Meet the ‘agri-influencers’, Ireland’s next generation of women farmers

Fiona Bergin is cleaning a farmyard. The wheelbarrow fills and empties as she works her way around the yard. After hosing down the shovel, she rewards herself with a mouthful of water from the hose. The simple 51-second video on TikTok has been viewed almost 367,000 times.

After praising the refreshing qualities of hose water, one follower tells @fionabergin that her video “settles something in my soul”. Another fan praises her wholesome content. “You’re my dose of happiness no matter what you’re doing,” the follower comments. A 2022 video shows her petting a cow she meets on a mountain hike. That one has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. “I watch this every time I’m sad and suddenly it’s not so bad any more,” says one follower. “Irish woman conversing with cows is a vibe I didn’t know I needed,” says another. “Such wholesome content, please don’t change,” one follower pleads.

Welcome to FarmTok, a calm and pastoral corner of TikTok where young farmers are amassing thousands of followers by posting videos of their daily routines. Wholesome is a word that frequently pops up in the comments. On a video-sharing platform that has been accused of everything from spreading misinformation to damaging teenagers’ mental health, young farmers are finding that their posts provide a soothing balm for their followers. Videos of hens urgently scuttling out of their enclosures to start the day, lambs springing in the air or calves playfully nudging their owners will do that to you.

It all started for Karen Moynihan when she was admiring the cattle in the shed one day. “The cattle were looking good, so I thought I’d take a video, a pan-shot of them,” the part-time suckler farmer from Kerry says. Her friends are not involved in farming so she thought the cattle might find a more appreciative audience on TikTok. And she was right. @k_moy now has almost 63,000 followers on the video-sharing platform, and another 60,000 on Instagram. A video of her prepping her Massey Ferguson 135 for work got more than three million views, while a video of her new mini muck spreader has clocked up more than half a million.

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“When I joined TikTok I thought it was just young ones doing dances to music that was trending, but then I found FarmTok,” she recalls. “It’s a massive community. I couldn’t have imagined how big farming was on TikTok before I joined. I don’t have farming friends in real life because I went to the school in the town and college in the city, and it’s only myself and my dad on the farm, so it’s nice to have that community and meet people with similar interests.”

Although she was always interested in the farm, she never planned on farming at this stage in her life. Then, nine years ago, her father Jerry, a carpenter and farmer, was paralysed in a workplace incident. She was working in retail in Cork so she could not help on the farm, but neighbours stepped into the breach. Then she was transferred to Kerry and decided to take over the feeding of the cattle.

“The first year I was feeding morning and evening, but it was very tiring. I would be up at 6[am] and not back to the house until 8.30 or 9 that night. So I started feeding in the evening and lined it up for my dad so that he could push the feed to them in the mornings. He has a gator [an all-terrain vehicle] which allows him to go into the fields.” She describes her father as the brains of the operation, while she is the brawn. She suspects many of her followers are there for her father or their vintage tractor, which was bought by her grandfather second-hand in 1970. “People love the vintage tractors, and it’s unusual to see the 135 as a workhorse on the farm these days.”

Jerry is quietly bemused by his daughter’s videos. “He’s more of a YouTube man so I started doing YouTube videos and he understood it a bit better.” But he has adapted quickly to her social media requirements and often assists without thinking, offering her something to prop up the camera before she even asks for it.

She baulks at the idea that she might be an influencer. “I would say I’m someone who farms and shares that on social media. I wouldn’t consider myself to be an influencer.”

You know you are an influencer when companies start sending you products in the hope that you will use them and feature them in your social media posts. But while many female influencers get baskets of make-up products and clothes, these agri-influencers are more likely to get sheep dip and clippers. Cavan farmer Sophie Bell laughs at the idea that the beauty industry might target her account. “No, I don’t get your general lipstick and beauty products. I might get a calf jacket, [to keep a newborn calf warm], maybe calf feeders, a lot of farm supplies and some equipment for machinery.”

Like Moynihan, she fell into farming. Her father, Henry, had to go abroad for work when she was doing the Leaving Cert, so she had to take over the work on the farm in Virginia. “It gave me a lot more confidence and independence. I learned so much that year.” She went on to study agriculture and animal science at Harper Adams university in the UK before returning to the family farm in Virginia. She now works full-time as a quality control analyst for a veterinary pharmaceutical firm, and farms part-time. She rears dairy heifers for two local farmers on her family farm, preparing them to go into the milking herd next spring, and also milks cows at the weekend.

