Two weeks ago, a very important internet dog (to me) passed away.
He belonged to Suzanna Crampton, a sheep farmer in Ireland. The dog was, quite amazingly, named Big Fellow. He was a proper farm dog — he knew how to be gentle with the sheep, and he knew how to jump up on Crampton’s little tractor for a ride to the pasture.
I’ve known about Big Fellow for 6 years or so thanks to Crampton’s Vine account, Zwartbles Ireland. I found this interview with her from 2016, when having 10,000 followes and 80 million loops was a relatively impressinve feat.
I loved Crampton’s Vines and have followed her from one platform to the next (unfortunately, she’s not on TikTok). Over that time I’ve gotten to know all her animals by name, like Ovemitt the cat (this woman really has a knack for naming animals) and the various premature Zwartble lambs she kept alive and warm in her AGA cooker.
I’m telling you about Crampton and Big Fellow as evidence that sharing farming life on social media isn’t new. As long as trendy teens have had iPhones, so have farmers.
On TikTok, farming is flourishing. I would argue though, that it looks a little different. The farmers gaining followers are millennials and Gen Zers1 who aren’t taking over family businesses or inheriting homesteads. They moved from a more corporate life, or skipped it altogether. Their farms raise animals for compansionship, not consumption (eggs aside), as you can be assured each one has a name.
It’s a different slice of rural life, one that’s very purposely ideallic. And a year and whatever into a pandemic, I’m not surprised people are all over it.
Meet the farmers
There are plenty of farmers on TikTok these days but I’m going to highlight some popular favourites.
First is @useless_farm, an account run by a woman named Amanda somewher in Ontario.
The Useless Farm is what its name suggests — a place where there is no livestock, no crops that I’ve ever seen, but a whole host of very beloved animals (except Karen). There’s some alpaca, two emus, a mini donkey, a very fancy Rooster, and a small horse or two.
The account big viral moment, that I’d argue was part of farmtok’s origin story, was a TikTok of Michael. Poor, sweet Michael.
Last December, the account posted a video of Michael looking like the little airhead he is.
“Michael you poor, sweet thing. You don’t have a thought behind those eyes do you, sweet boy,” Amanda said in the audio. That audio was then reused thousands of times more by people showing off their equally dense-looking pets and loved ones.
Like this himbo of a cat.
I don’t actually know the origin story of this farm. Amanda has alluded to having some sort of office job, so I want to believe that she just up and decided she wanted a farm and that was that. Maybe I just want that to be it because it gives me hope that I too could one day have a farm (with those fainting goats!!!).
The joy of this useless farm is each animal has its own personality, both real and as imagined by their human mother. I mean, there’s a donkey that needs constant human touch, it’s great.
Next is @mommyfarmer, who is both a mom and a farmer named Rebecca Pyle. She lives with her husband and kids at Twin Pines Farm, a historic site the couple bought in 2019 and refurbished. Now, it’s the perfect fairy tale setting, with a cute little white farmhouse, rolling green pastures, fluffy animals, etc.
It’s the kind of place where kids come to pet animals and you can do goat yoga. As far as I can tell no one’s getting slaughtered for dinner, you know? That kind of vibe.
The whole account is really a rural fantasy. In an average video, Pyle strolls through the sunshine with her pack of corgis and lets out all the animals, chatting with them along the way. It is incredibly soothing to watch this woman ask how her goats are doing, or call her chickens by name. When the pigs snort back at her in greeting, I feel a tug in my heart.
It’s cheery, it’s beautiful, and I want this woman to check on my mental state the same way she does for Virgil the goat.
And finally, I want to mention another happy place, @RedleadRanch. This is owned by a delightful guy named Brian.
When I’m telling you I could watch Brian pick produce for hours, I mean it. There’s something so satisfying, so whistful, about watching him forage through his vegetable patches and put together a colourful basket. I want to swim in him talking about the “beautiful abundance” of his garden.
I first found Brian by watching him so gently, so sweetly round up his loose chickens (who all have cute names, of course).
On the farm’s website, it explains that Brian was a lifelong city kid who ended up leaving that to move to Tennessee with his partner. Again, living my fantasy.
The whoe channel just emobodies kindness, a slower pace, and appreciating the fruits of one’s labour.
If you’re sending some common threads, well, welcome to the next section.
The softer side of farm life
If TikTok serves escapism, farmtok is the ultimate escape.
It’s not a coincidence that none of these farms and what you’d call working farms. Well, okay, I don’t claim to know proper farm terminology, but none of these farms are, for example, producing animals for slaughter or growing crops in an industrial capacity.
These are hobby farms and sanctuaries, not places that provide income the way farms more traditionally do.
And I mean, of course! No one outside of animal activists wants to see behind the curtain of how our food gets made. There’s a reason milk cartoons show cows out in fields with a bucket and stool beside them. Showing a row of cows in an industrial farm hooked up to machines doesn’t sell the same way.
It’s the same here. These farms in particular show a fantasy — a farming setting where you’re not just surviving, or trying to hold on to a dying way of life.
It’s pure escapism. A world without offices and Zoom calls and Uber Eats. No worries about crops dying, no sending the cows to the butcher. It’s not these people aren’t making an income somehow, we’re just spared from the banality of modern working life. Instead we get sunshine and fuzzies. It makes a life where your biggest worry is where Miss Featherbottom the chicken is, not how you’re going to pay rent. And god, isn’t that nice?
And so then it also isn’t a surprise that now is when farmtok is having its renaissance. Show me a city-dwelling, work-from-home millennial who hasn’t dreamt of escaping the grind and rising housing prices to live on some plot of land where they can have a donkey. When you’ve been cooped up in a one bedroom apartment since March 2020, farm life sounds widly appealing.
The downside I’m guessing this sort of fanciful country living is only a small, small sliver of the great landscape of modern farming. And the actual logistics of keeping the farm that doesn’t create income is probably a lot harder than these TikToks make it look.
Plus we all saw in Toronto Life just how difficult a transition it can be to get out of the city!
That brings me back to Crampton. I always appreciate that in her Vines because she never softened anything. Yes, there were beautiful foggy mornings and close ups of baby lambs, but she was also honest about death and disease, and about how at the end of the season, most of the animals were sold for meat. Although I loved escaping to Crampton’s farm, I wasn’t particulary jealous. It looked like genuinely hard work and a lifestyle that wouldn’t suit me.
Farmtok, though? Sign me up! Right now, I want the escapism. I want to think about a perfect little sundrenched life scooping up eggs. I want to believe it wouldn’t be a terrible decision. I want to ignore how poorly acrylic nails mix with farm chores. I want reality to fuck right off.
I’m lucky (priveleged!) that both myself and my partner got to keep our jobs through COVID. But would I happily give up a working day of two people on video calls with nary a wall between them to simply think of what to name my goats? Hell yes.
Farmtok keeps alive the fantasy that one day I’ll escape the terrors of modern capitalism and for that, I am grateful.
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