it any more.
There is work ahead of us.
[soft music]
[Jeremy] A few days later, I got an urgent early-morning call from Kaleb.
[Jeremy] What's happening?
Oh!
[Kaleb] Congratulations!
-No! -[Kaleb chuckles]
[Jeremy] No way! When did that happen?
-[Kaleb] Last night. -Oh my God! What is it?
[Kaleb] A little heifer calf. That's a girl, by the way.
[Jeremy] I know that. I've learnt that.
-[Jeremy] Look at that face! -Look at that little face!
Oh, look at your little face!
You lucky cow. You've come to Diddly Squat.
Well done, mum!
Mother's looking very proud, actually. Can cows look proud?
[Kaleb] Yeah.
Cow calving is so much different to sheep.
So it just fell out?
[Kaleb] Fell out. Stand up. Licking it off.
[Jeremy] It's going to be a heifer. We're not gonna eat this one?
Yes, we'll keep it in the herd to grow.
She's trying to have a poo. That's a really good sign.
[Jeremy] Here it comes!
Ladies and gentlemen, it's the first faeces!
The mother's gonna eat it. The mother's eating it.
[Kaleb] That's really good!
In the wild, there's predators out there, she'll clean up after her,
so therefore the predators can't smell the baby.
-[Jeremy] Really? -Yeah.
[Jeremy] Did you hear
the stat that Charlie told me the other day?
Everyone says cows are unenvironmental now?
Mmm.
'Cause you've gotta grow the grass to feed the cows,
so you've got two things to do before you eat them.
Apparently eating half a cow
is the same environmental impact
as one person flying to Australia.
-So they're not really... -No.
How many people fly to Australia a day?
Well, Novak Djokovic.
Tennis?
That a lady? A girl?
[Jeremy] I may have missed the birth of my first calf,
but then, over the next few days,
I managed to miss the next batch as well.
Oh, for Heaven's sake.
One, two, three calves have come out.
The problem we're having,
I'm sure you'd like to see the birth,
but the cow just goes... [coughs]
and then there's a calf.
It's very difficult to film.
Look.
Oh.
[Lisa] Oh look!
Hey, little one.
[Jeremy] Remember all that fuss and palaver with the lambing?
So much fuss.
They just cough and then a calf comes out.
We still have four more to come. So...
hopefully we can witness.
[upbeat music]
[Jeremy] Kaleb then told me you can buy devices that warn you
when a birth is imminent.
So, I immediately set off to buy some
because that meant going to my new most-favourite shop
in the whole world.
Normally I loathe shopping, absolutely loathe it.
But in here I want everything.
Oh, look at this.
This is the outfitters department.
Look, look, look!
This is where... This is Kaleb's wardrobe.
This is his Bond Street.
Let me talk you through all the different shirts you can get in here.
There's this one, OK? Yeah?
Then there's this one.
Then there's...
this one.
Then there's...
this one.
That's a steel... Oh, is that a steel toe cap?
Look at that.
Oh shit.
Look for the cameras.
[Jeremy] Focusing on the job in hand, I headed to the cow department,
where I was amazed to find exactly what I was looking for.
Oh, heavens.
No! No, I don't believe I'm seeing this.
"The Moocall."
So what you do is you pop it on the animal's tail.
And then when it's about to give birth,
you get a text message from this little machine.
You're kidding!
[lively music]
[Jeremy] Go on, go on. There you go.
[Jeremy] Back at the farm, Kaleb and I fitted the alarms.
[Jeremy] So when she lifts that up, I'll get a text?
[Kaleb] Yeah.
[Jeremy] "Moocall." There it is.
[Jeremy] And then we went for a chat with Charlie
about the stratospheric rise in fertilizer prices.
[Kaleb] It's like gold, isn't it?
It is literally gold. How much has it gone up by?
[Charlie] We bought this at £275 a ton.
And now it's about £675 a ton.
How many tons have we got?
