 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(February 2007) |
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| Frequency | 14 times per year |
|---|---|
| Total circulation (2011) | 500,000 [1] |
| Founded | 1886 |
| Company | DTN |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | Birmingham, Alabama |
| Website | www |
Progressive Farmer is an agricultural magazine, published 14 times a year by DTN. The magazine is based in Birmingham, Alabama.
Founded in Winston, North Carolina, in 1886 by North Carolina native Leonidas Lafayette Polk (1837–1892; a Confederate Army veteran who is often confused with CSA General Leonidas Polk, no relation), the publication was intended to bring the latest information on crop and livestock production to the reunited nation's agrarian economy in the Southeast. After Polk died in 1892, Clarence H. Poe from Raleigh, NC, took over as editor in 1899, and in 1903, he and three partners purchased the publication, taking it from a newspaper to a magazine with 36,000 subscribers by 1908. One of the most notable achievements of the magazine was its continual crusade and endorsement during the early twentieth century of the land grant college subsidies provided to Agricultural and Mechanical colleges across the United States.
The magazine broadened its reach beyond the Southeast by merging its Raleigh, North Carolina, operation with the Southern Farm Gazette newspaper published in Starkville, Mississippi. This was a major innovation in publishing at the time. Merging these two farm publications established the first publication in history to publish regional editorial specific to its circulation areas. This merger of the Progressive Farmer and the Southern Farm Gazette resulted in the need to have a production and printing facility that would be a one-day train trip to both of the editorial offices in Starkville and Raleigh, North Carolina, for receiving the typewritten feature stories for publication. In 1911, it was decided to establish a central office in Birmingham, while Clarence Poe and his partners remained in Raleigh and directed company operations from there. [2]
The Progressive Farmer Company continued to publish across the Southeastern and Mid-south regions soon expanding successfully into Texas and the Southwest. Serving farm information needs, publishing through two world wars, crusading for important rural farm issues such as rural electrification, soil conservation, rural education and modern agricultural technology, the magazine soared to a circulation high of 1.3 million by the 1960s.
In 1966, the management, led by Emory Cunningham and the editors of Progressive Farmer launched Southern Living magazine fashioned after the lifestyle and home life section in the magazine. The Progressive Farmer had extended its appeal among suburban housewives, and that segment of its circulation received the new magazine, Southern Living to establish its distribution and advertising rate base. From the pages of Progressive Farmer rose the largest and most successful regional publication in history. Consequently, Progressive Farmer was able to editorially focus more completely on production agriculture and concentrate circulation efforts to the rural farm household. The launch of Southern Living was an outstanding strategic move for the Progressive Farmer Company.
In 1980, the Progressive Farmer Company changed its name to Southern Progress Corporation in an effort to reflect its wider focus. In the early 1980s the editors of Progressive Farmer began a regional edition of Progressive Farmer in the twelve Midwestern states. It was distinctively different from the main Southern issue and was used to establish a circulation and advertising foothold in the Midwest. In 1985, Southern Progress Corporation was purchased by Time Inc. for $498 million. By the end of the decade, Progressive Farmer Midwest was incorporated into the main edition's editorial and circulation making Progressive Farmer a nationwide production agricultural and lifestyle publication with a circulation of over 700,000. During the 1990s Progressive Farmer enjoyed prominence among farm readers and advertisers with special editorial efforts in farm safety and rural recreation blended with production agricultural reporting.
In 2007, after 130 years of publishing under the company it founded, Southern Progress Corporation, a division of Time-Warner, announced it had sold the Progressive Farmer magazine, circulation 620,000, to a former advertiser, DTN, based in Omaha, Nebraska. It was announced by DTN that Progressive Farmer would continue to be headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama.
DTN was acquired by Telvent in 2008. In 2017, Schneider Electric, which had acquired Telvent in 2011, sold it to Swiss investment group TBG.
