Agriculture Journalism, Electronic

Origins

Even before World War I, experimental wireless stations often included farm news and market reports (sometimes broadcast in Morse code) in their scattered program offerings. Station 9XM at the University of Wisconsin was one of these. Soon after World War I, when radios became the exciting new mode of entertainment in the rural areas, a rural audience in Illinois was willing in 1921 to listen to station KYW broadcast an entire season of the Chicago Civic Opera—and nothing else. Music and variety and other standard urban-based entertainment were the first rural radio offerings, but early on programmers realized that farm audiences had different music tastes and information needs. The “barn dance” format of square dance and fiddle (as opposed to violin) was one of the earliest and most popular offerings, consisting of “hillbilly” music and broad comedy; one of these—the Grand Ole Opry, which first aired from Nashville in 1925—is still playing today.

In addition to entertainment, both the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and land grant universities rapidly realized this new medium's potential to reach the nation's farmers, many of whom were scratch producers, barely eking a living from the land. By 1922, the USDA started sending market reports on grain and livestock prices to radio stations, joining the U.S. weather bureau that began releasing official weather reports in 1921. This was no small service. With the new information, farmers could avoid some of the effects of rains and early freezes and time their harvests and shipments with higher crop prices.

In the 1920s, however, the six and a half million farms in rural America were largely without electrical power, and only the well-to-do few were able to afford such luxuries as telephone and automobiles. Even those who could afford a radio and its required batteries might not have the money or the mechanical knowledge to repair the frequently malfunctioning sets. Nevertheless, by the 1930s Department of Agricultural Census, roughly 20 percent of farms had radios, a figure that varied wildly between the relatively well-off North and Midwest, where adoption was as high as 50 percent in some areas, to lows of 3 percent in some of the poorer areas of the South. African Americans, often sharecroppers, were least likely to adopt.

From the 1930s to the early days of television, radio was a major source of farm and farm household agricultural news and entertainment. Television and, to some degree, changes in population demographics decreased the revenue that advertisers were willing to spend for entertainment and increased the amount of competition for direct advertising dollars. These same factors, and changes in direct marketing tactics in the post–World War II era, also challenged farm radio revenue streams, but even with the increased competition from other types of media agricultural radio has remained an overall informational mainstay for farmers.

From the start, typical farm broadcasting included market information, weather, and some agricultural news or features, which range from extremely local (interviews with 4-H members at the fair) to national (reports on the current farm bill's progress through Congress). The length of the broadcasts varies dramatically from a very few all-day agriculture stations to a few minutes of livestock and crop market reports and news briefs.

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