Balmoral Show day two: Social media farming celebrity among those doing brisk business
For many young aspiring farmers, this year’s Balmoral Show would not be complete without an autograph from a Donkey.
Teenagers and adults alike queued up for around 20 minutes to shake the hand of a man who has become something of a social media phenomenon: the founder of The Grassmen, Gareth ‘Donkey’ Gault.
The 44-year-old boss of the Ballymena-based business told the News Letter that merchandise was how the brand made its money, which is why Balmoral is so vital.
His brand has almost 250,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, where their videos about farmwork and the machinery that makes it possible have racked up millions of views.
Speaking to the News Letter, Mr Gault signalled that the Grassmen are increasingly taking on an international dimension.
The show is going “real good” despite being so much cooler than last year, he said.
“That's one good thing about the good old people of Northern Ireland – we're very resilient and it doesn't matter whether the sun is shining or it's raining, we'll still come out and have fun,” said Mr Gault.
“We're 16 years in business and we've been at Balmoral maybe 12 of those years, because it took two or three years just to get the brand up and running.
“This is the first of our major shows of the year.
“We think it's absolutely vital to put a big effort into our local show because at the end of the day it's our local fans that put us on the road, that supported us to the point it got us going.
“It gets us out meeting our local fans, and we're set for a busy summer now travelling round the UK with the roadshow.
“It is one of the most important shows of our calendar year.”
Did he ever imagine people would be queuing for his autograph when he started the business?
“No I didn't.
“I love it – I think it's fantastic that young ones and old ones can come and have a chat and say hello, and we're able to show them around some of the projects we've been working on in terms of machines.
“I really, really like that.”
He said Northern Ireland is a “fairly small marketplace,” and that they have grown to be “very strong” in Ireland and UK in general.
“But we'd be doing a lot more around the world. We like to fly the flag of agriculture around the world.
“So watch this space in terms of what we're trying to do there.”
Elsewhere, Kally Blain of Pomeroy, 25, was making money from her freehand drawings of tractors, lorries, and modified cars.
People can show her an image of their mechanical pride-and-joy, and she turns it into a colour drawing – though she is increasingly getting requests for oil paintings too.
Some take a couple of weeks to complete, and she described it as “really rewarding” when one is finished.
At the moment, there is a months-long wait for orders, though she is selling some off-the-shelf pictures at the show from her stall: Modified Car Sketches.
“I just came out of college and didn't know what to do with myself. I'm into cars, and I go to car shows, so I thought I might as well give it a go – it could blow up, who knows.
“I just thought I'd draw a car one day, and it kinda went popular online.
“Last year was very good, it was very busy. It's one of the best shows you could ever do.
“If you were a car artist coming in here, it's definitely the place for you 'cause there's a lot of young boys into cars, a lot of girls into cars and tractors and trucks.
“It's such a good place for any kind of artists at all – animal artists or car artists.”
At the Queen's University Belfast stand, staff were taking part in a campaign to warn farmers of the dangers of sepsis, sporting fake infected wounds on their arms.
Julie Brown said around 80% of people they talk to have had sepsis or know someone who has, often caused by getting cuts on the farm which then get infected from soil – and are often left untreated.
Dr Gerry Gormley presented this reporter with a graphic illustration of one of the symptoms of sepsis: one bottle filled with a normal amount of daily urine, and another showing the much-reduced level that sepsis can spell.
Upon seeing the reaction, he said: “Don't worry – it's actually tea” (adding that farmers should also be on the lookout for shivers and slurred speech too).