Jeremy Clarkson has revealed his farm manager Kaleb Cooper fears he’ll be “out of a job” due to his newest addition to the plot.
The farmer, 26, has been helping Clarkson, 65, run his 1,000-acre Diddly Squat Farm in Oxfordshire for several years.
Cooper has become a star in his own right since featuring on the Prime Video series Clarkson’s Farm, which recently wrapped its fourth series, and has even embarked on a tour around the UK.
However, Clarkson admitted his right-hand man feels “hounded” and threatened by the new piece of machinery he’s introduced to the farm - a driverless tractor.
The former Top Gear host revealed he has leased “the coolest machine in the world”, an autonomous vehicle called the AgBot T2 that performs farming tasks like cultivating soil and planting seeds without a human driver.
“Kaleb hates it. He says it’ll put him out of a job,” Clarkson penned in his Times column on Thursday.
The Grand Tour alum added: “I did point out, though, that if his contracting business had one he could turn up at someone’s farm, set it off and then go to someone else’s farm with his normal tractor and get paid twice. Double dipping. He did agree I had a point.
“But then he went into a mood again because before the AgBot could do any cultivating, he had to go into the fields and spread all the rhino and giraffe dung that we collect every so often from Cotswold Wildlife Park.
“And the simple fact is that he had to stop occasionally, to sleep for instance, and the AgBot didn’t. He was literally being hounded by a machine that absolutely will not stop.”
Clarkson added that Cooper was “only saved from humiliation by a few reliability issues” with the tractor, including water getting into the electronics and a mouse apparently eating part of the machinery.
The new farm addition comes after Cooper suffered a painful foot injury following a game of football.
He shared an update from A&E on Wednesday, confirming he had fractured his foot after taking a tumble.
Cooper showed followers a video of his visibly swollen ankle as he hobbled around the farm, grimacing in pain.
He said: “I just got back from football and I'm trying to shut the chickens up and look at that ankle, ahh pain, the pain, the pain!”
The following morning, the farmer posted an update from hospital as he prepared for an x-ray. Hours later, he confirmed the ankle was fractured and showed off a medical boot fitted to stabilise the injury.
