Andy Detwiler, armless farmer who became a YouTube star, dies at 52

On July 18, 1972, an Ohio farmer named Bick Detwiler was operating a grain auger, a spiral-shaped metal drill that pushes crops from a truck into a holding bin. He periodically reached toward the auger for a handful of his wheat, testing its moisture. He turned away for a moment.

Detwiler’s 2-year-old grandson, Andy, was hanging around nearby. He approached the auger and tried to mimic his grandfather, unaware of the danger of the machinery.

When Detwiler looked back, he saw that Andy had fallen into the auger. He extricated Andy only to find that the boy’s arms had been amputated.

Andy spent five weeks in the hospital, but he survived. An indication of his future arrived one night when Patricia Detwiler, Andy’s mother, went to cover Andy with a blanket.

Before she could do so, she saw her son grab the binding of the blanket with two toes and toss it into the air.

“It landed perfectly on him,” Patricia Detwiler recalled in 2019. “From that moment on, I knew he’d be OK.”

As an adult, Andy Detwiler ran his own 300-acre section of his family’s corn and soybean farm. Using his toes, teeth, chin and a single remaining shoulder, he learned how to drive a tractor, feed horses and goats, shoot a handgun, loosen screws with a screw gun, paint antique farm equipment, custom-build his own farm equipment, operate a snow plow — and film himself all the while, becoming one of YouTube’s most popular and beloved farming personalities.

He died Sept. 21 in Urbana, Ohio. He was 52. While being treated for esophageal cancer, he contracted pneumonia and had an aneurysm, his daughter and frequent filming partner, Kylie Detwiler, said.

With about 130,000 subscribers, Detwiler’s YouTube channel, “Harmless Farmer,” belongs to the upper tier of farming channels on YouTube across the English-speaking world, according to several rankings.

In his videos, Detwiler performs farm chores with striking resourcefulness and dexterity.

In one, of him feeding goats, he approaches a stack of feed bags and says, “I don’t advise this to anybody,” then bites one of the bags, lifts it upright, unties the string around the top with his teeth, spits the string out, cranes his neck so that his chin and shoulder surround the bag and grasps it, narrating his technique along the way. He carries the bag to a barrel, drops it inside, picks it up again with his teeth and smoothly pours the contents inside.

He then scoops up some feed with his right foot, raises his foot to the camera, creating a close-up, and lectures about the feed (“there’s oats in it, and cracked corn”), standing on one foot all the while.

Detwiler became an expert in devising workarounds for basic tasks. He worked outdoors in the winter barefoot. While driving his tractor, he filmed himself by attaching his camera to magnets. To film himself while moving about, he built a custom wooden mount for his GoPro camera that allowed the device to fit snugly and stably in his breast pocket.

He discussed his accident with relatives while cracking jokes, and he felt at ease with grain augers, showing in one video how he retrofitted parts from two different augers to create one extra-long tool.

Because of his disabilities Detwiler gained a set of skills that other farmers generally lacked. In several videos he uses his legs while lying on his back to lift and maneuver a PTO shaft, a notoriously heavy and unwieldy piece of farming equipment.

“Hooking up a PTO and hoses is always a challenge with two hands,” one viewer commented. “You are so good, I am dumbfounded.”

“Andy, I’ve had my daughter watch your videos,” wrote another viewer. “She’s been fighting cancer and has many struggles. I’ve told her she can overcome anything if she puts her mind to it. I use you as an example because we farm and know how hard these jobs are.”

At Detwiler’s funeral, his family displayed his farming equipment. It took four men to hook up the PTO shaft to a tractor.

Thomas Andrew Detwiler was born in Urbana on Nov. 24, 1969. He grew up in the small, rural community of West Liberty, Ohio. His father, Thomas, worked on the farm, which has been in the Detwiler family since 1904 and now encompasses 1,300 acres. His mother, Patricia (Simpson) Detwiler, taught eighth-grade American history.

In his boyhood Andy was a figure in the local press. When he was 9, The Dayton Daily News described him in school holding a clipboard with his left foot while filling out a test sheet with his right foot. To answer a question posed by his teacher, he raised his leg.

“The blue-eyed youngster with the mischievous grin leads an active, happy life with the support of understanding parents who refuse to coddle him,” The Springfield News-Sun wrote in a profile when he was 7. While in a sandbox, he played with toy farm equipment using his feet.

“Growing up, there wasn’t anybody that could teach me anything because nobody knew anybody that was like me,” Detwiler said in one of his videos. “I pretty much taught myself everything.”

He graduated from West Liberty-Salem High School in 1988. In 1992 he showed up with a group of friends at the house of a girl named Corkey Wallace at 2 a.m. and shouted from her family’s front porch that he wanted to go on a date with her. They married in 1996.

Detwiler first posted on YouTube in 2018 at the urging of his wife and daughter, initially with the hope of making a bit of extra money. As his channel grew in popularity, he started posting videos twice a week. He read every comment his videos received.

Detwiler also gained a reputation as a skilled chef, developing a chili recipe that was passed around West Liberty households.

In 2020, he began publicly discussing his cancer diagnosis. His last video went online Sept. 17, just four days before he died.

In addition to his parents, wife and daughter, he is survived by a sister, Kathy Jo Detwiler, and a brother, Matthew.

Detwiler’s ability to farm without the use of arms took a lifetime of practice, but it was also a testament to human adaptability. Something deep in him was rewired when he was 2.

He found the same trait in his daughter. When Kylie was old enough to stand up in her crib, Detwiler would lean down, and Kylie somehow knew to put her arm around her father’s neck, between his shoulder and his chin, so he could swing her across his body and carry her.