Justifying.
Funnier and more honest than "Our Story", and it implies — correctly — that somebody owes an explanation for how a thousand acres of loss-making Cotswold brash turned into six businesses.
It started with forty tonnes of potatoes.
In 2008 roughly a thousand acres of the former Sarsden estate, including Curdle Hill Farm, were bought and contract-farmed by a local villager. In 2019 he retired, and rather than find another contractor the owner decided to farm it himself.
The first year produced a profit of one hundred and forty-four pounds and, separately, about forty tonnes of potatoes with no obvious buyer. So a shed was opened with a till in it. That shed is now the Diddly Squat Farm Shop, and it is comfortably the most profitable decision anybody has made here.
Everything since has followed the same pattern: a problem, an improvised solution, and a solution that turns out to be worth considerably more than the thing it was solving. Barley that would not pay as grain became a brewery turning over twenty-one million pounds. A derelict fifteenth-century barn became a pub employing a hundred and forty people. Five years of conversations behind a farm shop counter became a marketplace with 1,300 farms on it.
None of it was a plan. All of it followed from the same fact: on a thousand acres of thin soil over limestone, the farming does not pay, and everything downstream of the farming does.
The whole thing, in order.
The land is bought
Roughly a thousand acres of the former Sarsden estate, including Curdle Hill Farm. It is contract-farmed by a local villager for the next eleven years.
The contractor retires
And rather than find another one, the owner decides to farm it himself. This turns out to be the beginning of everything else.
The farm shop opens
Roughly forty tonnes of accidental potatoes need a buyer. A shed gets a till.
Chapter 1: Tractoring
Series One arrives on Amazon Prime Video. Eight chapters, released together.
Hawkstone Lager launches
Brewed with barley grown on the farm. The first batch fails a blind taste test and is rebrewed.
The enforcement notice
West Oxfordshire District Council serves it over planning breaches.
Series Two
Chapters 9 to 16, including Council-ing and Counselling. It becomes the most-watched Prime Video original in the UK.
The appeal decision
The inspector upholds the notice in part — the restaurant is refused and the barn ordered restored, but the café, shop and car park are permitted, with the extra car park temporary and goods limited to a sixteen-mile radius.
The cider recall
A batch over-ferments. It is recalled with a statement beginning "we completely cocked up". Sales rise afterwards.
Series Three
Chapters 17 to 24. Unfarming is the most economically significant chapter in the run.
The Farmer's Dog opens
Hundreds queue down the lane. Everything on the menu is British and there is no telephone.
Waitrose
Hawkstone gets its first national grocery listing, in more than three hundred stores.
Whitehall
Clarkson addresses tens of thousands of farmers protesting against the inheritance tax changes.
Series Four
Chapters 25 to 32. Kaleb tours, Harriet arrives, the pub is built on camera.
Twenty-third on the Sunday Times 100
Hawkstone almost triples sales to £21.3 million in the year to March 2025.
Series Six is commissioned
Expected around summer 2027.
Only Farmers Limited is incorporated
Company number 17058134, directed by Lisa Bentinck.
Diddly Dunkers
A trademark application is reported for a biscuit and sweet snack range, alongside drinks marks including Knollbury Fort, Arrowhead, Midsummer and Firelight.
Only Farmers launches
Over 1,300 farms join within roughly two months.
Series Five
Chapters 33 to 40, released in three tranches. It contains the coronary heart disease and prostate cancer disclosures.
Hawkstone reaches Europe
Exports to ten European countries.
Chapter 41
Which is this.
Established in 2020, Diddly Squat Farm Shop was the brainchild of Jeremy Clarkson after realising that potatoes did indeed grow well on his farm and he had accidentally produced 40 tonnes of them. The farm shop, on its own origins
The full timeline.
Twenty-two moments, dated.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Public filings, published rankings and press reporting, each labelled on the page as a verified record, a founder claim or a third-party estimate.
The words are ours. The brands are not, and nothing here is licensed.
