He was the breakout star of the hit TV series Clarkson's Farm. Now Cooper, 23, has more Instagram followers than a Hollywood A-lister – and his own cider company.
In his local supermarket on a recent afternoon, "in my wellies and overalls, straight from work", Kaleb Cooper was picking up groceries for his one-year-old son, Oscar, when he was accosted by a woman he'd never met. "She shouted over, 'Are you still farming?'" He looks bemused at the memory. "I said, 'Er, yeah, I'm still farming.' She said, 'Oh, I thought you'd be in Hollywood by now.'"
He's not. He's in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, the bucolic Cotswold market town (population 6,337) where he was born, raised and ideally prefers never to have to leave. The furthest 23-year-old Cooper has ever been is London (three times, grudgingly), and he "hated it, f***ing awful". "I got a nosebleed when we went to Stow," he says (Stow-on-the-Wold, 30km away, is over the border in Gloucestershire). He doesn't own a passport.
So it's safe to say that an imminent relocation to Los Angeles seems unlikely. Cooper, however, does have more Instagram followers than many Hollywood A-listers (a million and counting), is regularly mobbed at festivals and agricultural shows, gets asked for selfies by celebrities, and has resorted to hiding in the toilets of his local cinema to avoid being recognised.
The undisputed hero of the Prime Video series Clarkson's Farm, Cooper – a bearded, baby-faced young farmer with a fondness for experimental hairstyles – immediately endeared himself to a global audience when the series launched with his exasperated put-downs of his cack-handed employer, Jeremy Clarkson.
The irascible former petrolhead presenter, a blow-in from London who suddenly fancies himself as a character from The Archers, has gained a new fanbase with the series. Humbled by the challenges facing farmers – bureaucracy, Brexit, the sadistic British weather – the man who called Greta Thunberg a "spoilt brat" and roundly rejected the scientific consensus on climate change has become an unlikely environmentalist: rewilding, keeping bees and building owl boxes, delivering lambs, and speaking up for the embattled agricultural community whose ranks he has now joined.
But it is Cooper, his sharp-witted farm worker, who steals the show as he cleans up the incompetent Clarkson's messes, dragging him – and his oversized, flashy £40,000 ($76,000) Lamborghini tractor ("an ornament", according to Cooper) – out of ditches while mocking his slapdash crop-planting and regularly admonishing him as a "f***ing idiot". Clarkson, for his part, calls Cooper a "rural halfwit".
Today, lolling against a tree, in a navy jumper decorated with cream labrador hairs, jeans and brown deck shoes, Cooper is no less forthright – sceptical about standing in an orchard in spring, among juvenile trees with no fruit on them, or against a dry stone wall ("Is that what everyone in London thinks the countryside looks like?") – and no less scathing about his boss.
Is Clarkson really as hopeless as he appears to be? "He's useless. I've tried my best. I'm still trying." Not that he's hopeful that the 61-year-old presenter will improve much. "He has got better with the tractor," he concedes. "And it is a really hard job, but you just have a knack for it. You're either a farmer or you're not a farmer." (Cooper, delightfully, pronounces "farmer" with triple the number of Rs it is traditionally spelt with.) "I mean, Johnny here," he continues, motioning to his business partner, Johnny Hornby, whose orchard we are standing in – "imagine him going out there, trying to farm. That would drive me mad, trying to teach him. He can't even put an umbrella up."
Cooper was not impressed by Clarkson's characterisation of him in his recent bestseller, Diddly Squat – A Year on the Farm. "He referred to me as a tractor driver. That's f***ing shit – I'm a farm manager. I'm the boss. It's Kaleb's Farm, secretly."
But in spite of the barbed repartee, the pair are "really good friends. We're always together," he grins. Is it a different dynamic off screen? "No. We argue just as much. Probably more, because we don't have a film crew stopping us." Filming for season two of the series is under way. "It's going to be good. That's all I'm going to say. It's going to be good."
