A 1-Year-Old Magazine About Farming Is the Talk of the Media World

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In this March 17, 2014 a cow cleans her newborn calf on the O'Connor Ranch near Philip, South Dakota.

Image: Toby Brusseau/Associated Press

By Seth Fiegerman2014-05-02 18:39:22 UTC

Ann Marie Gardner couldn't help but be starstruck by all the big names gathered at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan for the National Magazine Awards. Most in attendance worked at publications that had been around for decades and had hobnobbed with celebrities and politicians. Her magazine had barely been around for a year and focused more on livestock.

Gardner and two of her coworkers gawked at Jake Silverstein, the soon-to-be editor of the New York Times Magazine, and mingled with the team from Martha Stewart Living. At one point, Gardner decided to introduce herself to Graydon Carter, the renowned Vanity Fair editor who was set to be inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame that night.

"I said to him, 'We are actually up against you for the magazine section category,'" Gardner says. "And he said, 'Oh my gosh, you're going to win.'"

Carter may or may not have been sincere with that prediction. In truth, Gardner had no expectation that she would win. Her publication, Modern Farmer , was up against Vanity Fair, GQ and New York Magazine, the latter of which had won the award in this category in previous years.

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Then the announcement came: Modern Farmer had won a National Magazine Award. The room erupted in applause. Suddenly everything slowed down for Gardner.

"I really wasn't expecting that we were going to win," she says. "When they announced us, it was like everything went in slow motion and then I had a really long walk up to the stage. It was surreal. This is what it must feel like to be at the Oscars."

When Gardner first set out to work on a magazine dedicated to modern agriculture lifestyle, the feedback from her friends wasn't particularly positive.

"I worked on it for about a year and my good friends thought, 'What are you talking about? A farming magazine? Are you having a midlife crisis?'" she recalls. "People were worried."

It wasn't actually supposed to be a magazine. While reporting for The New York Times and Monocle, a publication she helped found, she noticed more and more people who were eager to learn about where their food comes from, how to grow things of their own and generally become more self-sufficient. She thought it might make for a good article, but the more she thought about it, the bigger the project became.

She opted to turn the idea into a television show and began sketching out story lines for 12 episodes. Then her inner magazine editor took over and she realized she had the makings of a new publication.

Gardner raised a modest funding round from Frank Giustra, perhaps best known for founding Lionsgate Films, and built up a small team of nine employees in Hudson, New York, the picturesque upstate city where she lives. In April of last year, she launched the Modern Farmer quarterly magazine and website.

On any given day, you might find a story on Modern Farmer about reducing the dangers of raw milk, the strange phenomenon of moose milking, and an artist who turns hay into art.

And then there are the livestreams.

Each issue of the magazine features a livestock animal on the cover. To promote it, the Modern Farmer website hosts a livestream of that animal every day at 4pm for a week. For the latest issue, which had a pig on the cover, there was "ham cam."

"We have a pretty seamless integration between our print and our digital," Gardner says.

Some 300,000 people tuned in to the livestream during the week, she says. In total, Modern Farmer had 800,000 pageviews in March, up from 500,000 in December. The print publication currently has a circulation of 100,000 each quarter.

Modern Farmer isn't profitable yet, which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise for a year-old print and online operation, but Gardner expects it will break even by 2015, if not sooner. The startup is looking to raise a little more funding to help scale up business operations and prove that there is room in the media landscape for a successful magazine about farming.

For now, the small team at Modern Farmer is heads down in their office in upstate New York, only coming up for air on brief occasions like the magazine award ceremony this week.

"Maybe that's why last night was such a surprise," she says. "We were so busy doing it, we didn't think about how it was going to work. We just kind of trusted that it would."

Topics: Business, farming, Media, Startups