Bell is up at 6.30am to get the farm work done before heading for the day job. “Before work I check on the animals, feed them and change the fences and take note of any that are coming into heat for breeding. There’s also something happening, even when you think you have a quiet evening,” she says. “In an ideal world I would like to be farming full-time, but it’s not achievable at the moment so I think the stability of the day job is great.”

When Bell was growing up she followed NY Farm Girls on Instagram. Evelyn, Claudia and JoJo Leubner are three sisters who run a dairy and tillage farm in Marrietta, New York. They started posting about their farm on social media in 2015 in an attempt to address some misconceptions about dairy farming. Today, @nyfarmgirls have more than one million followers between Instagram and TikTok and even have their own range of merchandise.

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Popular items include T-shirts and hoodies with logos such as “I Farm, You Eat” and “Manure Happens”. Their social media accounts say they are “advocating” for their farming practices. “They were really inspiring to watch,” Bell recalls. Her agri-influencer days began when she posted a picture on Instagram of a winter’s day on the farm. “I was amazed by how popular it was, so I began posting more of the farm life.” Now @sophie_bell__ has more than 21,400 followers on Instagram and another 12,300 on TikTok. “I’ve only been on TikTok for a year and so I’m surprised at how popular it has been,” she says.

In the beginning Bell’s followers were mostly farmers, but more recently she has noticed many non-farmers engaging with her posts. “If there was a pretty calf, you’d notice how they’d want updates about the calf.” Her most popular costar is Hope, a Belted Galloway calf who was premature and very weak when she was born but has since thrived. Her social media feed isn’t all strictly farming. A popular post involved her hanging used tea bags on the line, in a nod to the stereotype of stingy Cavan people. Another post shows her quietly fuming at the tendency for some men to walk into the yard and ask her if the boss is around. “I wonder why they don’t think I am the boss. It can be tough because you do so much to prove yourself and show that you are capable,” she says.

Female agri-influencers inevitably get some unsolicited comments about their appearance and offers of dates and even marriage, but these women take it in their stride and are not afraid to deploy the block button. They also get frequent comments, often from men, telling them how they should be doing certain jobs. But it can be useful, according to Moynihan. She was using a topper for cutting rushes and put up a video of her struggle to attach the machine to the tractor. Someone suggested using fencing posts in order to slide the topper into position. “Such a simple idea and now it goes on in two minutes.”

My own grandmother was mad for farming but had to emigrate as the farm was given to her brother

—  Hannah Quinn-Mulligan

Unsolicited advice doesn’t faze Katie Shanahan. The part-time sheep farmer from West Cork says that’s just what farmers do. Every farmer, male and female, has their own way of doing things – and they don’t hesitate to tell you how their way is much better than yours.

She used to get some negative comments about petty things such as her nails or her hair, but noticed that if someone made a cruel remark, it would be quickly followed by 20 comments from her followers. “But the longer I’m doing it, I think people realise it doesn’t make a difference. You can do a job the exact same way, however you look.”

She began posting about the farm during a Covid lockdown in 2020. “We got Covid in the family so the whole house had to go into lockdown. It was right in the middle of lambing time and there was lots of new life coming into the farm, so I started posting a few videos here and there and it blew up very quickly.”

She likes to give her followers a rounded view of country life. Indeed, there is plenty to see in her daily life. She went to Clonakilty Agricultural College, did a Master’s in marketing at UCC and now works in the farm management app company Herdwatch, as a content marketing executive. She helps run the family’s pedigree and commercial sheep flock, teaches Irish dancing and presents Farming Now for Hot Country TV on Sky channel 181. Her @k8_eeee account on TikTok has amassed almost 142,000 followers while almost 16,000 more follow her on Instagram.

She says it’s massively important to let people know about the reality of farming and is delighted to give advice on agricultural college and job opportunities in agriculture. “I’d say I speak to three or four girls, and lads, a week, [with them] asking what agriculture college is like, or the Green Cert, or marketing. That’s something I didn’t have when I was younger.”

