What does the farmer say? It’s all on trombone-playing Kansan’s videos

In the quest for quirky jobs, Derek Klingenberg does it all.

His is an eclectic mix of videographer, musician, poet, drone flier, farmer, dad and philosopher – or, as he likes to call it, “the three F’s: filmer, farmer and father,” and not necessarily in that order.

For the past four years, the 37-year-old farmer has been an internet superstar garnering more than 30 million hits off his take on popular songs – mostly parodies with a heavy dose of cow art or farmyard drone antics.

He has now entered the record books – “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” book, “Unlock the Weird,” published this fall. His distinction is cow art.

“Rancher Derek Klingenberg of Peabody, Kansas patiently used his feed truck to move cows around a field until they formed the shape of a smiley face, which he then filmed from above with a camera drone,” his entry reads in Ripley’s. “It took several minutes for the cows to get in line, and he had to double back at one point when the cows forming one of the eyes finished their food and started to move away.”

Klingenberg skyrocketed to fame in 2013 with a parody to Yivis’ “What Does the Fox Say?” except his was “What Does The Farmer Say?” and mostly it is “Work, work, work, work, work.”

And while most people know Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy,” Klingenberg has his own version, “We Are Farming,” with lyrics such as “Dance around if you have ever ruined a good shirt, dance around if your office roof is sky blue.”

“So many videos have gone viral, I never know what is going to hit,” he said.

Growing up

Klingenberg was raised on a Marion County farm near Peabody that his grandfather Willie started from an 80-acre inheritance. Willie Klingenberg came to the United States from west Prussia in 1923, when he was 9.

The farm survived the Great Depression and continued to grow in the following decades, along with the family.

“My grandfather would say he went to get married, came home, went to bed and got up the next day to go to work,” Klingenberg said.

The next generation to carry on at the farm is Vernon, 72, Willie’s son and Derek’s father. Derek and his brother Grant, 32, are the third generation to farm the land. Another brother, Brett, is a minister in Beatrice, Neb.

Derek Klingenberg’s mother taught music lessons, and from her, he learned to play the trombone. He sang in the Kansas State University Men’s Glee Club and played trombone in the marching band. He received his bachelor’s degree from K-State in ag economics and minored in agronomy.

When he married and came back to the farm, Klingenberg realized that element of creativity he always found in music was missing.

“I was always heavily involved in music, and suddenly it became apparent I wasn’t,” he said. “I needed an outlet, and luckily, my middle brother, Brett, when he was here, he said there was a talent show at the local church. He and his buddy were going to sing bluegrass. He said I could be in it if I played the banjo.

“There were a few problems: I didn’t know how to play the banjo. And it was in three weeks. But I really wanted to play.”

So Klingenberg taught himself to play the banjo.

The group formed as the Possum Boys. One of their top hits was “Bumble Bees in the Hay,” eventually shot as a video showing the Klingenberg farm and brother Grant dressed as a bee. That was soon followed by another snappy tune called “Possum in a Barn.”

“When I was a kid, my parents bought a video camera, and so I began making videos,” Klingenberg said. “They usually featured my brothers. They were willing. We’d film on the weekends.”

He began using the talent he had for creating family videos, turning them into music videos.

“I started getting hired by companies, and that’s when I did one called ‘White Pickup Truck,’ ” Klingenberg said. It featured Mid-Kansas Co-op, and some of the characters in the video became local celebrities at different co-op meetings.

“After that, I decided to stop working for other people and just work for myself,” he said.

Becoming a celebrity

Klingenber’s videos are inspired by daily life. One video that went viral shows him at sunrise sitting in a lawn chair against a rise in the Kansas prairie while playing Lorde’s “Royals” on the trombone, with cattle running up to him.

The idea to play his trombone for the bovine came after he and his wife, Kara, volunteered at Camp Mennoscah in Kingman County.

“I’d play the trombone to wake the kids up,” he said. “So I went out at 5 on a Sunday morning and started filming below a hill to see what the cows would do.

“I edited it after church and didn’t really look at the video after I put it up. The next day, it had 1,000 views. And the next day, I took a break and all these guys were trying to get ahold of me.

“I think it skipped the Midwest and went directly to New York and then L.A. and then around the world before it ended up in the Midwest again.”

Ellen DeGeneres tweeted about it. A radio station from Auckland, New Zealand, called to interview him, because that is where Lorde is from.

“I keep trying totally different stuff,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I have too much diversity. A lot of channels focus on just one thing. But I get bored with one thing.”

His YouTube channel is “Farmer Derek.” He’s on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

He has posed lying on the frozen feedlot ground surrounded by cattle, has ridden a bicycle with bull horns strapped to the handle bars, has drunk milk squirted from a cow’s udder, has pretended to be a cat and has interviewed himself as a blade of grass.

In fact, that’s one of his latest videos, “Grass Walker.”

“It’s all about having fun,” he said. “ A lot of it is seeing what I am capable of and what I like to do.”

This story was originally published December 19, 2016 at 8:10 AM with the headline "What does the farmer say? It’s all on trombone-playing Kansan’s videos."