I have come late to farming. There was no epiphany, no eureka moment watching Clarkson’s Farm. The blame lies partly with my neighbour, who’s my running partner and a fellow Pony Club Dad. He’s an agronomist and would enliven our jogs along country lanes with talk of crop rotations. In the end, that other form of muck-raking – journalism – provided the shove I needed. After 24 years at Sky TV, I joined the first presenter line-up (of many) at GB News. I went in the hope of a fresh start at an exciting new channel, only to be thrown out of it when my ratings failed to pass muster.

So, at 55, I am a student again. Or, as those who find themselves at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester prefer, an ‘agri’ at ‘siren’. Friends who went there three decades ago say it had a notoriously raucous campus culture, afloat on a sea of cider. It has changed, but only up to a point. Yes, my first lecture contained approving references to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, climate action, ‘zero hunger’ and gender equality. But out in the fields, where the university still grows commercial crops on Cotswold brash, I see something of farming’s natural resistance to wokery. Corporate groupthink, which has found fertile ground in so many British universities, struggles to put down roots here. This is partly because of the nature of farming itself. Who has time for micro-aggressions when cabbage stem flea beetle is rampant?

My course of study – the Graduate Diploma in Agriculture – has produced some celebrated farmers: Sarah Langford, the former barrister and author of Rooted, and Joe Stanley, the farming conservationist who wrote From Farm to Fork. Unlike them, farming is not part of my family history. When I read Joe’s book, I was reminded that many farmers return to the land after careers elsewhere. This means they already know a lot of the basics, while I struggle to learn from scratch how to reverse a tractor and trailer on my own embryonic farm in Wiltshire.

Part of the attraction of farming life is because of what it is not. Towards the end of my career as a journalist, it sometimes felt as if news broadcasting existed only to peddle ephemera. There was a sense of unreality to it all. On TV, my small tribe of anchormen and women appear wise, even omniscient, but they are coddled by autocue and are required only to know a little bit about a lot. By contrast, there is nothing meretricious about farming. Failure to apply sufficient effort or knowledge or persistence means a crop will fail or an animal will suffer. A flagging farm cannot be fixed by Botox, or a drought ended by agreement with an agent over lunch.

It’s true that society gets the police, politicians and, indeed, journalists it deserves. This rule, though weaker, holds for farmers. Jeremy Clarkson, Kaleb and the Yorkshire Shepherdess prove that the agriculture and celebrity of our age are not incompatible. Online farming stars like Harry Metcalfe and Tom Pemberton are supplementing farm income with serious YouTube streaming revenue. There’s no shortage of practical online advice, but, as in so many other industries, the internet opens ideological fault lines too. Farming grievances have long influenced traditional politics in France and, more recently, the Netherlands. But agriculture now also has its own culture wars, fought online. Arable farming, for instance, is in the grip of a kind of religious revivalism. Guilt about the way we have abused our soil for decades has spawned an almost evangelical belief in the evils of the plough. Salvation comes in the form of direct drilling and ‘minimum tillage’. In other words, sowing seeds without disturbing soil through cultivation. But without ploughing, how are we meant to control weeds?

No ideological issue is more contested than that of re-wilding. Recently, I was in northern Italy, the scene of a fatal attack on a young jogger by a re-wilded brown bear earlier this year. The locals where I stayed were even more worried about the growing numbers of wolves than about bears and pointed to the remains of wild boar as evidence of attacks. Tasteless as it is to say, this fear proved useful. I was in Italy enjoying a holiday with Olivia, who like me was widowed five years ago. With dusk gathering, and the wolf threat surely growing, she was keen to get inside as soon as possible, so had little choice but to accept my proposal of marriage. By the summer she will be, if not a farmer’s wife, then a farming student’s wife.