" I heard it through the AgLine"

January 8, 2010

 

 

·        Amish entrepreneur’s old fashioned approach

·        Can we feed the world without damaging it?

·        Hawaii sees first case of tomato curl disease

·        Solar powered irrigation a boon to West Africa

·        Mixed niches yields big success for rural TV

 

 

Amish entrepreneur’s old fashioned approach

 

(Business Week) – Imagine trying to build a national food retailing business based on mail order, far-flung distributors, and trade shows—without using the Internet. No e-mail newsletters or Web site for taking orders and handling complaints, no Facebook fans, or Google (GOOG) ads, or Twitter following.

 

That's not all. Imagine doing it without using cell phones or computers. No BlackBerry for expediting orders. No CRM software for segmenting customer lists. Absolutely no texting.

 

Let your imagination go a little further and picture doing it without driving a car or without using electricity. No quick trips to the post office to ship orders, and no fax machine, scanner, or copier.

Remarkable Anomaly

 

This is the world of Miller Farm, a Pennsylvania food producer that has grown to $1.8 million in annual sales from less than half that four years ago. The farm is so busy it's turning away orders from food cooperatives around the country.

 

But data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggest what an anomaly Miller Farm is.

 

While farming is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, with more than 300,000 new farms started from 2002 to 2007, accounting for nearly 2 million small farms, making a good living is becoming tougher. The USDA in its 2007 census said the number of small farms with $100,000 to $250,000 annual sales (its highest revenue range for small farms) declined 7%.

Horse-and-Buggy Ways

 

The driving force behind this anomaly is 32-year-old Amos Miller. He's not growing his business bereft of so many modern conveniences out of some sense of purity or to prove a point, but rather because he is Amish. As part of their religious beliefs, the Amish turn their backs on modern-day conveniences and are highly visible in the areas of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where most live, notable for their dark clothing and their horses and buggies, which compete with cars and trucks on local roads. They avoid even having their photos taken, which is why we can't include a photo of Miller and his family.

 

Located in Bird-in-Hand, Pa., Miller Farm was started by Amos' father, Jacob. Amos says he and his dad concluded in 2000, based on conversations they had with customers and representatives of organizations that promote nutrient-dense foods, that interest was about to grow significantly. The two of them focused on expanding the farm's product line, so they now offer 31 products, from grassfed beef (including not only various steak cuts, but marrow bones, ox tail, and tallow) to milk-fed pork, pastured chicken (including chickens not fed any soy), and 16 varieties of cultured veggies (including fermented ketchup, cabbage juice, and tomato salsa).

 

The interest in such foods has helped drive the rapid growth of farmer's markets, private buyers clubs, cooperatives, and community supported agriculture (known as CSAs, whereby consumers commit to buying a particular producer's foods for a season or ongoing). Once popular mainly for vegetables, CSAs now exist for meat and even for fish.

Quest for Nutrient Density

 

"It used to be that organic was all the rage," says Dan Kittredge, executive director of the Real Food Campaign, which is part of advocacy group Re-Mineralize the Earth. "Now everyone has organic." Nutrient-dense food is the new rage and gives "the advantage back" to small farmers who leverage the notion that certain foods, such as fermented vegetables, grass-fed beef, and pastured chickens, are more nutritious than conventionally produced products and may help consumers strengthen their immune systems. "There is money to be made here," he says.

 

And making money is what Miller Farm is doing. "I can't meet all the demand," says Amos Miller. He relies on additional supplies of product from his brother, John, who "grows the produce that we ferment and process here," and from three other neighboring Amish and Mennonite farmers.

 

What distinguishes Miller Farm from others, such as celebrity farmer Joel Salatin's farm in Virginia, which has helped popularize nutrient-dense foods, is that Miller has gone national—and done it without modern conveniences. His main concessions to modern life are a generator for refrigeration to cool certain foods and a landline telephone (717-556-0672) to take orders from distributors and mail-order customers. He also relies on FedEx (FDX) for shipping orders to customers.