Er, there's 80 there.
So what's that? 30,000 quid.
[Jeremy] Why is it so fucking expensive?
There's this bloke. He's called Vladimir.
[Jeremy] Oh, Put-- Well...
Well, especially with all this war stuff going on at the minute as well.
[Jeremy] Staggered that Kaleb knew Putin was making noises
about invading Ukraine,
I gave him some of my wisdom.
There's not gonna be a war.
-Oh well, I dunno... -There isn't.
[slow music]
[Jeremy] Since my fertilizer was now worth more than Elon Musk,
it made sense to protect it from burglars.
[Jeremy] Right, here it is. So if you could give us a hand?
[Gerald] Yeah.
[Jeremy] Which meant asking my head of security
to help me fit a high-tech alarm system.
[Jeremy] I saw this on YouTube. And I thought that's just bob-on.
It's a really good idea, this.
[Gerald] Everyone shoots a bullet.
Tom has probably got one that comes out as far as here.
[Jeremy] And I always think your approach to security's quite sensible.
Yeah, I don't want no full-front advance
just meeting great big men when I come out, you know.
Blokes with axes and stuff.
I don't want a lot of that these days.
Whatever that is, we've no need to worry anymore.
So, take this off.
[Gerald] If it's a real damp, foggy night...
Oh yeah, I guess.
Now, the idea is, somebody comes in,
it detects their movement, yeah?
-Yeah? -And then a siren goes off.
And the siren triggers these, which are smoke canisters.
-Yeah? -So, I mean, this whole barn--
Will be black and covered...
-[Jeremy] Properly thick smoke. -Dense.
-Yeah? -[Jeremy] And you can't see a thing.
The thing is, though, with that big chalk piece that starts the wars,
and then there's the piece that'll kill at least twelve people...
[Gerald speaking indistinctly]
Until you've cleaned it all out,
it wants just edge and siding as well, really.
[Jeremy] Mmm.
[upbeat music]
[Jeremy] With the fertilizer fully protected,
it was time for a meeting with Mr and Mrs Cacklebean.
[sighs] It's a nice morning.
-[Steph] Beautiful. -Just light drizzle.
[Jeremy] Who'd come over to give me some advice
on some worrying news I'd received.
[Jeremy] So these texts I keep getting from the Hen Police in...
Who is it, the government?
[Paddy] It is the government.
-[Jeremy] "H5N1"... -5N1, yeah.
-"Avian influenza." -Yeah.
Found at a premises in Warwickshire.
That's not...
27 miles...
Yeah, 27 miles away.
So it's a bit worrying.
[Jeremy] So how do we stop this lot getting it?
We will have to shut the birds in.
What? Really?
-What, completely? -Completely.
[Paddy] For about three months.
[Steph] Until we've got the all-clear, isn't it?
[Paddy] Till we got the all-clear.
[Jeremy] Shit. Do they lay less when they're inside?
[Paddy] It won't make a difference to them.
It will make, 'cause their lives will be less enjoyable.
No, there's ways that you can make their lives more enjoyable inside.
You've gotta make sure that they've got lots of bedding,
so they can dust bathe.
-I think we should put radios in. -Some radios.
Yeah, they can listen to a bit of music.
-[Paddy] Yeah. -Now you're being silly.
No. At home, Cackleberry Farm, every shed has a radio.
Have you got any audiobooks that we could play them?
They love it.
No. How do you know they love it? Do they smile?
-They sing. -Do they dance?
-Yeah, they do. -[Jeremy] No, they don't.
[chuckles]
They start off with Radio One when they're young,
move on to Radio Two when they're middle aged,
and Radio Four when they're old.
[laughing]
[upbeat music]
[Jeremy] With my hen and cattle mob-grazing enterprise
now halted by bird flu,
it was back to the cow barn to feed the new-borns.
[Jeremy] You go and get the nuts. We'll give them those.
Right. We've gotta put another pen in here.
