COMMENT: Farmers always the butt of the joke but it's stopped being funny
Katie Gleeson's column in the Tipperary Star and The Nationalist
There’s a certain “farmer” you’ll meet over and over again, not so much in real life, but in TV adverts, comedy sketches and newspaper cartoons.
Exclusively a man, slow to speak, heavy on the accent, crowned with a flatcap bejewelled in straw and thinks “soil testing” means poking the ground with a stick.
His sentences trail off halfway, his wit is unintentional, and it makes for a good laugh. But as farming struggles with generational renewal, new entrants and a changing role in Irish society, has the joke stopped being funny.
We’ve been decent sports about it for years. Rolled our eyes, let the laugh run its course. No other profession lives more rent free in the pisstaker’s paradigm.
But the more I see how farming is portrayed, the less harmless it feels.
Because when you tell the same joke often enough, people start to believe it.
Since I started sharing our own farm online, I’ve realised just how far off the public’s picture of farming can be.
I’ve had people genuinely shocked that we use apps to measure grass growth, track soil nutrients, or monitor emissions. They think it’s cutting-edge. In reality, it’s part of daily life for most farmers.
And here lies the rub, if the starting assumption is that farmers don’t do any of this, then the stereotype has already done its work.
When farmers are portrayed as thick or backward often enough, even in online sketches, people start to believe it. Social science has a name for it: Stereotype Threat.
A 2022 study in the Irish Journal of Agricultural and Food Research looked at how negative media portrayals influence both how farmers are seen and how they see themselves.
It found that younger people are less likely to consider farming as a career when it’s shown as outdated or low-status.
The researchers even compared it to nursing, where years of biased portrayals have put people off joining the profession.
In other words, the “ah sure, it’s only a bit of craic” image might be doing more long-term damage than we realise.
It affects how outsiders see the work, but more importantly, it shapes how insiders see themselves.
Farming is no different to other sections of society.
If people don’t take you seriously, they stop listening. I, unfortunately, have seen this in action on a couple of occasions at events.
And once you lose their ear, you lose influence: in public debates, in policy decisions, and in convincing the next generation that this life is worth choosing.
Most farmers I know give that “backward” image a good laugh of their own. They’re STEM graduates, business managers, and data analysts.
They forecast weather and milk prices, juggle spreadsheets, manage cashflow, and adapt to some of the strictest environmental and food safety regulations in Europe, all while trying to keep food affordable and the countryside alive.
But here’s our blind spot: we don’t talk about it.
Farmers have made a virtue out of keeping the head down, getting the work done, and letting lazy portrayals slide and that has created a vacuum.
That quiet pride might have worked in the past, but in today’s noisy world, silence just makes the stereotype easier to believe.
Maybe it’s time to change that with straight talking about what farming actually is: skilled, complex, measured, and far more intelligent than the caricature suggests.
And no, not every farmer speaks like they’ve just stepped off a debate stage in south Dublin.
But don’t mistake the country accent for ignorance.
We’re not the punchline, we’re part of the solution and it’s about time we started owning it.
Katie Gleeson is an online content creator who documents family life on a dairy farm in rural Tipperary via her Instagram account @katieinthecountry.