SharkFarmer: Ag influencer brings wisdom to FFA students

SPOKANE — Never give up and never get dragged back down. That was the message for the Future Farmers of America members assembled for the keynote speech at the Spokane Ag Show Feb. 6.

“On the east coast where they catch crabs, they have little plastic pots that they fill up, and when they fill them up that much, the crabs can actually crawl out,” said Rob Sharkey, known nationally as The SharkFarmer. “But as soon as the crab starts to crawl out, the other ones grab it and pull it down. Farming can be like that. When you try something different, when you’re trying to succeed and lift yourself up, sometimes the people closest to you are going to be the ones that are going to try to pull you down the hardest.”

Sharkey presented a talk called “Everybody Thought I Was Crazy” at FFA Day, to an audience of FFA students from all over Eastern Washington, then recorded an episode of his SharkFarmer podcast with two students in the exhibition hall. Sharkey is a fifth-generation grain grower in Illinois who, with his wife Emily Sharkey, parlayed their struggling farm into a radio, podcast and TV presence connecting with farmers across America and showing the rest of the world just what it is that farmers actually do. Emily Sharkey is also from a farm family, she told the group, but didn’t grow up on the farm herself.

“We’ve been married for 29 years,” Rob Sharkey said. “Guess what age we met.”

“Four!” came a voice from the audience.

“Four? What kind of arranged marriages do you have around here?” Sharkey answered. “We met when we were 16 years old, at a 4-H dance. I came up with, I think, the best pickup line in the history of pickup lines. I said, ‘Hey, do you want to go see my show pick?’”

A rocky start

When the Sharkeys returned to his family farm in 1998 after college, he said, his dad was raising hogs and he decided to buy some feeder pigs and rent some buildings and do the same thing.

“We had no idea that the hog market crash was going to happen a few months later,” he said. “So right off the bat we were broke. And I mean we were broke, broke. We didn’t have any money. Our credit cards were maxed out. The alternator went out on my car, and I had to ride a bike a couple of miles from our house to the farm. It was not a pretty sight.”

Sharkey wasn’t alone in his unfortunate timing. Across America, pork prices dropped 63% in 1998, according to a New York Times article from the time.

“We go to the banker, we sit down and the banker just flat out tells us, ‘You’re done,” Rob Sharkey said. “’You blew it. You guys are young; file bankruptcy and start over.’”

“We woke up the next morning and I woke up mad,” Emily said. ‘’I’m like, ‘We are not filing bankruptcy. We are not doing this. We are not giving up our dreams. We’re going to find a way, because we have to live in that community, and we didn’t want to go bankrupt and put that on other people.’”

It took the Sharkeys eight years and a lot of odd jobs to crawl out from under the train wreck that was the hog collapse, they said. One of those jobs involved capitalizing on one of a grain farmer’s biggest hassles, deer that get into the fields. They rented some hunting ground, put an ad in the back of a magazine and set about learning the outfitting business. After a rocky start involving some unsavory customers, that sideline began to make enough money to get the Sharkeys back on the road to recovery.

The move to social media came by accident, Sharkey said, when the power went out at Christmas while Emily and the kids were visiting family.

“Back then we only had this little red Honda generator, and it would barely run the furnace and the fridge and my phone charger,” Rob said. “I couldn’t even really watch TV, so my mind was going in odd places, because I’m breathing in fumes, I’m not sleeping. So I started messaging my power company. There’s over 70 of these (messages). I just kept doing them. And they are the dumbest thing ... If you want to go big on social media, just be an idiot. I went from 500 followers to 10,000 followers in one day. Because back then, when you trended, you trended globally. So the whole entire earth was seeing my stupidity.”

On the datawaves

Before long, Sharkey was recording podcasts, some about hapless hunters he had outfitted and some with local farmers.

“We really wanted to talk to people who were just regular, average, everyday farmers and ranchers, not like your politicians or your CEOs or your presidents of certain organizations,” he said. “It was just farmers and ranchers like your families.”

Soon Sharkey’s topics began to move into more serious realms, like an interview with a 19-year-old woman who had gotten her hair caught in a machine and torn her scalp off, and an Olympic athlete who returned to his family farm and spoke about his struggles with alcoholism.

“We had emails when we started talking about alcoholism, saying, ‘Hey, you know you shouldn’t talk about that stuff. You shouldn’t make farmers look bad,’” Emily said. “And we said, ‘You know what? We’re going to tackle these topics.’”

The podcasts got onto satellite radio, and the owner of the SiriusXM channel where The Sharkfarmer broadcast also owned RFDTV, Rob said. He had the chance to approach the owner but almost chickened out, he said.

“I convinced myself that, no, I should not approach this man,” Rob said. “And then I felt a real sharp pain in my ribs. What it was is my wife was stabbing me with a ballpoint pen, and she goes, ;If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it.’ I went over … I sat down, I pitched the idea to him, and in 10 minutes, we had a TV show. So all this fear of not wanting to ask for something, I’m afraid of going for my dreams because I was afraid of being told no, how dumb would that been?”

The result was SharkFarmer TV, now in its 10th season on RFDTV and also shown on PBS. The program is shot in Nashville, Tennessee and besides interviews with farmers and ag professionals, includes a man on the street segment where Rob and Emily chat with passersby to see what they know about farming. The results are eye-opening, Rob said.

“We go out on Broadway, which is where all the honky-tonks are, and we take pictures of a combine and a tractor, and we show them to people,” he said. “They have no idea what any of it is. You show a picture of a grain bin, they think that’s where the farmers keep their milk. People just have no idea. But what we learned is that after we get done asking them, we can’t get rid of them, because they’re asking so many questions about where their food comes from.”

Roots for the future

Sharkey drew his final point from the redwood trees of Northern California.

“How do they get roots?” he said. “Well, they don’t. They can’t go down enough because of the rocks. So they go down a foot or two, and then they go out and they grab onto the roots of the tree next to it, and they all hold each other up that way. The roots are all connected, and that’s the way these giant trees are able to stand up without going straight down. These are the type of friends that you need. You need to find people that are going to help you stand up and help you be the absolute, absolute best.”

    Rob Sharkey, known as The SharkFarmer, takes a selfie while speaking to a gathering of FFA students at the Spokane Ag Show Feb. 6.
 JOEL MARTIN/BASIN BUSINESS JOURNAL