So you'll have a friend to talk to. And then...
[alarm goes off]
Oh you haven't?
[Kaleb] What the fuck?
[alarm]
[Jeremy] You have.
Oh... fucking Kaleb...
[Kaleb] What was it?
[Jeremy] We put that system in that completely fills the place with smoke.
[Kaleb] Why didn't you tell me?
[Jeremy] I thought Gerald had. We put it in this morning.
[Kaleb] Well, he didn't inform me.
What are you playing at?
[Jeremy] Oh. Fuck's sake.
[Kaleb] I nearly shit myself.
[Jeremy] Literally, we've had it in... three hours.
I mean, I was hoping never-- Oh.
I can't... Where's the fucking door?
[coughs]
[soft music]
[Jeremy] That night, another piece of technology swung into action.
[mooing]
[Jeremy] Where is she?
Oh!
Oh, it's out.
She's got a balloon coming out of her back bottom.
Right.
[groans]
Come on. It's OK. Come on.
[Jeremy] Having put the mum-to-be in her own pen,
we waited for Kaleb to arrive.
This'll be our first one.
'Cause all the others have been born when no one was looking.
[cow mooing]
[Jeremy] Oh.
Oh, hello, hello, hello. Look.
That's not piss now, look.
That's baby juice, isn't it?
[Lisa] No, it's not, because the baby juice is all in the sack.
I don't know how the back of a cow works.
All right?
[Jeremy] We don't know.
[Jeremy] She keeps arching her back and then fluid comes out.
Yeah, she's starting to...
-[Jeremy] Push? -Push.
[Kaleb] Give her a bit of time. Relax.
How long after you get the party balloon do you get a cow?
-20 minutes, half an hour, hour... -[Jeremy] Really?
It varies.
[groans]
[Jeremy] Look, more calf's coming.
What's that, looks like...
-A hoof. -It looks alien.
That's just a hoof. That's a front foot, yeah?
[Kaleb] Yeah.
[Jeremy] Push. Push, push, push.
[groans]
[Lisa] Oh man, I feel it for you.
[Lisa] I think her contractions have slowed right down.
-[Kaleb] They have a little, right? -[Lisa] Mmm.
[soft music]
[Jeremy] Two hours after the Moocall had texted me,
the calf still hadn't been born.
-[Jeremy] Are you going in? -[Kaleb] Mm-hmm.
Can you please hold her tail ?
[Jeremy quietly] There's a good girl. There's a good girl.
[Jeremy] There's a good girl.
That's my girl.
-[Jeremy] Good girl. -I can feel the head.
-[Jeremy] Where's the other leg? -On the side.
Everything's in the normal position.
But it definitely feels like it's a big, big calf.
[Jeremy] Kaleb reckoned this was now a job for Dilwyn.
I haven't seen the head yet. That's what's worrying me the most.
But it does feel like a bloody big calf.
OK. Thank you.
He's gonna pop out.
[soft music]
[car door slams]
What have we got?
[Jeremy] It's been three hours.
Yeah?
Oh.
Oh, he is a big lad.
[Kaleb] A big old boy. I mean... A big old boy.
We'll give it a bit of a tug and see.
Are you just attaching the rope?
Yeah.
Good girl.
Will the calf be in some distress?
Yeah. The longer he is and the tighter it is there,
the tougher it is for him.
He is alive at the moment, so.
Oh man, that looks brutal.
[Jeremy] And this was just the start of it.
-[Dilwyn] Right. Where's the jack? -[Kaleb] Do you want the jack?
Bloody hell.
[Jeremy] Jesus.
I cannot believe I am seeing this.
[Dilwyn] Good girl.
So... Hold on.
[Jeremy] God, what a contraption that is.
[cow mooing]
[Lisa] Oh...
[jangling]
[Jeremy] Come on, darling. Come on. Good girl.
-[Jeremy] We've got the head. -We have.
That is the first time I've seen the head all night.
