Season three of Clarkson’s Farm will see the return of a familiar character, Andy Cato, but not everyone is pleased.
Groove Armada’s one-half traded song rights to support a farming career, now dumping fertiliser instead of beats.
This choice led to a meeting with Jeremy Clarkson, which will appear in the future Amazon Prime Video series.
Andy, 51, was joined by George Lamb, 44, a former TV personality who owns the firm Wildfarmed alongside him. The three guys, who are increasingly abandoning entertainment to pursue farming, met with land guru Charlie Ireland.
‘Basically, our current farming system destroys war on natural systems and it’s got us in a bit of a fix. Our soils have been pounded and poisoned to a point where they are in a few decades of giving up,’ Andy told the group.
‘We’ve lost 80% of our insects we can’t keep doing that. Regenerative farming is a way of farming that tries to copy natural systems.’
Instead of avoiding all chemicals, like in organic farming, they measure what each field requires in order to adjust fertilisers and grow various plants in one field to recreate the natural environment.
Jeremy, 64, was particularly delighted by Andy and George’s pledge to buy any products grown in their way for a premium price. The partnership has 250 regular clients, including Marks & Spencer, which thrilled Jeremy and his business advisor, known as Cheerful Charlie.
Despite their great pitch, newly hired farm manager Kaleb Cooper required some convincing when he eventually met Andy.
After seeing the musician planting wheat and beans on the farm, Kaleb, 25, asked: ‘Who the f**k is that?’ When Jeremy informs Kaleb he was part of Groove Armada, he hits back: ‘I don’t know what that is, why is he drilling my field?’
‘That’s p*****g me off seeing him in there,’ he said before criticising his choice of equipment.
After Jeremy warned Kaleb to ‘be nice’ and ‘not petulant like a child’, it was time for them to come face-to-face. Although, the reception was initially a bit frosty they eventually bonded over farming.
Kaleb couldn’t resist getting the last word though: ‘Was you in a band? I can tell because you’ve left your tractor running at a pound per litre.’
Andy decided to pursue a different career after reading a thought-provoking article in 2006.
‘I hadn’t really thought about food at all until I was coming back from a gig one day, picked up a newspaper article about what you might call industrial food production, and it wasn’t particularly pretty reading.
‘It had this line in it, “If you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it”,’ he recalled to the Irish Independent.
He started modestly, cultivating vegetables in his garden while living in France with his wife Jo and their two children. Five years later, Andy sold his songs to buy a 100-acre property in Gascony, France.
While he may call it an ‘absolutely ridiculous decision, financially speaking’, he has no regrets. ‘I back it in terms of having a life of doing things which I think matter and I work with amazing people and have diverse experiences. I’m the richest person in the world.’
He launched Wildfarmed in 2018 alongside George, whom he met by coincidence in Ibiza, and financier Edd Lees.
Former Big Brother’s Little Brother presenter George spoke about his own journey to this moment (via Financial Times): ‘I had this big career and I woke up one morning and I called my dad [actor Larry Lamb] and told him I was feeling unfulfilled.’
Andy originally rose to prominence alongside Tom Findlay in Groove Armada. Between 1996 and 2020, the team published nine albums, including commercially successful songs such as At the River, I See You Baby, and Superstylin’. They have three Brit Award nominations and three Grammy nominations.
Andy returned to the UK in 2021 and now has a National Trust farm tenancy in Oxfordshire. While Andy is occupied with the 295 acres, Tom is a qualified CBT counsellor who works for the NHS.
They embarked on a farewell tour in 2022.
Clarkson’s Farm series 3 launches globally on Prime Video on May 3.