Mostly, says Cooper, his newfound fame as Clarkson's better-skilled sidekick is a positive. "This morning I was up at 5, delivering hay, and then at midday I'm standing here with an apple, throwing it up in the air for a picture. Do you know what I mean?" And he tries to respond to as many messages from fans as he can. "I find it very bizarre, when people message me and go, 'Is the fertiliser price as bad there as it is in Texas?' And I'm like, 'Where's Texas?' People are like, 'Oh, we've got snow here.' I'm like, 'We haven't got snow. Where have you got snow?' 'Alaska.'"
Among a clutch of other projects the series has led to – including a forthcoming book, and "a big thing coming out very shortly for young people" – Cooper now has his own cider company (hence the apple) with partners including Hornby, an advertising executive who previously worked with Tony Blair.
The unpasteurised, locally(ish) produced Hawkstone cider – made from apples grown no more than 95km from the presses and fermented for six months in aged oak barrels – was inspired by the enormous success of the Hawkstone lager that Clarkson, a man having a serious Midas moment right now, launched last year.
"I spent the last two years planting Jeremy's spring barley for his beer and to be honest with you, I cannot stand beer," confesses Cooper. "But I do like cider."
It is testament to his passion that Cooper agreed to travel all the way to Ledbury, Herefordshire (an hour and 10 minutes away; multiple nosebleed miles), to partner with Weston's, which has been brewing cider on traditional presses for 150 years, using apples from Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. One of Cooper's aims with Hawkstone is to support Oxfordshire farmers by using their apples too, and he is planning an apple festival in the autumn, to which locals can bring apples from their gardens to add into the mix. "Everyone can bring their apples out of their garden. I'll give them a pork or bacon roll, we'll have a drink of the cider that we made previously and then go from there."
The cider has been produced to please Cooper's own palate. "I don't like a dry cider, to be honest with you," he says. "But when I go to the pub, if I order a very sweet cider I normally get killed: 'Oh, you wuss. You girl.' So I've made this cider that looks manly but it's got a hint of sweet in it."
Nothing is wasted; the pulp left over from the cider production will be used for animal feed, says Cooper, and when the cider turns a profit, he plans to reinvest it in planting more orchards.
Cooper, whose enthusiasm for his industry is infectious – "I can't explain how much I love it. Just talking about it, I want to get out there and sit on a tractor and do something" – has wanted to be a farmer for as long as he can remember. "The best way to get into farming is if your mum and dad are farmers, so you can have the land come down the generations."
That was not the case for Cooper. His mum, Rachel, is a dog groomer, and his dad, Mark, a carpenter. "My dad wanted me to follow in his footsteps. I remember him taking me to the building site, where I was supposed to be a gofer for him, but I'd just stand at the gate and watch the tractor go up and down all day, ploughing. As a little kid, I had a pedal tractor and I used to dig holes everywhere, and cart all the soil from there to there, and move it back again. It would keep me busy for three days."
His parents split up when he was 12; he lived with his mum while his brother, Kieron, then 10, lived with his dad. "Tough times. That was when I started getting into farming. It was a distraction from everything that was happening. Probably kept me sane, to be honest."
His parents, while not farmers, had purchased a small piece of land a few years earlier – four and a half acres in Heythrop, a few minutes down the road.
For his 13th birthday, his mother bought him three chickens, the eggs from which he sold door-to-door. "I could make about £7 a week profit, so each week I bought another couple of chickens. By about three months in I had 450 chickens. I used to get up in the morning, go and let them out, go back at night, feed them, clean them out. The only reason I went to school was because I was selling the teachers eggs."
At 14, he bought three sheep, bred them, had the lambs slaughtered, then sold those on his egg round too. At 15, he bought his own tractor – for £5,500 ($10,400) – even though he wasn't legally allowed to drive it on the roads for another year.
After studying at agricultural college, he launched his own business, Kaleb Cooper Contracting, which provides all manner of farming services – topping, mowing, hay turning – and now employs his brother, Kieron, his best friend, Jack, and his partner, Taya. "She's going to be managing the chickens and doing the paperwork, and she'll jump on a tractor in the summer when need be." Their son, Oscar, is a fan of the tractor too: "The vibrations and the movement of the tractor just send him straight to sleep, so if he can't sleep, I take him out and just drive round and round the field." He plans to employ some apprentices later this year. "I taught Jeremy, for God's sake – well, I say 'taught Jeremy'; I nearly taught Jeremy – so why couldn't I teach an apprentice? They have to be better than him, haven't they?"