Courting the Foodies

 

To market his wares and network, Miller regularly attends events popular with foodie types. At the annual conference of the Weston A.Price Foundation, held in November at a hotel outside Chicago, he and several other Amish manned a large table in the exhibitor area, selling large jars of fermented veggies, maple syrup, and homemade spelt noodles.In December, at a conference in St.Paul, Minn., of sustainable farmers and their customers put on by Acres USA, Miller's offerings were a little different: at breakfast time, slices of dense grain bread slathered in butter and honey; and at lunch, plates of bread with homemade liverwurst and salami.

 

How did he get all that food to the conferences if he doesn't drive? He rented a refrigerated truck and hired a non-Amish neighbor to drive it. He stored the food in dozens of coolers with refrigerant chemical blocks.

 

"He's a hustler," says Pete Kennedy, president of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, who mans a booth near Miller's at the Weston A. Price Foundation conference.

The Blessings of Dirt

 

The conferences bring in not only direct revenues but also customers from around the country. For instance, many of the attendees at the Weston A. Price Foundation conference are involved with food cooperatives back home that are seeking the kinds of foods Miller's farm produces. The orders pour in from individual consumers the old-fashioned way—via snail mail, as well as via the farm's conventional telephone line. The farm receives regular orders from food cooperatives as far away as Florida and California.

 

While he says he's proud of the fact that "we're making a lot of money," Miller notes that elders in his church worry about the growth. "They discourage us getting too big," he notes, in part because they don't want Amish farmers to be tempted by the marvels of modern technology. "As long as we don't rely on computers and electronics, they're okay."

 

Miller says he doesn't get frustrated by not having modern conveniences. In fact, when he's at trade shows, he usually can't wait to get back home. "The city is a pretty sterile environment," he says. "But if I did it once a month, I'd get lost, I'd forget what it's like to get dirty."

 

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Can we feed the world without damaging it?

 

(Greenwire via The New York Times) – Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak have every reason not to get along.

 

Ronald, a plant scientist, has spent her past two decades manipulating rice from her lab bench, bending the grain's DNA to her whim. Adamchak, meanwhile, is an organic farmer, teaching college students the best practices of an environmentally gentle agriculture at his California market garden.

 

As Adamchak confesses, few have been more vociferously opposed to the genetic engineering practiced by Ronald than his organic movement, which has steadily grown in recent years to constitute an influential, if tiny, part of the U.S. farm system. So it can come as some surprise when Ronald and Adamchak let slip that they have been happily married for more than a decade.

 

Such a union should not be shocking, the couple argues. And a more modest version -- sans marriage -- must be considered by any farmer or consumer hoping for a sustainable future for agriculture.

 

Industrial farming, with its heavy use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer and irrigation, is exhausting the environment, and with billions more mouths to feed in the upcoming decades, the problem will only worsen unless the efforts of organic farming and genetic engineering are combined, they say.

 

"The worst thing for the environment is farming," said Ronald, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who is best known for her work developing rice strains that survive two weeks of continuous flooding.

 

"It doesn't matter if it is organic," Ronald said. "You have to go in and destroy everything. So let's be efficient. Let's conserve. Let's be smart about it."

 

To spread their message to two communities that rarely speak in measured terms, Ronald and Adamchak have written a book, "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food," which came out in paperback last month.

 

What Adamchak and Ronald pursue in the book is in essence a unified theory of farming. While critical of Western seed companies that have co-opted genetically modified (GM) crops for questionable business practices, the couple argues that both current and future generations of altered crops will, if responsibly managed, allow much of the world's hungry to be fed from land already degraded by the plow's slice and the tractor's compressing wheel.

 

"The point of our book is that you really need to look at the goals of sustainability," Ronald said. "What matters is: Are we achieving sustainable agricultures that can feed the world without damaging it?"

