Held at The Bear Hotel, Cowbridge, the annual meeting gave members the chance to learn more about what’s required to become a social media influencer. Members also heard about Olly’s farming enterprise and his extensive charity work.
Diversifications
Olly is the fourth generation to farm the family farm near Merseyside. The farm is predominantly arable, growing various crops, but also boasts diversified businesses including office spaces in improved barns, holiday accommodation and a small animal hotel. In previous years, Olly has also grown a number of acres of sunflowers on his farm, to raise money for charity.
Social media journey
His journey into social media started 12 years ago with media training at the NFU, this led to Olly appearing on broadcast outlets talking about issues affecting farmers across the country. Then Covid hit and when the country went into lockdown, Olly began spreading some farming insight for those stuck in their homes. This started with his #CabIsolation videos which were the beginning of his social media journey.
Olly said: “I started my #CabIsolation series as a bit of a joke. I was bored in the tractor one day and thought I’d just do a three or four minute video about what I was doing on farm. A week later I was contacted by a couple of school teachers who wanted the videos for their online lessons. After getting a lot more requests from teachers I decided to upload the videos to YouTube so anyone could access the link.
“I was initially going to stop posting after 100 days…then I said I’d do it for a year, because I was getting quite a few views. But the number of subscribers grew so much in those latter months and my channel began getting monetised, I decided to carry on.”
Top tips for social
At present Olly (@OllyBlogsAgricontractfarmer) can be found on all social media channels and has 110,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. Olly says this form of diversification is now a very profitable part of his business and he aims to post once a day.
During the meeting, Olly shared some tips with members of the audience. He said: “Make sure you’re in the video; explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it; people love seeing animals and machinery so show those as much as you can too. Finally, you’ve got to make sure you stay relevant and keep on top of the trends.”
Charity work
As well as Olly’s work in educating the public on food and farming, he is very passionate about raising money for charity. Among some of his charity efforts are his sunflower mazes, which have raised around £50,000 for charity, his Christmas tractor runs into the city raising around £225,000 and most recently the John o' Groats to Land's End Combine Challenge, which raised over £100,000 for charity.
NFU Cymru Deputy President, Abi Reader then addressed the audience, where she outlined NFU Cymru’s lobbying work in helping to maintain the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) for another year, which will provide much needed stability for the industry. She also spoke about the ongoing development of the Sustainable Farming Scheme.
NFU Cymru Glamorgan County Chairman, Tom Rees said: “We were very pleased to welcome our guest speaker Olly Harrison to our annual event. He drew a bumper crowd of new and familiar faces, all eager to hear about his farming journey. The audience were especially keen to hear about Olly’s charity work, using his huge social media following to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for various charities across the UK.
“On the topic of the Sustainable Farming Scheme consultation, it is clear that there remains a great deal of concern among the county’s farmers over elements of these plans, not least the 10% tree planting stipulation and the eligible land criteria. I would urge farmers to respond to this consultation with their views and to take advantage of all the resources being made available by NFU Cymru to assist them in their response.”
