Influencer goes to Iowa to give farming a try
John Deere backs his effort to highlight innovations
DES MOINES, Iowa – He calls it “Cogen’s Farm” and David Cogen delights in explaining how he already has selected the corn variety he will plant this spring after careful research and discussion with an agronomist.
Yet on a warm day in early March, Cogen is already fretting, sounding every bit like a seasoned farmer. Maybe he should plant earlier than he had originally planned. The weather has been awfully warm, after all.
Discussion of hybrid seed choices and planting dates is the kind of conversation that plays out in diners, coffee shops, implement dealerships and hardware stores across Iowa in springtime.
But Cogen’s Farm is a little different. It’s just 20 acres near Bondurant, a mere fraction of what the U.S. Department of Agriculture says is the average-size Iowa farm: 359 acres.
And Cogen also isn’t your typical farmer. He’s from Brooklyn – the one in New York famous for Coney Island and a bridge bearing its name.
With an assist from friends at John Deere, Cogen will try his hand at farming for the first time this year, attempting to profitably raise a crop and bring it to market all while sharing the experience on his social media accounts as he progresses through the growing season.
Cogen’s real job is being a tech influencer on social media, bringing his know-how under the name of theunlockr to his 768,000 subscribers on YouTube and 38,700 followers on Instagram. Over about 15 years, he’s garnered millions of views for his videos, including a particularly famous one entitled “How to Make the Apple Logo on Your iPhone Light Up Like a Macbook.”
In announcing his farming venture earlier this spring, Cogen wrote: “This small 20-acre piece of land just outside of Des Moines, Iowa is where, for the next six months or so, I will attempt to till, plant, spray, harvest and sell corn. This is a project I’ve been wanting to do for years honestly.”
Commuting from Brooklyn, he will start with field work and planting in April, make a return trip to do some spraying this summer and then harvest his crop in the fall. Expenses such as equipment rental, seed and chemical costs will be figured in. Deere will bankroll the project and keep tabs on costs. Cogen knows he needs a solid yield to make a profit.
He told the Des Moines Register he developed his interest in trying to farm from watching British celebrity Jeremy Clark
son’s documentary series “Clarkson’s Farm,” where the TV presenter decides to try his hand at running a farm he owns in the Cotswolds.
For Deere, it is an opportunity to have a wellknown tech influencer highlight its “oh-wow” innovations for monitoring, controlling and automating agricultural processes to achieve maximum efficiency and yields.
“I think a lot of people who don’t live in Iowa and around rural agriculture think of farmers as, you know, pitchforks and overalls. Farmers are very, very sophisticated businessmen and marketers and technologists, so it just seems that technologies is the common link to help people understand how their food is grown,” said Franklin Peitz, technology and innovation PR manager at John Deere.
Peitz said the interest of younger people in technology provides an avenue for the company to educate them on agriculture and how their food is grown.
“Autonomous cars or self-driving cars still haven’t really hit the market. However, we’ve had self-driving tractors for almost a quarter of a century now,” he said. “Just the adoption of technology in agriculture is tremendous and we’ve got a really great story to share and we’re just trying to shed a light on it.”
The ultimate goal of the project, he said, is to educate people on how complex and difficult farming can be and how many different decisions growers have to make.
It was Deere that first reached out in 2021, offering Cogen and some other tech influencers an opportunity to come to Iowa, where it has several plants, and Illinois, where Deere is based in the Quad Cities, to try out some of the technology.
Cogen drove a huge Deere combine and was hooked.
He jumped at the chance to try his hand at farming when the company offered the opportunity.
“I think your average person does not know what it takes to farm. They have an idea in their head of what that is and it’s just not true. I think I would like to just show literally what everyone goes through in farming and the business side of things. I would love to be able to show people because I think that’s also fascinating to me and how hard it is and how small the margins actually are,” he said.
Cogen describes himself as a competitive person.
“I would be super, super stoked if I could turn a profit, any profit,” he said. “That’s what I want to do. I want to just, like, make something off of the land and get a good yield and not end up just losing money.”