Even my college friends were so surprised, they enabled me to write a few stories that would enable viewers to enjoy the hilarious consequences' of my attempts to manage the woods and the meadows and the fields full of wheat and barley and oilseed rape.
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When I first started it felt impossible, I thought that I wouldn't be able to do anything. 
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Still, I was confident I'd manage. Man has been farming for 12,000 years, so I figured it must be in our DNA by now. You put seeds in the ground, weather happens and food grows. Easy.
   
Unfortunately I could not have picked a worse year to begin. We had the wettest planting season on record. 
 
I'm sitting here on a lovely Autumn day and, apart from 10 acres of oilseed rape completely dead due to the extortionate heat we had over the summer but, everything seems to be growing quite well. And only two sheeps have died. And as there's so much to do, I'm not wandering around the house, glugging J2O's from the bottle and watching terns of Cash in the Attic. I'm a proper worker. 
   
And better yet, I still have something to write about, here in the "Country" section of your magazine - my tractor.
I could have got a Fendt. Everyone says they're the best. Or I could have bought a Fastrac. But obviously I wanted a John Deere. So that's what I've got. An 6155R 2020, to be precise.
 
John Deere was a tractor-maker long before it made hand-tools, but the business moved on- in 1837. Today they're made in Germany and US. If an Aventador were to make love to a spaceship, this is what you'd end up with. It's Big. Even the front tyres are nearly taller than me. You have to climb up a four-rung ladder to reach the door handle. It's Vast, so vast, in fact, that it wouldn't fit into the small barn. I therefore had to help build a bigger one.
 
Every single farmer type who's seen it says the same thing. That, they intone with a rural tug on the flat cap, 'is too big for a farm of your size' But in my mind tractors are like penises. They cannot be too big. Yet the farmers are quite right. It is too big. Not only will it not fit into the barn, it won't fit through the front gate, as I found out when I hit both gate posts on to the driveway. So I've had to build a new driveway. It is also too powerful. The straight-four turbocharged diesel produces only 120 horsepower, which, in car terms, is Golf GTI territory, but there are 775 torques.
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This means that when you attach a piece of equipment to its rear end, it is immediately ripped to shreds. Not that I can attach anything to its rear end. It's all heavy engineering back there and I just know that if I tried, you'd be reading about yet another farmer walking for four miles across his fields with his severed arm in a bag. To put cultivators and rollers and drills on the back, Ive therefore had to get help from a former employee a woman called Keeley. Who also says my tractor's too big. She reckons her CLAAS is better. We argue about this a lot. I concede the John Deere is a bit complicated. You start it and there's an almighty roar from the vertical smokestack, which is a full pins in diameter. And then you put it in gear. And then you put it in gear with the other gear lever, and then you let the clutch in, before you realize you haven't selected forward from the other gear lever and you reverse into the Goats Paddock. To change gear on the move, though, you use a fourth gear lever. There are, I'm told, forty-eight gears forward and
reverse. Happily, there are only two brake pedals and two throttles. But I did count 164 buttons before I opened the arm rest and found 24 more. None of them is labelled, which is a worry as all of them are designed to engage stuff that will tear off one of my arms.
 
Eventually, though, it all began to move and I discovered something unusual. The tractor has suspension and so does the seat, but they are designed to operate independently, so when the tractor is going up, the seat is always coming down. This means you alternate between severe spinal compression and a banged head. I clung so desperately to the steering wheel that after just three minutes it came off. Literally, off.
 
I've never been terrified at 25 mph before, but in that tractor I really was. Since then, I've driven it very slowly into six gates, a hedge, a telegraph pole, another tractor and a shipping container. I think I'm right in saying that I have not completed a single job without having at least one crash. 
 
Doing a three-point turn at the end of a cultivating run? I'm bad at that. I always go through the fence. I'm also very bad at ‘drilling'. This is the word we farmer types use for "planting'. Mainly this is because, to do it properly, you must install the type of computer that Nasa uses for calculating re-entry angles. That's another aspect of farming I can't do: computer programming. Which is why some of my tramlines are I oft and some are in Yorkshire.
 
However, despite all this, when I'm trundling along and the air-conditioning is on and there's a constant dribble of socialism coming from Radio 4, I confess I start to understand why Forrest Gump was happy, after all his adventures, to end up on a tractor mowing the school football field. I'm especially happy when the engine is under load, because the stupendous noise coming from that exhaust pipe drowns out Marcus Brigstocke. And when I finish a field and I climb down the ladder and sit on a fence I've just broken to enjoy a bottle of beer and a Ploughmans sandwich, I can look back at the work I've done and feel a tiny bit proud. It's not nursing or doctoring, I understand that, but growing bread and beer and vegetable oil is somehow a damn sight more rewarding. 
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Over the weeks, I shall be bringing you more news from the farm each week.
Cost of tractor, second-hand: £40,000
Cost of barn to put it in: £28,000
Cost of driveway it can actually use: £2,000
Cost of repairing the damage I've done so far: £100,000
But it does run on red diesel.