Jeremy Clarkson thinks Chris Packham has got farming all wrong.
After Chris used Celebrity Gogglebox to take aim at the idyllic opening titles of Clarkson’s Farm ‘Diddly Squat’, Clarkson hit back in his Sun column, dismissing the comments as nonsense and suggesting that if there really were animals “being crushed” or kept in crates, he’d have been the first to notice during Packham’s visit to the farm back in 2012.
But Chris Packham wasn’t describing Diddly Squat Farm.
He was describing the system that produces the vast majority of Britain’s meat, dairy and eggs.
And just like Chris, we’ve seen up close the reality of our food production that the British public doesn’t get to. In 2024, Animal Rising carried out the UK’s largest ever undercover investigation into farms and slaughterhouses when we looked into the ‘RSPCA Assured’ scheme at a time when Chris himself was president of the RSPCA.
If Diddly Squat sells the British public an idyllic vision of farming, RSPCA Assured sells the same myth nationwide: the cute, quaint English farm. Its logo shows farm animals practically embracing, a promise that these animals were afforded some measure of kindness on the way to your plate. And like the artifice of a TV opening sequence, that promise evaporated the moment we made contact with reality.
Across more than forty sites at what are meant to be our ‘kindest’ farms, we filmed a systematic pattern of cruelty. One image in particular, out of thousands, stayed with us: a hen so tightly confined that she had little choice but to stand on the body of another hen, dead and left on the shed floor.
Presented with proof of widespread suffering, Chris chose to act on his convictions. After our follow-up investigation revealed cruelty across Assured slaughterhouses, he resigned as President of the RSPCA, arguing that the charity had failed to act decisively enough on the evidence of mass suffering happening under its own label.
These weren’t the worst farms in Britain but they were carrying one of our most trusted welfare labels. And we didnt find a string of isolated mistakes. We recorded a pattern of cruel efficiencies, just what you’d expect from a system built to produce food as cheaply and quickly as possible, whatever the cost to the animals inside it. From the perspective of the vast factory farming industry, that system was operating perfectly.
We can’t take on Big Ag like this without support. Animal Rising exists because people choose to stand behind the unglamorous, unseen work: the months spent inside sheds and slaughterhouses gathering evidence, the legal costs, the campaigns we can’t talk about yet but which will need every one of you behind them.
Right now, we’re four days away from a major fundraising deadline. If enough people choose to become monthly donors for us to reach our monthly giving target by the end of July, we’ll unlock a further £75,000 for our investigations and campaigns. We’re nearly there.
The countryside people want to believe still exists
Part of why Clarkson’s Farm has connected with so many people, aside from Clarkson being a talented entertainer, is that it hands them the countryside they want to believe is still out there. Rolling hills, hedgerows, a tractor that won’t start, a farmer up against the bureaucrats and the weather.
But like the RSPCAs cuddly logo, it isn’t an accurate picture of how most of Britain’s food gets made. Some people can’t look away from that gap between the story and the reality. Least of all Chris Packham, who has spent much of his life watching and defending the small, strange, overlooked corners of the natural world and who knows, better than almost anyone in British public life, that this world is under the most severe threat it has ever faced. Our rivers and hedgerows and every creature inside are on a precipice. Chris doesn't look away from these difficult realities. That's why, when he speaks about animal agriculture in the UK, he tells an uncomfortable truth. Honesty is in short supply in mainstream conversations about factory farming.
The animals disappear…
Every time this story becomes Jeremy Clarkson versus Chris Packham, the animals disappear from it.
We forget about the millions of chickens, pigs, fish and cows whose lives remain hidden from view, suffering in this exact moment. We overlook the hedgehogs, the curlews and the dormice, all under mounting pressure from habitat loss, polluted rivers and the environmental cost of an increasingly intensive food system. Chris was trying to pull that reality back into the frame.
And while we’ve all been having this argument, the industry hasn’t paused for a second.
Just weeks ago, the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that the number of intensive dairy farms confining cows indoors in the UK has more than doubled in the past ten years from around 70 to 180. Within that figure, the number of “megadairies” housing more than 700 cows has also doubled.
That’s the breakneck corporate pace we’re up against. American-style mega farms didn’t arrive in Britain by accident. They arrived because it is currently more profitable to confine an animal indoors for their entire life than to let them outside. Every month this goes unchallenged, the system gets more entrenched. That is the logic of factory farming: expand faster than anyone can build the resistance to stop it.
Britain deserves a more honest conversation. Not one about a single celebrity farmer, but about the food system we’ve collectively built, the suffering it runs on, and the future we could still choose instead.
If you believe that conversation is worth having properly, help us keep having it. Investigations and campaigns don’t happen by accident; they take months of challenging work, planning and people willing to fund the truth even when it’s inconvenient. We’re four days from unlocking £75,000 of vital funding to support our campaigns for animals, if we hit our target of new monthly donations.
Chris Packham asked the UK to look closer at where our food comes from. It's a conversation Britain can no longer afford to look away from.
In solidarity,
Animal Rising
If you haven’t seen our RSPCA investigation yet, check it out here:
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