Young farmers are reaping bumper harvest on TikTok

There’s footage of Braindí penning a flock of sheep to Louis Theroux’s Jiggle Jiggle rap and of a herd of Friesians strutting past a field to “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”. A video of Ó Súilleabháin’s younger sister, Niamh, tumbling off a horse into a ditch has attracted 8.4 million views. “My sister is such an attention seeker,” he captioned the clip showing people rushing to her aid. “Just stay on the horse.”

In one recent post showing a couple of horses in a wet field Ó Súilleabháin channels David Attenborough’s soothing lilt before reverting to an exaggerated Kerry drawl to describe them as “touo dirty harses” (which “much like the locals”, he says, are “charming”). In another, he shares his “words of wisdom” as Gaeilge, before translating: “It sounds complicated but basically it means there’s more than one way to do something. Literally it means there are many ways to kill a cat other than to choke him with butter. Use that in your life.”

His followers, mostly women and mostly from America, can’t seem to get enough. “I just spread your voice on my toast and ate it and it was delicious,” one commented. “Ladies, form an orderly queue to the left please,” another posted.

Ó Súilleabháin is part of a new breed of Gen Z and millennial farmers using social media to promote Irish agriculture — a sector employing more than 160,000 people — far beyond Ireland. The timing couldn’t be better for the industry, which faces soaring costs in feed and materials, and criticism over its role in the environmental crisis. TikTok-famous farmers give their followers a glimpse into rural Ireland, from feeding and fencing to dosing and dehorning. They’re taking the Irish language to new audiences and smashing stereotypes around the role of women and the LGBTQ+ community in farming.

And they dance. A recent video of Katie Shanahan busting some moves to Honky Tonk Badonkadonk in front of her blue Ford 5000 tractor has been viewed more than 40,000 times. Shanahan, who lives at home on her family’s beef and sheep farm in Leap, Co Cork, has more than 120,000 followers on TikTok and uses her profile (@k8_eeee) to promote women in agriculture.

Shanahan started posting FarmTok content during the pandemic when the Irish dancing school she runs was forced to close and she had to self-isolate from her job as a social care worker. “I just had rakes of free time so I started taking very simple videos, no fancy editing, of me on the farm,” she says. “I think people really enjoyed the natural content showing me working with my three brothers and mum and dad.”

A compilation of her two pet lambs — Dolly and Polly — from bottle-fed babies following her around the farm to full-grown ewes running up to her with their own lambs in tow has been viewed almost 400,000 times. A fan favourite are her transformation videos: Shanahan, 26, goes from muddy oilskins to slinky dress, complete with full hair and make-up. “You don’t have to be a man to be a farmer,” she told The Sunday Times. “I like promoting the idea that farmers don’t all look the same or act the same.”

You won’t find Karen Moynihan twerking on social media. She’s more likely to post about her Massey Ferguson 135, a 46-year-old tractor. Moynihan, who also works as an area manager at Aldi, started uploading videos on TikTok (@k_moy) two years ago and shows her 44,000 followers the “struggles of a part-time suckler farmer” in Kilcummin, Co Kerry.

She works on the 50-acre farm with her dad, Jerry, who has been in a wheelchair since a construction accident eight years ago. There’s nothing glamorous about her work: calving, dehorning, tagging and ringing.

Moynihan, 34, wants to be a role model for the next generation of girls considering a career in the male- dominated farming sector. “I want to show that I’m doing it all,” she says. “I get messages sometimes from women saying their daughter loves my TikTok — that’s why I do it.”

Teenager Lauren Ennis (@laurenennis135) has amassed 75,000 followers and 1.4 million likes by posting TikTok videos from her family’s suckler and sheep farm in Co Offaly. April Higgins, 30, and Alymer Power, 37, owners of a pedigree Valais Blacknose flock in Co Limerick, have attracted more than 50,000 fans on the platform (@bopeep_valaisblacknose).

Irish FarmTok videos have racked up tens of millions of views in the past year as farming content explodes on the platform. Videos tagged with “FarmLife’’ attracted 12 million views in August alone; those tagged with “Agriculture”, “Agri” or “Farm” collectively had 30 million views last month. TikTok has noticed the trend and for the first time will have a tent at next week’s annual National Ploughing Championships. Rebecca O’Keeffe, from TikTok, says that the agriculture industry is using the platform not just to share cute videos of lambing season but also to talk about the challenges and isolation of life on a farm.

Last year Mícheal Cullinane used TikTok to come out as gay. “I thought that if more people see me accepting who I am, they might accept who they are,” he says. The reaction, however, was mixed. “Real farmers are not gay,” one commented. The most popular comment, from an apparent farming account, said: “Someone is getting an unfollow.”

Cullinane works on his family’s 500-acre dairy and beef farm in Co Cork. “People were commenting that my dad must be disappointed but I know my dad; he and my mum are my main supporters,” he says. “It wasn’t great. But the video’s still up there because I’m proud of who I am.”

Cullinane, 26, says that growing up gay in rural Ireland was difficult. He never thought he’d find a partner or be able to get married. He is also a support worker in the intellectual disability sector and started his account (@mcullinane1996) in lockdown. Today it has almost 30,000 followers and 1.6 million likes. He started it to document how Irish farmers cared for their animals but hopes that the message people take away from his videos is to be themselves. “You never know what someone else is going through,” he says.

Ó Súilleabháin never expected his videos to become so popular. “It started, really, out of boredom,” he says. “I started making videos for my friends on Snapchat, just little jokes, and my sister said they’d do really well on TikTok.”

His first couple of videos “did terribly” but after a few weeks Ó Súilleabháin uploaded a clip of Braindí, his then 13-week-old pup, whom he was training to herd cows. Overnight it blew up: more than 50,000 people saw the video. Today it has more than 1.4 million views. “From then on people started asking me questions about the farm and how things work in Ireland,” he says. “It just grew from there.”

After lockdown restrictions eased Ó Súilleabháin’s parents, who run the farm, realised he might be on to something. “They hadn’t much interest at first. It was so out of the ordinary for them — my father doesn’t even have a smartphone,” he says. “But then they’d be meeting people who’d say, ‘Oh my God, you’re the Kerry Cowboy’s mother or father.’ They realised I was actually doing something here, whereas I think prior to that they thought this lad going around with the phone while we’re trying to get work done was just a bit of a nuisance.”

Ó Súilleabháin’s page now has 5.7 million likes. He says his goal with the videos is to celebrate Irish language and culture, while giving followers an insight into agriculture and dispelling myths around farming, such as claims about animal cruelty. “Of course you see horror videos out there but they’re just freak cases, they’re not the standard,” he says. “I try to be open about how things are done here and show people how it really is. A lot of my followers are from urban backgrounds and I like that I’ve opened their eyes to where food comes from.”

Ó Súilleabháin says his experience on TikTok has been mostly positive, with “more marriage proposals than death threats”. Ironically, Ó Súilleabháin’s success promoting Irish agriculture might be the very thing that takes him away from the farm. Through his profile he was offered two presenting roles on TG4, which were filmed over the summer. Other opportunities have since arisen, though he can’t talk about them publicly yet. Farming will always have a role in his life, Ó Súilleabháin says, but he may be headed in another direction.

“To be honest, I can’t say that I will stay farming,” he says. “There are a lot of challenges in farming and I’ve got a taste for the outside world now. I’d like to balance my passion of being at home on the farm with the animals and promoting the Irish language with working in the media.”

He adds: “It’s amazing that this all started with one video of a puppy.”