We hop in Kaleb's big white truck – one of several, though he cautiously declines to list all his vehicles for me – to the Swan Inn at Swinbrook, one of ten local pubs that will be serving Hawkstone cider, which will also be sold online and at Clarkson's Diddly Squat Farm Shop. It's an extremely upmarket pub, the sort that serves pheasant rillette and cavolo nero. Steve, the flat-capped, gilet-sporting Geordie landlord, tells us that they had the king and queen of Sweden in yesterday. I doubt as many diners recognised European royalty as look up from their lunch when Cooper ambles in.
"Your life must have changed quite a bit," observes Steve, as we test a couple of pints of Hawkstone cider (crisp, fruity, but not too sweet, and to my admittedly inexpert palate eminently drinkable).
"I got famous, suddenly, and I got all these offers and I didn't know what to say yes to," Cooper tells me. He did a McDonald's advert, in which he learnt more about the fast food behemoth's efforts to be sustainable, but, when he posted it to social media, he was branded a sell-out by fans. Burnt by the backlash, "I just didn't want to do anything. I said no to everything. Now, everything I do, I have control over."
As fans of Clarkson's Farm will know, Cooper had, famously, never read a book. He's read one now: Clarkson's. "And I thought, why don't I just write one? How hard can it be?'" His publishers lent him a Dictaphone. "In the tractor, that's where all my thoughts come. Normally, I sit in there and I think of better ways to earn more money, but I recorded all my thoughts, then I would type them up at home."
The World According to Kaleb, due to be published in October, is available now on pre-order. "It knocked Jeremy's book off the top for a bit, and it's not out yet," he says, gleefully.
He won't reveal the contents, but one can hope he might touch on subjects as varied as his loves ("I'm an apple snob. I like Pink Lady the best, and I can't eat apples that squeak on my teeth"), his phobias ("I have a massive fear of balloons") and his haircare regime. Having showcased a perm in the later episodes of Clarkson's Farm, he is currently "growing it out for the next style", the details of which he will also not reveal. I liken him – quite charitably, I think – to his Cotswolds neighbour and former hairstyle adventurer, David Beckham. "What do you mean, 'Farming David Beckham'? I'm better looking," he protests. "I like to think of myself as the farming version of Steve Irwin."
He is wary of saying anything potentially divisive – "I can see what's happening with the government and farming and that, but I try and stay out of politics" – but he does believe that farmers "get a hard ride. They get blamed for everything – for killing all the insects, for releasing all this carbon when they plough, when there's Dave flying his little private plane around for three hours."
And he sees supermarket shopping, as opposed to buying from local producers where possible, as not only detrimental to farmers, but a false economy. "Why do you go to the supermarket to buy milk for 80p instead of paying £1? The farm's just up the road. And you're telling me you can drive to Aldi or Co-op for less than 20p?"
Cooper's longstanding ambition is to own his own farm, which he estimates will cost at least £3 million ($5.6 million) for about 200 acres (Clarkson has 1,000 acres, "but he bought that in 2008", Cooper notes). But, thanks to a diversity of new roles, including charity work and talks for young farmers, there are other ambitions too. "I want to be Kaleb Cooper MBE," he says. "Marcus Rashford did it quite easily, so why can't I?" As he tells his young farmers at his talks, "Dreams don't work unless you do."
He's a grafter himself, happily working 18-hour days, and that won't change, he assures me. After our lunch, he'll be off to someone else's farm to spread some fertiliser. And, with Hawkstone cider, "I will be loading the lorries with my apples; I will be driving the apples to the press; I will be planting the trees myself; I will be going to the pubs to try to make the deals. It's exciting, and I run on adrenaline," he says.
"I don't want it to get to a point where I am no longer sat on a tractor. I want to be that person going, 'Yes, I'm on my way,' and then getting on a tractor and spreading their muck." But, he concedes, "I do need to get a PA."
Clarkson's Farm, streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London
