Meet the farmer-turned-influencer promoting his fruit and veg on TIKTOK as an alternative of to the supermarkets

The wind on the Fens is biting this winter, and there is very little in the way of shelter on the Cambridgeshire flats surrounding us.

Though it is below freezing, arable farmer David Wheatley has little choice but to be out in the elements. 

Wrapped in layer after layer of clothing, he has been up since five in the morning and has a considerable workday still stretching ahead of him when we meet at nine.

For thousands of years, farmers have toiled year-round, and that isn’t set to change any time soon. Wheatley himself is a fourth-generation farmer, while his daughter has now pushed his family into its fifth generation of farming.

‘It isn’t easy growing,’ he says, ‘It’s even harder to sell it and make a profit. Every farmer in the country knows this, but nobody else does.’

But on his farm near Wisbech St Mary, Wheatley is doing something very different to the hundreds of thousands of farmers and other agricultural workers in the UK.

David Wheatley is a social media influencer.

Wheatley has amassed some 500,000 followers across multiple websites, including Instagram and Tiktok where he posts as @petitepeonys.

While he never wanted to be an influencer, he says his online following has allowed his farm to weather the worst of the misfortune thrown at it, and is changing the way he farms.

His bad luck started in 2019 when a serious fire broke out at his farm, destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of property and machinery.

‘I lost all my tractors and all my machines,’ Wheatley says. ‘And I basically didn’t buy anything. I couldn’t carry on farming.

‘It was hard work getting over that and I went into a bit of depression. 

‘I thought we’d be alright because we were insured – but then Covid hit in 2020 and the price of everything went up when I was trying to rebuild.’

Wheatley was forced to hire the machinery he needed as he couldn’t afford to replace it himself. 

‘My whole system was ruined,’ he said.

For three years, the farm lost £100,000 per year. ‘I knew I was going to go bankrupt… I was close to pulling the plug, but getting up every day and working hard for no money,’ he says. 

Wheatley has undeniably been beaten down, but you wouldn’t be able to tell upon meeting him. When speaking about his farm, he is animated, and it is easy to be captivated by the passion behind his words.

In the end, it was a stroke of luck that saved the farm. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the price of wheat skyrocketed. 

Wheatley was able to offload his wheat for much more than he would have been able to before, having previously held it as wheat prices simply weren’t high enough to make the money he needed to save the farm.

‘It wasn’t really me being clever,’ he said, ‘but its the only reason I’m still in business.’

Incidentally, it was also one of Wheatley’s brushes with misfortune that gave rise to his social media presence.

As well as crops including wheat and apples, Wheatley also grows peony flowers. 

In the depths of the Covid pandemic, and national lockdown, Wheatley had picked his entire crop of peonies. 

The blooms have a naturally short picking window, and he was hoping that the pandemic would be short lived and he could still sell them before they wilted. 

It wasn’t, of course, and Wheatley was left with thousands of flowers that he couldn’t sell, with all but essential retailers closed for business.

Instead of dumping the stems, however, Wheatley decided to fill his house with the flowers, making Tiktok videos to offer them free of charge.

Some of the videos went viral, and when the pandemic eased this gave him the momentum to set up a business – Petite Peonys – selling the flowers online. 

While he says he was still ‘in a growing state of depression,’ selling online opened a door that Wheatley has yet to close.

Saying no to the supermarkets  

Since then, Wheatley has continued to sell the flowers online, and business is booming. 

He said: ‘Last year went pretty well and I sold half to the supermarkets and half through social media.

‘This year I said no to the supermarket when they rung me up. That was the hardest decision I’ve made, but we sold them all [online].

‘For a seven-acre field, the supermarkets would pay me £35,000 to £40,000… last year we had 2,000 customers, and we sold 150,000 stems online for more than £120,000.’

‘I’m actually making money from that,’ he said, ‘If I lose 500 customers it doesn’t matter because I have hundreds of people on a waiting list.’

Wheatley has pre-sold £40,000 worth of peony subscription boxes for the 2026 peony season.

‘I’ve got people dying to go on this waiting list, and I’ve had people on it for four years now, so I offer the products to them for less money, because they are saving my business.’

‘I tell every single one of them that if they are not happy with the subscription then I’ll pay you all your money back, and not one single person has complained.

