The house dance farmer move is one that eludes me. I’m about 1.5 years into my house dance journey and this move in particular is one that I both struggle to achieve both the look and the feeling. Because of this, the farmer rarely makes an appearance in my freestyle rounds and when it does, and I replay the footage, I dislike how the move looks on me.

That being said, my farmer has progressively improved and I don’t feel like I’m too far from nailing it. Since the beginning of my journey, here’s some of the ways I’ve tried to tackle the farmer:

• House dance classes in Seattle – Orb often demonstrates this move as part of the foundational warm up
• Feedback from Kerry (Karina) House – I took 1:1 private lessons with her for about 1 year and during that period, during our remote privates we went over the farmer and sometimes I would send her videos (over Telegram) for feedback
• House dance classes in London – In both Ani’s and Jevan’s class, they often will include the farmer in either the combo or choreography. They do go over some techniques and yet I still struggle
• Watched (god knows how many) YouTube tutorials
• Analyzed video clips of a handful of people performing farmer – I try and breakdown and dissect and analyze the body mechanics

But last night (Friday night), I was chatting with a friend (Kristina) who sent some of her own personal written notes. These notes combined with a YouTube tutorial (below) makes me feel like I am on the right track

Farmer Progression

YouTube Tutorial on Farmer

I believe the language he’s speaking is Russian. Because I cannot understand, I turned on auto-captions and was able to follow along. What I learned from the above video is this:

• When lifting leg, shoot pelvis back – this is something I noticed when analyzing videos but in other tutorial videos I’ve watched so far, nobody has explained this part of the movement
• When lowering the leg, tap with the toes – I’ve been missing this component and going to experiment with incorporating this into my farmer
• After tapping with the toes, flatten foot and (lightly) hop – related to previous point but I would hop on one foot but was missing the intermediate step of the toe tap