[Dilwyn] It's very handy, this.
It's got about 8 men in it. The strength of 8 men.
-So you have to be very careful using it. -[Kaleb] It's a big one, that.
That's a huge...
[Kaleb] Come on!
That's gonna feel better, isn't it?
[cow mooing]
[Dilwyn] Good girl.
[Jeremy] Whoa!
[Jeremy] Yes.
[Lisa] Let me know when I can get me a go.
[Jeremy] She's all right. She's blinking. He... it.
[Dilwyn] It's an "it" for the time being.
[cow mooing]
Oh my God. Look at the size of its legs!
It's all right.
-[Jeremy] Are you happy? -[Dilwyn] Yeah. It's a girl.
-[Jeremy] It's a girl? -[Dilwyn] Another one!
[Jeremy] Five girls!
Oh, look at the little face.
Oh, that is fantastic.
She's an absolute beauty.
[cow mooing]
[Dilwyn] Do you like her?
That is fantastic!
Thank you ever so much, both of you.
[Lisa] Thanks.
[Dilwyn] I've been doing this for years and it still gets you.
It really gets you. It's amazing.
You know, especially when she loves it so much.
[Jeremy] And what would have happened had we not been around?
Would that have been a tricky one?
[cow mooing]
It's quite possible we would have lost the calf.
-[Jeremy] Really? -Yeah.
[Dilwyn] That calf needed to come out when it came out.
[cow mooing]
[upbeat music]
[Jeremy] It was now less than a week until the big council showdown.
So, over at the National Portrait Gallery,
Charlie was crossing the Ts on the restaurant application.
[audiobook voice] Vanessa, now dripping wet, emerged...
[Jeremy] While at the farm,
the hens were enjoying one of Lisa's audiobooks.
[audiobook voice] Reaching for a towel,
she ran it over her skin,
to absorb the moist droplets from her warm, supple body.
Adrian moved up behind her.
Removing her towel, his firm touch made her heart flutter.
He dropped his pants to reveal his equipment. Perfection.
Thinking of the only...
[Jeremy] And I had to sit down with my local butcher...
Oh, Henry. Henry, dear boy. How are you?
[Jeremy] ...to discuss how much restaurant meat
I could get from each of my cows.
So you've got three, four, five, six, seven joints off of each leg.
So that's fourteen, each of which would feed twenty.
Rump. That's twenty-two steaks from each rump.
-[Jeremy] Forty-four. -That's forty-four.
[Jeremy] The numbers coming from Henry sounded like a meaty goldmine.
So a sirloin, you'd then get twenty,
-twenty-four steaks out of each sirloin-- -So we'll go in the middle, then.
[Jeremy] Twenty-two sirloin steaks.
Times two.
-Oh, so forty-four, then. -Yeah.
How many fillet steaks?
-Eight good eight-ounce steaks. -Fillet steaks.
Times two.
[Jeremy] Oh, so it's sixteen.
[Henry] You've got the rib of beef.
You know, king of the roasts.
It's a four-bone rib, so sixteen people, per rib, so that's thirty-two.
-We've got the shins. -Each shin would probably weigh
three kilos.
That's fifty people.
Fifty people could have a stew.
And five hundred and twenty people can have a burger.
We're feeding seven-- eight hundred,
eight hundred and forty, eight fifty, eight sixty... Nine hundred...
and eighty-six people from one cow.
That's nearly a thousand people.
Yeah, it is a helluva lot of meat.
[Jeremy] But then, everything came crashing down.
Oh God.
If we've got sixty covers in the restaurant...
[Henry] Yeah.
And it's twice a day. That's a hundred and twenty people a day.
Yeah.
And I've got two cows that are ready to go, or will be soon.
Right.
So if everybody did want beef, I'd have to close the restaurant
after sixteen days.
That's not good business, is it?
Oh God.
[soft music]
[Jeremy] In the end it was Charlie who came up with a possible solution.