 

Ronald and Adamchak are not alone in their call for a more nuanced understanding of GM crops. Their work has inspired books by a varied clutch of professionals: an environmentalist, a historian and a journalist. The books -- Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Discipline," James McWilliams' "Just Food" and Michael Specter's "Denialism" -- take advocates and critics of genetic engineering to task for what has become a polarized and dumbed-down debate.

 

Brand, who heavily cites Ronald and Adamchak, is perhaps the most incendiary in his work. While he made his name as a leader of the environmental movement decades ago, founding the Whole Earth Catalog, in recent years Brand has sought a third way, supporting "heretical" technologies like nuclear power.

 

He is full-throated in his defense of GM crops, writing: "I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our practitioners a crucial tool."

 

McWilliams, an agriculture historian at Texas State University and previously a critic of GM crops, said that during his recent research he has come to respect and heed the couple's message.

 

"I admire them for fighting an immense uphill battle," McWilliams said. "I cannot think of another issue that really sets the organic lobby [so] on edge. ... Their attempt to blend organic agriculture with genetic engineering is really quite visionary."

 

"They're looking into a tidal wave of opposition," he added. "Just judging them solely on the contents of their book, they do it with a great deal of knowledge and a very powerful argument."

 

Filling a void?

 

At its heart, organic farming has never been about opposition to GM crops, said Adamchak, who teaches organic production at Davis. Organic techniques -- use of natural pesticides, no synthetic fertilizer, limited irrigation -- should be seen as limiting farming's effects on the land than as a reaction against agriculture technology.

 

And there is no doubt that conventional agriculture, while highly productive, puts a huge strain on the environment. Most significantly, synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, used to load the soil with nitrogen, an essential plant nutrient, leach from fields into water tables, causing massive algae blooms in the oceans and contaminating drinking water.

 

Such strain pushes the limits of human adaptation and raises questions of how willing communities are to tolerate environmental degradation, Adamchak said. For example, Des Moines, Iowa, has a water system that filters out nitrates left from the region's massive corn and soy fields.

 

"It's cheaper for that system than changing the farming system," Adamchak said. "But it's kind of crazy."

 

Organic farms limit external inputs, as they are known, enriching the soil with alternative crops or introducing natural predators for pests. However, such farms are labor intensive and require larger tracts of land to grow yields acceptable to most farmers, meaning widespread acceptance of the movement could destroy more natural land and require a massive return of workers to the heartland. Currently, no more than 3 percent of U.S. farming is organic.

 

"It's a rare person that will get out and farm," Ronald said. "So, if that's true, and we don't have a massive return to farms," then centralized, highly productive farms will remain, she said. "But how do you retain that productivity without the negative impact?"

 

This is the void that GM crops can fill, they say. Environmental benefits can be seen in the developing world with even the current generation of GM crops. For example, farmers in China have quickly adopted cotton engineered to produce a protein called Bt -- a natural insecticide that is also heavily used by organic farmers. Within four years, the farmers' annual chemical use dropped by 156 million pounds, and related illnesses plummeted.

 

But the true, yet currently unfilled, potential of GM crops in the future will be to allow farmers to maintain or raise their current yields while working with a selection of organic techniques to reduce external inputs and improve soil health. Crops that more efficiently use nitrogen or water will go a long way toward achieving sustainable, industrial models of agriculture, they say.

 

While such nitrogen-fixing crops may be closer to reality, it should be made clear that they have not yet successfully been developed and have long been promised. It also remains questionable how much genetic engineering could really lower nitrogen use, said Thomas Sinclair, an agronomy professor at the University of Florida.

 

"Plants have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be very conservative with nitrogen," Sinclair said. "Since 75 to 80 percent of the nitrogen accumulated by a grain crop ends up in the harvested grain, I don't see how things can be improved very much."

 

Turning point seen

 

Despite the somewhat theoretical thrust of their argument, the couple's position is echoed by a recent report by Britain's Royal Society, which called for a "sustainable intensification" of agriculture using GM crops. The report couples its support with calls for greater public-sector research, responsible use and the need for regulators to limit the risk that GM crops could spread beyond a farm's limits.

