Five series of Clarkson's Farm, and the same thing happened every year without anyone pointing it out. The wheat drowned in the wettest autumn on record. The sheep stood in the rain and lambed. The oilseed rape was eaten by flea beetle before it came up. The cows ate the grass that grew where the rape had failed. The potatoes rotted in a shed he could not sell them from. The pigs ate the potatoes. The wasabi, the chillies, the mushrooms in the bunker and the nettle soup made a few hundred pounds between them. The venison off the wood paid for the stalker and then some. The barley came in late, light and under the price it cost to grow, and the brewery took it at a discount. The beef off the same acres went out of the farm shop at a price people queued down the lane for. The arable half needed a two hundred thousand pound tractor, a man to drive it, a contractor to combine it, diesel, sprays, seed and a prayer to the sky. The grass half needed a fence and an animal. The one thing on that farm that failed every single year was the part a government leaflet tells you Britain should be growing more of. The one thing that never once failed was the part you are told the planet cannot afford. Five years of evidence, a thousand acres, the best advice in the county, and a camera crew to record it. The verdict was the same as every hill farmer's since the Domesday Book. On land like that, the animal is the only thing that works.