Meet Harriet Cowan, the breakout star of Clarkson’s Farm With her killer lashes, the can-do farmhand is the stand-out star in the new series of Clarkson’s Farm. We meet her at the family homestead in Derbyshire.
With her petite stature, meticulously curled blonde hair and full face of make-up, Harriet Cowan is far from the image of a stereotypical farmhand. And yet, at just 24, this young woman is changing the way we think about farming. After arriving on the most recent season of Clarkson’s Farm to help Jeremy with his duties while his sidekick Kaleb was away on a national tour — and subsequently charming the show’s millions of viewers — she is now one of the most recognisable farmers in the country.
“Mums have reached out to say my daughter’s wanting to go into farming,” she says. “Or I hear about four-year-old girls who want a toy tractor for Christmas, so that’s really nice.”
We met on the family farm where Cowan grew up: a tiny cottage looking out over the sweeping Derbyshire countryside, with cows grazing in the next field, barns full of hay bales and a whole host of tractors that she points out enthusiastically as we pass. Cowan’s grandmother is resting inside and her father potters around tending to his land, offering us large cups of tea and looking utterly bemused at the flurry of glitz and glam that has descended on to his farm.
Even before Cowan appeared on Clarkson’s Farm she had built up her own TikTok audience of about 40,000 followers (it has now risen to 730,000), just from uploading videos of herself driving tractors in Derbyshire. Then one day last year she received a message on social media from the team behind the Amazon Prime series. “Charlie [Ireland, Clarkson’s land agent] let me know they were looking for someone to come and help,” she says. “I think they were keen for it to be a woman who could do that role and show they could do it well.”
Cowan had heard of Jeremy Clarkson but she wasn’t particularly aware of his work. “I wasn’t really into the cars thing growing up.” Nonetheless, the offer intrigued her. Clarkson, she says, is “very much like every other farmer I’ve ever met” and “very much willing to learn. He wanted to do well by the farm.” Plus, “he’s got the physique of a farmer”, she adds, laughing.
Cowan is part of the furniture in this rural community. Her grandparents bought this bit of land in the 1950s and as a child she and her older sister, Isabel, would “spend every afternoon in Dad’s tractor passenger seat”. When the other young farmers first heard that Cowan was going to be on TV, “they thought, ‘Ah, you’ll be in the back of the pub and they’ll have filmed the pub and the back of your head will be in it,’ ” she says. “So when it came out they were, like, ‘Oh shit, she is actually in it a bit more than I thought she was!’ ”
Just down the road from us is the cattle farm where Cowan works with her boyfriend, James. The pair met at Belper Young Farmers Club when she was 15. At first “everyone was just friends. But when I turned 17 he’d recently got out of a relationship and I was, like, ‘Ooh, I really fancy him,’ ” she giggles.
Every morning the couple get up as the sun rises. Cowan does her make-up and then feeds the animals. From 8.30am to 4.30pm she does her second job as a community nurse. “The moment you get off nursing you get in the tractor and spend the evening in the tractor,” she explains. “Every farmer will have two professions.”
The hard work of these two incredibly demanding jobs does not faze her. “When you’ve grown up on the farm you’ve already got that work ethic — you’ve seen that from your parents. I fit in with everyone else, everyone’s got a good work ethic around here.”
Clarkson agrees. “Harriet was like a pocket-sized powerhouse,” he tells me. “All farmers work hard but she set new standards. I don’t think I ever saw her sit still.”
It wasn’t always a given that she would go into farming. “Growing up, I used to be so afraid of the big cows,” she says, chuckling. “I was always a very girlie girl. I wanted to be a ballerina.” But, she adds, “there was always going to be farming in my blood. Then, when I met my other half, that’s when it really sparked. I’d always done tractor driving but the cattle side of it started when I met him. I found a passion for it more on the livestock side.”
Still, Cowan hasn’t lost that “girlie girl” part of herself. On Clarkson’s Farm she always wore her fake lashes. “Obviously I’ve not got them any more, but that’s mainly because I bought a house [close to the family farm] and they were very expensive to maintain. So I went for a lash-lift instead.” In a memorable scene in the show, when she spotted Clarkson’s wayward eyebrows, she whipped out a pair of scissors and gave them a trim. “I was, like, ‘God, they are massive.’ ” Given Cowan cuts her dad’s hair and eyebrows, “I wasn’t afraid. I was just thinking, ‘Hmm, they look awful.’ ”
As well as fixing her boss’s brows, she taught him many things about farming — including that he has been driving the wrong tractor for years. But did she learn anything from him? “He’s still very much grounded and he doesn’t let the fame and all the publicity get to him.”
One of the many conversations the pair had was about loneliness in farming and the high rates of suicide among young farmers. Cowan worries about young men in her industry. “I feel that particularly for men in farming, it’s seen as a weak thing to talk about your mental health, to talk about being lonely and to open up to each other, so they just don’t do it. I think it’s a perceived idea that if you don’t talk about it, it’s not there, it isn’t happening. Whereas it definitely is and the sooner that they’ll talk about it the better it gets. Once I’ve had a good natter with my friends about everything, it seems like the weight’s been halved. They just need to start opening up. Don’t you?” she grins at her dad, who shrugs gruffly and smiles.
It is conversations such as this that have allowed Clarkson’s Farm to alter the way our country thinks about farming — bringing the daily challenges and struggles of agricultural workers, previously hidden, into our homes. Cowan’s arrival takes this even further: showing a young woman who can keep up with the boys any day.
It’s a matter of pride for Cowan that she can show every part of herself, including her feminine side. She enthusiastically tells me that she “loved having my nails done when I was a teenager”. Surprisingly, it’s the regulations associated with her work as a nurse that means she no longer can, rather than the farming. “Driving a tractor with your nails is fine. It’s harder to get off the toilet and wipe your bum with nails than it is to drive a tractor.”
She admits “there are definitely challenges” to being a young woman in farming. “I’m lucky enough to have been born into a family where it was just me and my sister, so there were no men to take on the family farm. So Dad was like, ‘I’m left with you pair. I’ll have to make it work.’ ” But, she adds, “It’s also fun that I can be just as accepted as any lad. If you can have a conversation with a bloke about a PTO [power take-off] or the hydraulics of a tractor, you’ll be fine, as that’s pretty much all we talk about at the pub.”
Cowan has loved showing the public — on the show and on her own social media — that women can farm too. Now she wants to start a YouTube channel “to showcase the farm, and how we farm in Derbyshire”. As for Clarkson, “I’ve always said I’ll be very open if Jeremy needs me again. We’ve sort of left it like that. If he needs me, I’m here.”
In the meantime, what does the girl from the farm make of her new-found fame? She grins beatifically. “Like, honestly, it’s so nice, and everyone is so kind. I think, why do people want a picture with me? It’s so crazy — because I didn’t really think people would care that much about a girl who did farming.”
