History
The magazine was the brainchild of Norman Ridker, founder and chairman of BowTie Inc. In 1999, he was visiting a friend and business associate in upstate New York who enjoyed making maple syrup on his farm in his spare time. Looking around at the farm and his friend's life — a working professional who enjoyed farming as a hobby — he realized that no magazine existed that served him and others like him. He enlisted editors to begin researching "hobby farmers" and the seeming groundswell of urban professionals moving to the country seeking a more meaningful existence and with a desire to farm in their spare time. Finding that a very real need existed for education and basic information about farming for such individuals, BowTie trademarked the term "hobby farm", and launched Hobby Farms magazine in the spring of 2001.
In 2004 Hobby Farms editorial office moved from Irvine, California, to Lexington, Kentucky. The magazine helps small producers in the United States and around the world turn their hobby into a viable business. Focused on the modern "back-to-the-land movement", the magazine is designed to appeal to older Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and the growing population in between who are in tune with organic growing methods and lifestyle.
Hobby Farms features articles on raising livestock humanely, sustainable agriculture, marketing a small farm, self sufficiency, history and preservation, and the dangers of factory farms. Columns cover farm equipment and tools, cooking, buying land, and agricultural news and trends.
The magazine thrived in 2006, and was the fastest-growing farm publication in the country. [4] In 2013 the magazine was acquired by I-5 Publishing LLC. [5]
A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer might own the farmed land or might work as a laborer on land owned by others, but in advanced economies, a farmer is usually a farm owner, while employees of the farm are known as farm workers, or farmhands. However, in the not so distant past, a farmer was a person who promotes or improves the growth of by labor and attention, land or crops or raises animals.
A farm is an area of land that is devoted primarily agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food production. The name is used for specialised units such as arable farms, vegetable farms, fruit farms, dairy, pig and poultry farms, and land used for the production of natural fibres, biofuel and other commodities. It includes ranches, feedlots, orchards, plantations and estates, smallholdings and hobby farms, and includes the farmhouse and agricultural buildings as well as the land. In modern times the term has been extended so as to include such industrial operations as wind farms and fish farms, both of which can operate on land or sea.
Organic farming is an alternative agricultural system which originated early in the 20th century in reaction to rapidly changing farming practices. Certified organic agriculture accounts for 70 million hectares globally, with over half of that total in Australia. Organic farming continues to be developed by various organizations today. It is defined by the use of fertilizers of organic origin such as compost manure, green manure, and bone meal and places emphasis on techniques such as crop rotation and companion planting. Biological pest control, mixed cropping and the fostering of insect predators are encouraged. Organic standards are designed to allow the use of naturally occurring substances while prohibiting or strictly limiting synthetic substances. For instance, naturally occurring pesticides such as pyrethrin and rotenone are permitted, while synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are generally prohibited. Synthetic substances that are allowed include, for example, copper sulfate, elemental sulfur and Ivermectin. Genetically modified organisms, nanomaterials, human sewage sludge, plant growth regulators, hormones, and antibiotic use in livestock husbandry are prohibited. Reasons for advocation of organic farming include advantages in sustainability, openness, self-sufficiency, autonomy/independence, health, food security, and food safety.
Community-supported agriculture is a system that connects the producer and consumers within the food system more closely by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. It is an alternative socioeconomic model of agriculture and food distribution that allows the producer and consumer to share the risks of farming. The model is a subcategory of civic agriculture that has an overarching goal of strengthening a sense of community through local markets.
Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow food crops to meet the needs of themselves and their families. In subsistence agriculture, farm output is targeted to survival and is mostly for local requirements with little or no surplus. Planting decisions are made principally with an eye toward what the family will need during the coming year, and secondarily toward market prices. Tony Waters writes: "Subsistence peasants are people who grow what they eat, build their own houses, and live without regularly making purchases in the marketplace."
Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage, it focused on maximizing the crop yield while maintaining a good soil ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the discipline expanded and the current scope of the discipline is much broader. Agricultural economics today includes a variety of applied areas, having considerable overlap with conventional economics. Agricultural economists have made substantial contributions to research in economics, econometrics, development economics, and environmental economics. Agricultural economics influences food policy, agricultural policy, and environmental policy.
