The Press: Farming by the Book

As a boy on the poverty-stricken farm land of Chatham County, N.C., Clarence H. Poe got a proposition from his uncle. "If you'll pick the leftover cotton in that patch," he was told, "I'll give you a year's subscription to the Progressive Farmer." It did not seem much of an offer to a spirited, twelve-year-old North Carolina farm boy. The Progressive Farmer was a struggling, eight-page weekly with only about 5,000 readers. But it changed Poe's life. He got the subscription, and became so interested in the Farmer that, at 17, he joined the staff of the magazine as a writer. After five years, he and several friends bought the Progressive Farmer for $7,500, later turned it into a monthly.

Last week, in his 50th year of running the magazine, Editor and Chairman Poe's Progressive Farmer (circ. 1,227,329) carried more advertising than any other farm magazine in the U.S., and could justly say that its five regional editions "dominate the rural South."

Two Hands. Progressive Farmer dominates by giving farmers articles on everything from "Rhinitis in Hogs," "Bible Readings" and "Roughage for Dairy Cows" to "16 Ways to Beat the Feed Shortage" and "Poisons and Their Uses." Between pages and pages of four-color ads (beer and liquor are banned) are reader-participation contests, fiction, how-to-do-it articles, outspoken editorials and dozens of other features that fit within the magazine's editorial formula: "Stories [and articles] that are wholesome and inspiring without being goody-goody or pedantic."

To meet farmers on their home ground, each of Progressive Farmer's five editions concentrates on specific states, thus allows the magazine to pinpoint crop, land and cattle advice. When Poe first took over the magazine, farmers "believed more in the moon than they did in the agricultural colleges." Poe spurred the fight to change all that. Progressive Farmer educated farmers to diversify their farming ("Don't try to farm with one arm"), demanded "more doctors for rural areas," and worked for a better deal for the Negro ("We must fight for a much fairer deal for the Negro, even while we also oppose the extremist demands of his more violent spokesmen"). Poe kept Progressive Farmer free of any single farm group, still carries the legend in the magazine: "Serving no master, ruled by no faction, circumscribed by no selfish or narrow policy."