He said that other local farmers might be happy
to provide their produce for the restaurant.
-[Jeremy] Hi, there. -Hello.
-[Jeremy] Hi, there. -[woman] Hello.
[Jeremy] So, we invited them over for a chat.
[Jeremy] Thanks for coming.
We're planning on opening a restaurant
in the lambing barn next to the farm shop.
And so I was really wondering if there might be some way
that we're able to buy from local farmers
and how that might work. Is that...
Yeah, I think that's exactly it.
So, we're expecting, hopefully, a few people to come
and eat at the restaurant.
And therefore we need to stock it with good local produce.
[Jeremy] Anyone grow vegetables?
[woman] We grow vegetables.
-[Jeremy] You grow vegetables? -Yeah.
[Charlie] We've got vegetablists.
-[Jeremy] Yeah. -[laughter]
You need vegetables 'cause they're an accompaniment to food and--
[laughter]
-You need something else, which-- -[woman] Something extra.
What do you grow?
We have quite a lot of sweetcorn. Broad beans. Courgettes. Pumpkins.
Perfect. Has anyone got chicken, turkeys and geese?
We do some geese and turkeys.
So we've got meat, we've got vegetables.
What do you have with it? Potatoes.
-Potatoes. -[man] Potatoes, yes.
-Is that you? -Mm-hmm.
[Jeremy] There, you see?
That's for the restaurant. We've got the beer.
Have you had some...
[Jeremy] Up to this point, I'd only been thinking
about the needs of Diddly Squat Farm.
But in the meeting,
it soon became clear that these hard-working folk
needed the restaurant even more than we did.
[Jeremy] And anyone farm pigs?
-Yes, we do. -[Jeremy] You do?
It's tough. The feed costs are horrific. The price of wheat.
Yeah.
And because there's a massive backup,
we're not able to send those that we need to go to the abattoir.
Shortage of staff at the abattoirs?
Well, there are staff at the abattoirs, there aren't enough.
But the problem is, they're all processing EU pork
that's been bought cheaply, pushing us out,
taking up the staff,
processing and packing meat that's come in cheap from the EU.
Because their price is 37p cheaper than ours per kilo.
How can you compete against something that's so much cheaper?
And do supermarkets dictate the price?
The price is dictated to you rather than you being able to negotiate
or set a price.
Are you allowed to sell wonky vegetables?
Or do they want everything...
They sell wonky veg in the supermarket, don't they,
at a third of the price,
but it costs the same to grow a wonky potato
as it does a beautiful-looking potato.
So they should just sell it at the same price,
and it doesn't really matter 'cause it's a potato.
[woman 2] And they taste the same.
And they've got the same nutritional value.
So can we have your imperfects?
-Yes. -They're just as good as...
[Jeremy] I know they are.
They taste just as good, they're just a little bit wonky.
[Jeremy] It turned out that no one needed the restaurant more than Emma,
the local dairy farmer whose herd had been ravaged by TB.
[Jeremy] So how many have you lost to TB now?
[sighing] Er, about sixty.
[Jeremy] Jesus.
[Jeremy] And who was only being kept afloat by selling milk and milk shakes
at our farm shop.
Financially, without it, I think we would have had to give up.
[Jeremy] Oh really?
[Emma] Because without the vending machines,
we're getting around twenty-six pence a litre for our milk.
I'm free labour. So we've got, you know...
Well, I don't take a wage. We don't get paid.
We've never taken a wage at the moment, because financially we can't.
By the time we've paid vet bills...
Does that happen a lot in farming?
[Emma] Yeah, a lot.
The margins are that tight that if you were to take a realistic wage,
we would have had to give up ten years ago.
Can you imagine any other industry working on this premise?
No.
I'm... Honestly, all of it.
It happens quite often. You know.
[Jeremy] The meeting ended with an agreement to form
a sort of cooperative.
Definitely, yeah.