The Lexington Herald-Leader is a newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company and based in the U.S. city of Lexington, Kentucky. According to the 1999 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, the Herald-Leader's paid circulation is the second largest in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The newspaper has won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. It had also been a finalist in six other Pulitzer awards in the 22-year period up until its sale in 2006, a record that was unsurpassed by any mid-sized newspaper in the United States during the same time frame.
A smallholding is a small farm. Smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. As a country becomes more affluent, smallholdings may not be self-sufficient but are valued primarily for the rural lifestyle that they provide for the owners, who often do not earn their livelihood from the farm. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in the world, supporting almost two billion people. Today some companies try to include smallholdings into their value chain, providing seed, feed or fertilizer to improve production. Some say that this model shows benefits for both parties.
A hobby farm is a smallholding or small farm that is maintained without expectation of being a primary source of income. Some are merely to provide some recreational land, and perhaps a few horses for the family's children. Others are managed as working farms for sideline income, or are even run at an ongoing loss as a lifestyle choice by people with the means to do so, functioning more like a country home than a business.
Progressive Farmer is an agricultural magazine, published fourteen times a year by DTN. The magazine is based in Birmingham, Alabama.
The Irish Farmers Journal is an Irish weekly farming newspaper, sold in Ireland. It is the largest selling farming newspaper in the country with a circulation of 60,934 at the end of 2017. It is published every Sunday. It employs 90 people and is owned by The Agricultural Trust which also owns The Irish Field.
The Farmers Guide, produced by a family-owned and -managed company, provides the English agricultural industry with advertising both for its readers and their suppliers. Founded by Doug Potts and now run by Jane Potts and Julie Goulding, the magazine's readers have bought and sold through its columns while enjoying the interests, information, and contentious political comment through its editorial columns for more than a quarter of a century.
A You-Pick ("U-Pick") or Pick-Your-Own (PYO) farm operation is a type of farm gate direct marketing (farm-to-table) strategy where the emphasis is on customers doing the harvesting themselves. A PYO farm might be preferred by people who like to select fresh, high quality, vine-ripened produce themselves at lower prices.
Launched at the Smithfield Show in December 2004 by Sir Don Curry, the Fresh Start initiative aims to secure sustainable future for farming in England by:
Modern Farmer is a quarterly American magazine devoted to agriculture and food, founded in April 2013. The magazine is unique in that it attempts to have equally rural and urban readers, and to "appeal to the person who wants to romanticize farming and the person who is knee deep in turkey droppings", according to The New York Times. In 2014, the publication won the National Magazine Awards for the Magazine Section.
California Farmer (1854-2013) was the state of California's leading farm magazine for more than a century.
Kentucky was the greatest producer of hemp in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was the source of three fourths of U.S. hemp fiber. Production started to decline after World War I due to the rise of tobacco as the cash crop in Kentucky and the foreign competition of hemp fibers and finished products. In 1970, federal policies virtually banned the production of industrial hemp during the War on Drugs saying all Cannabis sativa is a Schedule I controlled substance. Federal law under the Agricultural Act of 2014 allowed research back into hemp. Kentucky began production again with 33 acres in 2014. As of 2016 harvest season, only two U.S. states other than Kentucky had over 100 acres (40 ha) in hemp production: Colorado and Tennessee. The first 500-acre commercial crop was planted in Harrison County in 2017, and research permits were issued for over 12,000 acres (4,900 ha) that year. The 2016 documentary Harvesting Liberty concerns the 21st century Kentucky hemp industry.
Betsy Freese is an American editor, blogger, and radio personality who focuses on small and large-scale agriculture journalism as executive editor for Successful Farming and Living the Country Life. She was the host of both the Living the Country Life radio series and TV show. She produces the exclusive annual Pork Powerhouses ranking of the largest 25 pork producers in the U.S. and Canada.
The Hemp Farming Act of 2018 was a proposed law to remove hemp from Schedule I controlled substances and making it an ordinary agricultural commodity. Its provisions were incorporated in the 2018 United States farm bill that became law on December 20, 2018.
