Stepney City Farm is setting up private Zoom calls with its new lambs and kids

We all have a bit of Zoom fatigue right now. All the morning meetings, birthday quizzes and virtual yoga classes have begun to blur into one recurring nightmare of squares. By now, you’ve probably perfected your ‘Zoom concentration face’ so that you can browse your email while your colleague monologues behind your 20 open tabs. Even the appearance of a cat walking across your line manager’s keyboard has lost its novelty.  

The workers at Stepney City Farm have sensed your pain, and they have come up with a solution (one which doubles up as a handy fundraising drive for the farm). For a fee, you can organise a private Zoom meeting with the Stepney Farm Animals. For £200, Farm Yard Manager Tom Goody will hop on a call and give you a 25-minute tour, introducing you to the newly born lambs, goat kids, and Stephney donkeys George and Dunstan. 

They do corporate gigs too. Imagine this: you’re in a morning Zoom meeting, nodding along to financial projections or customer satisfaction survey results or whathaveyou, then Tom pops up with a surprise appearance from a piglet. Think back to the salad days of your lockdown, when someone lifting their dog up to the screen was enough to make your entire office cheer. You can have that joy again – but this time with a PIGLET (as long as your boss will foot the £100 appearance fee).  

If you can’t afford the private Zoom meet-and-greet, there’s always the Stepney City Farm Instagram Lives, which take place every weekend. On Saturdays, Billy the urban farmer will talk you through the veg he’s cultivating that week (if you’re interested in seeing resident pigs Kat and Mars enjoying some of Billy’s organically grown kale, click here). And on Sunday, farmer Goody will do a quick meet with the ducks, chickens, goats or whatever animals are camera-ready on the day. 

If this video is anything to go by, the Stepney goats and sheep are always ready to meet their adoring public: