Agriculture Journalism, Print

Agriculture—a $250-billion-plus-a-year industry, with $69 billion in crop exports in 2006—is one of the oldest and largest of all American industries. Every export dollar creates another $1.48 so that agriculture generated another $102 billion in supporting business. The major source of information about this industry for those in it is, and has been over the last hundred years, the agricultural/farm magazine.

Agricultural media became a viable—that is, fairly reliable, roughly continuous, and relatively current—industry some few decades after the Civil War, ironically during roughly the same period in which the number of non–farm workers first surpassed the number of farm workers. The number of publications grew from 157 to over 400 from 1880 to 1920, prompted by sweeping changes in the nation as a whole. The postal act of 1879, which allowed magazines to be mailed at two (later one) cents per pound, coupled with railways, better wagon roads, and more mechanized publishing technology, increased the ability of communicators to produce and deliver magazines. During this period industry and large-scale capitalism was penetrating into the farm commodity chain primarily through farming production technology—such as the steel plow. Farmers financed those purchases by increasing their sale of market goods and learned about the technology through farm magazines. At the same time, farm editors were switching from being authorities on agriculture to becoming communicators who supplied information coming from agricultural colleges, state and federal government, and advertisers of agricultural products, a network of sources that has remained essentially unaltered since that time.

Prior to the Civil War, publishers had generally disapproved of what they called “foreign matter” in their magazine, but by the 1880s their objections to advertising had largely disappeared. Advertising revenue allowed publishers to drop their subscription prices and by the 1890s publishers were receiving more income from advertising than from subscriptions. And, since farm magazine advertisers were interested in selling farm products, it was important to these advertisers that farm families, rather than other types of families, received the magazine. The 1915 government survey of commercial farm periodicals was the first record of editors using controlled circulation (the practice of sending magazines free to lists of selected farmers who have advertiser-preferred demographic characteristics) as a method to increase their attractiveness to advertisers.

In terms of content, however, the farm magazine strategy remained essentially unchanged from the 1880s through the 1920s. Aimed primarily at the farm family, the magazines promoted the values of agrarian fundamentalism and Jeffersonian ideals of the rural life as the most moral balance between the untapped wildness of “nature” and the moral degeneracy of the “city.” Farm magazines carried articles on family life, poems, fiction, advice on home management and raising children, and articles on production concerns, such as how [Page 61]to increase the number of pigs per litter. One of the more major changes in content for farmers was the use of the “success story,” a case study of a particularly successful farmer.

As the agricultural price slump of 1920 slid into the Great Depression, the main story of farm publications was their consolidation from 405 in 1920 to 295 at the end of World War II, although the number of readers increased somewhat. The main change in the farm press industry during the period 1920 to 1940 was a distinct increase in the number of publications produced by farm organizations, most particularly the Farm Bureau and the Grange. Overall, those magazines that survived these two decades kept their same editorial and circulation strategies.

...