And I think it'd be nice to be able to say
the food that you've got in there is--
Came from, well, you. I can point at your farm.
"You see what you're eating? That's its mum."
[Jeremy] And having heard from Emma,
I realised just how vital it was that the council granted us
planning permission for the restaurant.
[birds chirping]
Early the next morning, one of the Moocalls sounded an alarm.
[cow mooing]
And this time Kaleb knew straight away there was a problem.
He says that that strand of red hanging out of the back of her
says that the bag in which the calf lives has burst,
which means the calf's in there with no life support.
So we're gonna have to get it out now.
I mean, not even trying to wait for Dilwyn.
[Kaleb] Can you hold her tail like that for me?
[cow mooing]
[Kaleb] Push, push, push. Good girl!
Push, push, push.
-[Jeremy] Oh, it's coming. -Push, push...
[Jeremy] Push, push. Come on.
[Kaleb muttering]
[Kaleb] Darling, you've gotta push for me.
[cow mooing]
[Jeremy] Without Dilwyn's winch all we had was nineteen stone of Kaleb.
Oh, that's a big fucking calf. Jesus Christ!
Atta girl. Push, big push. Come on, come on, come on.
That's it, big push. There we go!
[Jeremy] Yes! There's an eye!
Big push again.
Big push.
[cow mooing]
[Jeremy] Well done, Kaleb. That's an eye, an ear.
[cow mooing]
[Jeremy] Yep. Get a straw.
[Kaleb] Go on, quickly.
[Jeremy] She's twitching, she's twitching.
She's alive! Look!
[Kaleb] Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.
-[Jeremy] Shall we let mum at her? -[Kaleb] Yeah.
[Jeremy] Yeah, she's much better.
Look at you!
[cow mooing]
That was good, that was.
That's how you properly do it.
Not the ratchet strap thing.
Don't get medieval...
When she started pushing I could tell.
[phone alarms ringing]
That's everybody's alarms!
-[cameraman] Gotta come to work! -Yeah!
We're all getting our alarms! [laughter]
Tragically, mine's gonna go off at eight.
[laughs] A rather leisurely eight o'clock.
[cow mooing]
[Jeremy] With 6 calves born successfully,
Project Cow was working well.
So now we just needed the final piece of the puzzle
to fall into place.
[soft music]
Before setting off to Red Tape Towers,
Charlie and I had a pre-match meet.
Morning.
I have actually dug out one of my Who Wants To Be A Millionaire outfits.
-What time's the meeting? -Two o'clock.
[Jeremy] And His Cheerfulness had done a great job
of answering everyone's concerns about our application.
I've done a summary.
Let's have a look. 'Cause Parish Council's backing us.
No longer an objection.
Cotswolds Conservation Board, no objection.
Thames Valley Police, no objection.
The Ecologist Group, no objection.
Archaeologist, no objection. OCC Transport--
Oxfordshire County Council Transport. So that's the big one.
No objection.
[Jeremy] Drainage, no objection.
Environmental Health, no objection.
And West Oxfordshire District Council Business Development, all supported.
[Charlie] All support.
[Jeremy] By contrast, there seemed to be only two areas of resistance.
Business--
So the Campaign To Protect Rural England
object due to more lights needing to go up.
But the lights need to go up
because the police say we need to put lights in.
So one part of it, the police go "You need more lights."
Because of security.
Yes. And then this lot say "You can't have any lights."
Honestly.
[Jeremy] The second opponent was a local who had decided to be my nemesis.
One of the people in the village, Hamish Dewar,
has employed a London planning barrister
to submit his objections
on the application.
It's quite frightening, you know.
I know you're reading it. But as he writes there,
he puts we will develop "two million square metres."
Two million square metres.
Do you know how big two million square metres is?
-It's two square kilometres, isn't it? -Yes. Hectares? Acres?
Two hundred hectares, five hundred acres.
-[Jeremy] Five hundred acres? -You're gonna build a new town!
