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February 28, 2020

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Bikini farmers of California

The Times newspaper has run a feature about a group of women herding cattle and wielding chainsaws in their thongs.

When you first visit the King’s Hill ranch in northern California, there are a couple of things you notice right away. You notice the animals: the sheep and the goats, the alpacas, horses and flocks of poultry.

But more than anything, you notice the girls. It’s hard not to. Because everyone working at King’s Hill is a young woman. Also – and this is important – they really enjoy wearing bikinis. Not all the time. Of course not. That would be impractical. “If we’re working with the animals then we’re not going to be in our thongs,” says Doris Molakides, a slim 39-year-old with long black hair who owns and oversees the 400-acre operation. But, she continues, yes, if it’s hot and they are just doing harvesting work or other farmyard chores then she and her troupe of young seasonal workers will strip down to their beachwear. “I mean, we’re in the sun every single day and we don’t want tan lines. If there are no guys around, we will take our tops off.”

You notice the remoteness, the acre after acre of sun-drenched farmland spread across rugged green hills, miles from the nearest town. You also notice an intense sense of industry, from the rumble of coming and going pick-up trucks to the distant buzz of chainsaws felling trees.

Now and then, some of them will strip down to nothing and go about their busy day of commercial agriculture. “We’ll get naked,” she says brightly. “We oil ourselves up and get pruning.”

What is this place? Why is it worked exclusively by cheerful, body-confident women? Why is one of the girls, Lexie, feeding chickens while wearing what I can only really describe as a G-string? Why is Molakides practising her marksmanship with an automatic rifle – she has completed several tactical shooting courses – in a tight, white miniskirt? What’s going on? I am, for better or worse, not actually at the King’s Hill ranch. Instead, like many thousands of other people, I have been following events here on Instagram. Molakides runs an account called @GirlsGoneOffGrid in which she documents daily life on her selfsufficient, off-grid ranch. It shows Molakides and her fellow workers helping their goats to give birth, harvesting walnuts, slaughtering turkeys and, until a recent change in the law prohibited them from doing so, cultivating industrial quantities of marijuana. Often while wearing bikinis.

For some reason, Molakides says, many people look at these images and videos and assume they are contrived. “There are so many people commenting like, ‘Oh, this can’t be real! This is fake!'” she says. But it really, really is real. “I guess I just wanted to document what we were doing. It wasn’t for show. It wasn’t for anything,” she …

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