Farmers bring reality television online
YouTube footage of rural life means additional income
PEACHAM, Vt. — The sweet smell of hay rose off the earth on a recent evening as Morgan Gold strode across his farmyard in heavy boots. He crossed the paddock, scanning for new eggs, water levels, infected peck wounds, rips in the fence line.
But mainly, he was looking for content.
Although Gold sells poultry and eggs from his Vermont duck farm, most of what he produces as a farmer is, well, entertainment.
With the good-natured ease of a standup comedian, Gold does his chores while carrying a digital camera in one hand and murmuring into a microphone.
Then, twice a week, he posts a short video on YouTube about his exploits as a neophyte farmer, often highlighting failures or pratfalls. Keeping a close eye on analytics, he has boosted his YouTube audiences high enough to provide a steady advertising revenue of around $2,500 to $4,000 a month — about eight times what he earns from selling farm products.
Northeast Vermont is rocky, hilly and isolated, and generations of small farmers have cast about for new ways to scrape out a living: the sleigh rides, the alpacas, the therapy ponies, the pick-your-own hemp. It is a new thing, though, to make farm life into reality TV.
Gold, 40, has learned the hard way — he tried to take a month off last winter — that any gap in his YouTube publication schedule results in a steep drop-off in audience. So he keeps a running list of themes that could be fodder for future videos. It reads, in part:
Should I Feed My Dog
Eggs?
Don’t Trust This Duck My Homestead Is a Dumpster Fire
What Does My Guard Dog Do All Day?
He has learned, through trial and error, what works with an audience. The sheepdog-mounted GoPro camera didn’t work.
“People were like, ‘Ten seconds and I was puking,’ ” said his wife, Allison Ebrahimi Gold.
Slow, sumptuous drone footage of his sun-dappled 150 acres — land porn for wistful cubicle dwellers — that definitely works.
Character development works, as demonstrated by Gold’s most popular video, “Our Freakishly Huge Duck (This Is Not NORMAL),” which, as he would put it, blew the doors off. Slowmotion footage of waggling goose butts set to a bouncy, whimsical orchestral soundtrack works.
But few things compel audiences, he came to realize, more than a real-life setback. He came to this realization last summer when a mink broke into his duck hutch, leaving its interior spattered with eggs and blood and feathers.
“It was one of the most depressing days of my life,” he said, “but at the same time, I’m thinking, ‘How is the audience going to react to this sort of thing?’ ”
The next videos, which featured freaky night-vision footage of the offending mink, helped boost Gold’s YouTube audience toward the 100,000-viewer threshold. And it helped him understand his own place in the universe of farmer influencers, which tilts heavily toward the how-to genre.
“The storytelling part is what I’m good at,” he said. “I’m not that good at the farming part.”
It is a paradox that the less financially viable small farming becomes, the more Americans want to experience it firsthand.
This idea is as old as the dude ranch; video streaming of farm life is only the most recent iteration.
Amy Fewell, the founder of Homesteaders of America, said the number of farmers who earn substantial income off YouTube channels is steadily climbing and stands at around 50.
Some earn money through product endorsement deals, like Al Lumnah, who posts videos five days a week from his farm in Littleton, New Hampshire.
It’s a lot of work: Lumnah wakes up at 3:30 a.m. so he can edit the previous day’s footage in time to post new video at 6 a.m., which his 210,000 regular viewers, who are scattered as far as
Cambodia and India, have come to expect.
“People will say, lunchtime here Ukraine,’ ” Lumnah said.
Others, like Justin Rhodes, a farmer in North Carolina, have parlayed a giant YouTube audience into a dues-paying membership enterprise — he has 2,000 fans who pay annual fees of up to $249 for private instruction and direct communication via text message.
“We don’t sell a single farm product,” Rhodes said. “Our farm product is education and entertainment.”
Gold, who moved to Vermont and started his YouTube channel four years ago, has not reached that point. He still has a full-time job as a marketing executive for an insurance company and so far has refused the endorsement deals. He has built up his ‘It’s in flocks of chicken, geese and ducks to 100 and is hoping to add cows next spring.
He’s certainly captured the interest of the farmers who surround him in Peacham, said Tom Galinat, a neighbor whose family farms 550 acres.
Farmers here struggle to eke out a living from rocky, uneven soil and a hostile climate, and they are astounded — in some cases a little jealous — to discover Gold is internet famous, he said.
As Gold’s audience has grown, he has at times been taken aback by the enthusiasm.
Several dozen viewers have driven to Peacham and knocked on his door, hoping to buy eggs or talk about ducks, something his wife described as “really distressing.”
“Morgan is so vulnerable on film,” she said, “that people assume they know us as people.”
Most of it is nice. Viewers send handcrafted accessories for his outbuildings, like a plaque that says, in elaborate lettering, “Ye Olde Quack House.” When one of the Golds’ barn cats was hit by a car recently, at least 50 viewers offered cash to cover her medical bills.
Samier Elrasoul, a nursing student in Howell, Michigan, is so devoted to Gold’s videos that he got a vanity license plate reading QUACKN, in honor of the catchphrase — “Release the Quacken!” — that Gold exclaims when he frees his ducks from their hutch in the morning.
Elrasoul, 34, said the videos inspire him because he, too, has a dead-end job — he works as a supervisor at Starbucks — and he, too, harbors a dream of changing his life.
“Seeing some guy just like me, just dropping everything and doing what he’s passionate about, was very encouraging to see,” he said. “I’m like, wow, he’s living his dream.”