Generational (non)Divide
The pre-internet generation of Petersons, parents David and Marla, say they are proud of their children’s online stardom. “I think it is good that they have become spokespersons for agriculture,” says Marla. “I think of seeing them grow up as little boys playing out in the sand pile with the toy farm trucks and equipment and farming the carpets inside with all their little toys. It’s fun to see them grow up and do it in real life and then sing about it and act in a video about it and reach a lot of people that way. It’s really fun to see them get along well together while they’re doing it. I would have never imagined that we would be sitting here doing this a year ago, but you know, we were not prepared. When everybody started coming for interviews and giving us all this attention, they had to take us the way we were.” Of course, there is the wish that the attention doesn’t distract the younger Persons from their main message—farming. “I hope all my boys become involved in some way, but that remains to be seen,” says David about his children’s future connection to the family farm. “I hope that someone would keep it going, I think that would have been my dad’s hope too.”
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Sunflower living summer 2013
(which, of course, resulted in them releasing a video “The Peterson Farm Bros’ trip to New York City!”). With that amount of exposure, came the curse and joy of the internet: viewer reactions. “We’ve had a few people put up a bad comment, but more people come to our aid and helped us out, explaining things to other people,” says Nathan, 19, a sophomore at Kansas State University. “You can’t fight YouTube comments; it is hard to change negative minds.” If you scroll through the Petersons’ online videos, you will quickly see what Nathan is describing: a few sour evaluations heavily outweighed by an eruption of farmer pride and the occasional bizarre request (such as the Italian viewer who chided the Peterson boys for not ripping off their shirts and dancing around in Stars-and-Stripes Speedos). “It starts a lot of conversations,” says Kendal, 17, a high school senior. “A lot of people want to talk to us about what we’ve done, about what the different videos are. When the second video came out and I went to high school, it was fun watching everyone watch the video. A lot of people are happy. They say they live in the same state, or that they know us, and a lot of them connect with us.” Greg insists he wasn’t playing to the hometown crowd when he thought up the videos. “My original audience was city kids, as much as I wanted to inform people. I knew just making a video on farming on YouTube wasn’t going to do anything more than reach farmers. You have to have some sort of bridge to cover the gap between city kids and farming and this urban style of music is what I found to be that bridge.” Without the urban-style music videos, that bridge seems harder to create. The Peterson brothers also release several mini-documentary videos of daily farm operations. But while these videos hit more-than-respectable viewing numbers of 13,000 to 40,000, they are not international sensations. Having found their recipe for viral success, Greg, Kendal, Nathan and Laura (the brothers’ 13-year-old sister and sometimes-camera-operator), plan more dance videos. And if the next video is pure entertainment, then that’s OK with them. Greg says even the silliest of concepts serves its purpose: No matter what the tune or how ridiculous the parody, there’s a lot more going on than faux-farming. “We didn’t try to sugarcoat anything, we were literally filming while working, in our real clothes. It’s not like we were dressing up, the realness factor was huge,” explains Greg. “Also, it looked very homemade; I think people understood that it wasn’t some agricultural portrayal and no one was paying for this video to happen. It was just of our own free will. Everything was just how it was.”