The need to recognise the farm work being done by women is something Hannah Quinn-Mulligan has been saying for many years. The farmer and journalist (@hqmulligan on Instagram and Twitter) says people talk about getting more women into farming, but “women have always been the backbone of farming”.

She thinks of her great-grandmother in the 1940s, who had nine children and ran the farm when her husband had to go to England for work. “And she got no recognition for that. My own grandmother was mad for farming but had to emigrate as the farm was given to her brother. She was the eldest in the family,” she says. Her grandmother, Catherine Quinn, eventually returned to Ireland with enough money to buy her own farm, and now Hannah farms alongside her in Croom, Co Limerick.

She says attitudes that prioritise sons over daughters for farm inheritance have been frustratingly slow to change. She knows of many cases where daughters who were keen to farm saw the land being left to their brothers, who had no interest in the farm, so that it would remain in the family name. “And then it’s sold because they have no interest.” According to the 2022 Census, women now make up 12.8 per cent of the people employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing. “There are more women farming who are over the age of 80 than there are under the age of 35 because women are traditionally only given the land when they are widowed,” she notes. “And until you change that attitude you will always have a problem.”

She says farmers still repeat the old trope that when a male farmer walks up the aisle to get married he has a farm, and when he walks back down, he has half a farm. It infuriates her. “In reality, if a woman is getting into a relationship for money, she would be far better off going for a software engineer with a steady income, instead of a farmer who can never get a weekend off, or find time for a holiday.”

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Unconscious bias is everywhere when it comes to farming. She recently noticed toy tractors for sale with a range of boys’ names on them, but no girls’ names. “I was mad for farming as a child and I had my toy tractors and I would have Barbie standing in a gap, but what message does it give to young girls when they reach for a tractor to find there are no girls’ names?”

Having more women in leadership positions in farm organisations would help shift attitudes. Katie Shanahan is a member of the Kilmeen Macra na Feirme club and says it is inspiring to see a woman – Elaine Houlihan – as president of the young farmers’ organisation. “She is a great role model for other club members to climb the ranks within their own club. I have become extremely involved in my own club – I’m PRO within Kilmeen and I have recently been elected as chairperson of the social committee within Carbery Macra. I will also be representing Carbery at this year’s Queen of the Land festival in November,” she says.

Getting away from the perception of farming as a life of drudgery would also help, says Moynihan. While she is hard at work in most of her TikToks, she also likes to show herself kicking a ball around. “There’s the perception that if you are not working 12-hour days, six or seven days a week, you’re not farming right. There are too many farmers out there who won’t take a break, won’t take a holiday, and I just want to show that you can do both, you have that bit of downtime and get the work done.”

Despite the challenges of balancing a full-time job with the farm work, she wouldn’t change a thing. “I love it. If you didn’t enjoy it, you couldn’t do it because it consumes a lot of your life. Farming can often mean spending long days in complete isolation, but I have the benefit of getting out to work and then using the farm to clear my head in the evenings.”

The agri-influencers welcome the chance to give non-farmers a glimpse into their lives and to counter claims that farmers do not care about animal welfare. “As a society we are so removed from where our food comes from, and I think people can be very quick to judge,” says Moynihan. “So if we can give any insight to how it all works, it has to be a good thing. I think anyone who has seen my videos will understand the love and care and attention we give the cattle. Especially these days – people are very much into the welfare of their animals.” And Shanahan is happy to show the efforts farmers make to address climate change. “The footage seen on my social media portrays the steps we take as farmers to be environmentally friendly and always reducing the carbon footprint when we can.”

All agree that social media has improved their lives in ways they never expected. “I have travelled all over Ireland, the UK and USA thanks to social media and I love spreading the realities of farming along with a positive country living lifestyle,” says Katie Shanahan. Some of the people she has met online have become firm friends and will be at her wedding next year.

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Because Bell attended agricultural college abroad, she didn’t have many friends in farming when she returned to Cavan. “But now there’s a good group of us boys and girls in the agri-influencer end of things and we try our best to meet up every now and again. It’s really great to have that network of people. Farming can be very isolating.”

But for Moynihan, the most surprising thing about social media was how nice people could be. “I have received so much kindness and support from people,” she says. “That’s something I never expected when I started out. For full-time farmers, social media can only be a positive thing.”