-[chuckling] Five hundred acres! -Sod the restaurant,
you're putting up a hospital.
That's half my farm!
The worrying thing is the planning officer
has put that straight into her report that they're reading today.
[Jeremy] I know one man has employed a barrister
and the barrister's opinion has been picked up wrong
by one woman at the council,
but that doesn't mean they're going to refuse it.
-No, it doesn't. No. -Exactly.
[Jeremy] At this point, we headed off for the big meeting.
[Jeremy] Look who's here.
It's the G-dog.
[Charlie] Hello.
-[Jeremy] Council. -Yeah. Best of luck.
[Charlie] Yeah, thanks, Gerald.
[Jeremy] West Oxfordshire District Council offices.
[woman] Hiya. Are you here for the planning committee?
-[Jeremy] Yes. -[woman] Lovely.
[Jeremy] As we arrived, I thought of all the passion
and the effort, and the money,
we'd invested in this project over the last six months.
It's £25,000.
14,500 delivered.
[Jeremy] All right, let's shake on that, then.
Welcome.
[Jeremy] Look at them! This is tremendous!
£10,000 this was.
[Kaleb] Fucking hell.
[Alan] All the glass had to be double-glazed.
All have to be up to building regs, safety.
You've got all them people coming in here.
250,000.
[Kaleb] The cows are out!
Ow! Fucking hell. [groans]
Make them into crisps.
-[screams] -[Lisa] Oh my God!
[Lisa] It is your thumb!
[buzzing]
[coughing]
[man] You've got a big old sett entrance here.
[man 2] It is absolutely enormous just through here.
[metal creaking]
[Jeremy] Bloody hell.
[ominous music]
Shit.
[man] Ultimately you're not a farmer, you're a media personality.
-You don't need an income from the shop. -[Jeremy] The farm needs an income.
[man] You personally do not need an income.
Diddly Squat sponsors Chadlington Football Club.
I'm being attacked by a cow!
[Dilwyn] Good girl.
[cow mooing]
[Jeremy and Lisa] Woah.
That is fantastic.
What a great sight that is.
[man] Straight through there. Seats are on the left-hand side.
[Jeremy] In our heads, the restaurant plan made sense.
It would help the soil, it would help local farmers
and local businesses,
and it would help us offset the dwindling government subsidies.
But my experiences as a local newspaper reporter
had taught me that council planners can be a law unto themselves,
so I had no idea how this would go.
I think Hamish Dewar's over there, on the far side, white mask. Yeah.
[hammering]
[Jeff Haine] Good afternoon.
A very warm welcome to members of the public.
If I can start with a few introductions.
My name is Jeff Haine and I'm chairman of the Uplands Area Planning Committee.
To my left are the Council secretaries
that will record the minutes of this afternoon's meeting.
To my right are the planning officers
concerning the application before us today.
We are an equal number of voters,
so in the event of a tie, I upcast the votes.
Erm, all right, proceedings can begin.
[Jeremy] First, a planning officer reminded everyone
of what we were aiming to do.
This application is for the conversion
of an existing building to create a café restaurant.
In this case the site lies within the Cotswolds Area
of Outstanding Natural Beauty,
where great weight should be given to conserving
and enhancing landscape and scenic beauty.
[Jeremy] Then it was the turn of the barrister
who'd been employed by my staunch opponent from the village.
Planning permission was granted as recently as 2019
for a lambing shed with potential for occasional filmmaking.
The applicant said then that sheep farming
would improve the wider farming business.
The reality is that the applicant has done sheep farming,
he never intended to do it more than once,
and the lambing shed was a Trojan horse
conveniently located next to the farm shop,
so it could be converted into a bar and restaurant.
And that's what's happened.
The applicant's conduct is shameful.
It indicates a give me an inch and I'll take a mile attitude,
and it militates strongly against the grant of planning permission.
Granting planning permission conflicts with the statutory objective
of conserving and enhancing the area
of outstanding natural beauty.