The history of what is now Alabama stems back thousands of years ago when it was inhabited by indigenous peoples. The Woodland period spanned from around 1000 BCE to 1000 CE and was marked by the development of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. This was followed by the Mississippian culture of Native Americans, which lasted to around the 1600 CE. The first Europeans to make contact with Alabama were the Spanish, with the first permanent European settlement being Mobile, established by the French in 1702.
The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), more informally called the American Farm Bureau (AFB) or simply the Farm Bureau, is a United States-based 501(c)(5) tax-exempt agricultural organization and lobbying group. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Farm Bureau has affiliates in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Each affiliate is a (state or county) Farm Bureau, and the parent organization is also often called simply the Farm Bureau.
DTN, previously known as Telvent DTN, Data Transmission Network and Dataline, is a private company based in Bloomington, Minnesota that specializes in subscription-based services for the analysis and delivery of real-time weather, agricultural, energy, and commodity market information. As of 2018 the company has approximately 600,000 subscribers, mostly in the United States. DTN is known for its accurate meteorological forecasting and large network of weather stations, its market analysis services, and its early use of radio and satellite systems to transmit reports to its Midwestern consumers. DTN also operates The Progressive Farmer magazine. DTN was previously owned by Telvent and Schneider Electric, and since 2017 has been owned by Zürich-based TBG.
Braxton Bragg Comer was an American politician who served as the 33rd governor of Alabama from 1907 to 1911, and a United States senator in 1920. As governor, he achieved railroad reform, lowering business rates in Alabama to make them more competitive with other states. He increased funding for the public school system, resulting in more rural schools and high schools in each county for white students and a rise in the state's literacy rate.
Leonidas Lafayette Polk, or L.L. Polk, was an American farmer, journalist and political figure. He was a leader of the Farmers' Alliance and helped found the Populist Party.
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The Birmingham News was the principal newspaper for Birmingham, Alabama, United States in the latter half of the 20th Century and the first quarter of the 21st. The paper was owned by Advance Publications and was a daily newspaper from its founding through September 30, 2012. After that day, the News and its two sister Alabama newspapers, the Press-Register in Mobile and The Huntsville Times, moved to a thrice-weekly print-edition publication schedule.
The Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union was formed in 1886 in Texas. Despite the fact that both black and white farmers faced great difficulties due to the rising price of farming and the decreasing profits which were coming from farming, the protective organization known as the Southern Farmers' Alliance did not allow black farmers to join. A group of black farmers decided to organize their own alliance, to fill their needs. The organization rapidly spread across the Southern United States, peaking with a membership of 1.2 million in 1891.
Southern Living is a lifestyle magazine aimed at readers in the Southern United States featuring recipes, house plans, garden plans, and information about Southern culture and travel. It is published by Birmingham, Alabama–based Southern Progress Corporation, a unit of IAC's Dotdash Meredith.
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The role of African Americans in the agricultural history of the United States includes roles as the main work force when they were enslaved on cotton and tobacco plantations in the Antebellum South. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863-1865 most stayed in farming as very poor sharecroppers, who rarely owned land. They began the Great Migration to cities in the mid-20th century. About 40,000 are farmers today.
Clarence Poe (1881–1964) was an American Progressive Era Southern editor, author, reformer, and segregationist.
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The Avondale Mills were a system of textile mills located predominantly in Alabama, but also in Georgia and South Carolina, with headquarters in Birmingham, and later in Sylacauga, Alabama. The Birmingham neighborhood of Avondale was chosen to be the site of the first mill, hence the naming of the company. Founded in 1897, the mills employed thousands of Alabamians throughout its 109-year history until they closed in 2006. Avondale Mills was founded in 1897 by a consortium of investors including the Trainer family of Chester, Pennsylvania, the future governor of Alabama, Braxton Bragg Comer, and a group of Birmingham civic leaders including Frederick Mitchell Jackson Sr.
The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.
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