‘I’m trying to improve what we’re doing and I’ve got so much support.’

It hasn’t been an easy path, and the toll of farming and managing a growing social media presence isn’t easy for Wheatley, but it has offered a level of income that selling to supermarkets does not, and the germ of an idea that farmers have the potential to sell to consumers in a different way.

Now I’m selling veg… for other farmers

Wheatley’s online selling has extended to apples and other fruit too. His farm has 22 acres of orchards, all restored from an uncared-for state with the help of Government grants aimed at improving biodiversity.

The orchards, he says, are no longer commercially viable, and apples are often rejected due to blemishes.

In 2024, Wheatley posted a video on social media offering followers the chance to pick as many apples as they wanted for £10 each.

Despite torrential rain, he says hundreds of people turned up to pick the fruit.

‘I made £300 without lifting a finger,’ he said, ‘they cleared nearly every apple in the whole orchard, and everybody loved it.’

Then he tried selling the apples online, and after another video of his went viral online, he says he was able to sell all of the apples from eight and a half acres of orchard for £1 each.

Last year, Wheatley had 300 people on a waiting list for apples sent through the post, and made £10,000 in a week before the apples were even sent out to customers.

When I met him, Wheatley was a week into selling vegetable boxes online, alongside sacks of potatoes and even bags of wheat.

The kicker is that the produce he is selling isn’t from his farm at all, but from other local farmers.

But in what might be a sad reflection of how tough it is for farmers, he isn’t making a profit from the veg sales – only from the commission platforms pay him for social media views.  

‘I’ve earned $4,950 (£3,657) last month just from views alone, and people are now paying subscriptions too, they are asking me how they can support me,’ he says. ‘I’m using that money to sell other farmers’ produce.’

‘I’m not making any money out of [the vegetable boxes], but as long as I’m getting paid somehow I don’t care.’ 

While Wheatley’s use of social media is a success story, it is no longer just a tool to make sales. The farmer hopes that in some way he can inspire real change for other farmers and consumers alike.

‘The money is there already,’ he says, ‘people are eating the produce, the problem is that the money is going to the wrong people.’

Farmers are at the mercy of supermarkets when it comes to selling their produce, Wheatley says, with supermarkets able to reject produce at a whim.

‘There are so many people in between the farmer and the consumer, they’re taking all the money,’ Wheatley says, ‘With vegetables that you buy for £2 at the supermarket for example, the farmer is only getting 20 or 30p from the supermarket.’

‘There are a lot of people out there who want to support farmers selling directly like this, but no one is doing it.’

‘I don’t even want to do it, I’m making it up as I go along,’ he says, ‘But if I don’t do it, then no one will.’

And Wheatley’s followers are supporting him. In a week of selling veg boxes, Wheatley says he turned over £15,000.

‘People came from Wales on Saturday,’ he says, ‘there are people coming from London and Manchester.’

He added: ‘I’m thinking: “there has to be somewhere closer they can do the same”.’

When the Wheatley took on his farm on a council-owned tenancy in Wisbech St Mary in the year 2000, he never would have imagined posting about his farm on Tiktok and Instagram, which of course didn’t exist at the time.

Packing vegetable boxes ready to send out to buyers, Wheatley said: ‘I wouldn’t have imagined this last week. We’ve been [selling vegetable boxes] for a week.

‘This shed just had farm machinery in it, I don’t think it looks like a normal farm shop now, but it has lots of produce and we are getting food directly to the people.’

While the support is considerable, so are the challenges. And Wheatley’s run-ins with bad luck haven’t completely halted.

Just weeks after we met, he was forced to stop selling vegetable boxes to his following as the delivery service he was using was unable to get deliveries to buyers quickly enough.

‘I’m pulling the plug on my farmers shop, but not because it doesn’t work, it worked a little bit too good for me right now,’ Wheatley said on Instagram. ‘My main problem is getting my deliveries to my customers within the time period they are supposed to.’

For a man that has been beaten down before, however, Wheatley isn’t one to shy away from challenges.

On the same video, his daughter, Sophie, says: ‘In the new year, we might be doing this again… people want this, this could be bigger.

‘This is not over, maybe just for now.’