That, speaking frankly, is a matter of obvious common sense.
Turning countryside into a car park
and introducing additional congestion visually and on the transport network
harms the AONB and its tranquillity.
It would never normally be granted planning permission
and there is no reason why it should be in this case.
[Jeff Haine] Thank you, Mr Streeten.
[Jeremy] After this minor kicking
I was given three minutes to plead my case.
Er, thank you for having us.
Much has been made of the fact that this area is an area
of outstanding natural beauty, which it is.
And the reason it is is because farmers maintain it.
Farmers look after the woodland, they look after the hedges,
the streams, the fields, they keep it beautiful.
But farmers are not going to be able to do that
for much longer because of the parlous state of their finances.
We have been told as farmers to diversify,
and that is exactly what this proposal is.
It's diversification of a farming business.
I know council from whom you've just heard has prepared a report.
I've read it. And if you can wade through the spelling mistakes,
you get to the fact that the car park was going to be two square kilometres.
That's five hundred acres. Now, that's half the size of the farm.
Now, in my old job,
I might have paved over the countryside,
but I've moved on from that
and I don't want to do any such thing.
It's a very small car park, very sensitively put together.
We've already started talking to our neighbouring farmers,
the idea being that we do the beef and the potatoes
and somebody else does the chicken, the milk...
So we all come together.
Locally produced food sold in this restaurant.
Everyone's very excited about that.
And we don't have to build anything. The building is already there.
So I commend the plans to you
and I very much hope for the sake of our farm
and all the farmers in the area
that you grant planning permission to us.
Thank you very much for your time.
[whispers] You should learn to spell.
[Jeremy] It was then time for the councillors to debate the issue.
And encouragingly, I did have some support.
Well, I never thought I'd say this,
but I agree with everything Mr Clarkson said.
I love the idea of the cooperative working together.
We live in a rural area and we have to support farmers.
And they're facing unprecedented hardship now.
And if we don't support initiatives like this,
then we're going to see them disappear
and then our whole landscape in West Oxfordshire changes.
Driving up towards the site, Diddly Squat,
from Chadlington,
is about a mile.
It's only in the last couple of hundred yards
that you actually see the site.
And when you go further away from it, it's not really truly visible.
Now, of traffic complaints.
If we accept a slightly larger volume of traffic in the district
for better employment prospects for your family in the future,
I believe that the general public will accept the extra traffic
for the economic benefits that this produces.
[Jeff Haine] Thank you.
[Jeremy] Then the naysayers opened up.
I think one of my concerns
is the potentially harmful impact on the rural character
and scenic beauty and tranquillity of the area,
plus the fact of having a seventy-vehicle car park
in a rural location anyway.
It strikes me as not being appropriate in the AONB.
[woman] From the point of view of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,
there's a lot of real concern here
about how it fits into that.
You know, it is an area where "dark skies"
could almost be achieved because there's very little housing around there.
I just find that argument constantly frustrating.
And we say about the "dark skies"...
I don't know anyone that stands and looks up at dark skies
and goes, "Oh, dark skies."
There are people living in the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty
and they need jobs.
[man] I just would say to my good friend Councillor
that I do go out for dark skies.
[woman] Do you?
[man] And I didn't stay up until half past ten last night
watching Sky At Night for nothing.
[laughing]
[Jeff Haine] Thank you.
Do members have any matters of clarification?
[Jeremy] The debate had gone the full twelve rounds.
No?
[Jeremy] And I just hoped that common sense and logic had won the day.
[Jeff Haine] All those in favour of refusal please show.
And those against.
The application is refused.
[dramatic music]
[Jeremy] Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
It's gonna be 30 years. 30 years before we turn a profit.
You can appeal.
The Secretary of State.
[Kaleb] What's a Secretary of State?
If you're all ready... go.
[Jeremy] Holy shit! Look at this!
[Kaleb] That's amazing.
[theme music playing]
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