 

Other veterans of the industrial farming models of the "Green Revolution" -- credited with saving millions of lives in the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s -- have seconded Adamchak and Ronald's message, notably Gordon Conway, the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Conway, who wrote the introduction to "Tomorrow's Table," has called for a "doubly green" revolution to remedy the green revolution's industrial excesses, counting in part on biotech crops.

 

Yet despite such institutional support and what Ronald and Adamchak see as their complementary aspects, there has been little openness in the organic community to their message.

 

"It's almost like the public grasped onto what I see as this very small sliver of sustainable agriculture," Ronald said. "It really was a distraction to the overall goals of what many people in the agricultural community tried to achieve."

 

Both see the turning point as when the U.S. Department of Agriculture established its national organic certification. The department's initial proposal would have allowed GM crops to be branded organic, a move that drew many thousands of letters of protest. Adamchak witnessed the revolt firsthand as the former president of California Certified Organic Farmers.

 

"Organic agriculture has been from the start a reaction to the problems generated by conventional agriculture," he said. "As long as [GM] plants are seen as being part of the conventional agriculture system, there is guilt by association."

 

Ronald tries to closely question people opposed to GM crops, she said.

 

"I always want people to be really, really specific: what don't you like," she said. "Usually it comes down to, I don't like Monsanto. That's not a forward-looking concept. They should be going to the Department of Justice if they want to stop Monsanto."

 

McWilliams, the historian, found much the same in his research.

 

"I have realized that people have deep, deep anger at the companies that own this technology and that profit from this technology," he said. "That is where the vast bulk of the anger lies. And on the question of the science itself, most of the laypeople I talk to ... really don't understand it.

 

"I don't mean that to be dismissive. It's just not something consumers have spent a lot of time getting their minds around."

 

Shifting the debate

 

Adamchak credits his openness to GM crops quite specifically to his wife.

 

"It took me a while to figure what her research really was," he said. "It seemed to me what is demonstrated that there are many people in the university looking to solve various problems in agriculture coming from a completely different point of view than organic agriculture."

 

When the couple encountered various news stories alleging health risks from the crops over the past decade -- notably flawed studies that alleged harm to monarch butterflies from Bt corn -- they had each other's expertise to draw on, Adamchak said.

 

"What Pam had access to was the scientific papers and research that had been done on this issue -- what the most factual information was," he said. "That really helped me to gain a balanced view of how [GM] crops are functioning in the environment."

 

Ronald has been disappointed that the larger organic community has not responded like her husband. When the book first came out, she asked Adamchak if they would have a lot of great conversations with his peers, to which he replied, "They won't read it."

 

"Sadly, he's mostly been right," Ronald said.

 

"There's no incentive for the organic community to read it," she added. "The marketing is going really well now, and the public has a certain idea. They falsely believe that sustainable means organic and falsely believe GE seed falls outside this."

 

The couple would like to see a new national sustainable certification established. Such a standard would likely face opposition from both conventional and organic farming, however, they said.

 

"One of the problems I see with conventional agriculture as a whole is it doesn't really have a vision for sustainability at this point," Adamchak said. "If you can establish one ... that's a vision that a lot of consumers can embrace and say, 'Yes, I'm contributing to a sustainable farming system when I'm buying this food.'"

 

More than anything, Ronald seems to wish GM crops were placed back into the backwaters of technical, rather than political, debate. One should not get hung up on whether a crop is GM or not and "just use the most appropriate technology," she said. In some cases, like her flood-tolerant rice, it will be advanced breeding; in other cases, genetic engineering.

 

While they argue for rapprochement, Ronald and Adamchak have left the details for how organic methods can be applied to GM-friendly industrial models to others. Promising research is being done at Iowa State University, Adamchak said, where their chief investigator into sustainable agriculture, Matt Liebman, has experimentally tested organic-style crop rotations that could be competitive with typical industrial models.

 

Much more research will be need in these areas, Ronald said.

 

"I think it's important to remind people that most of the arable land has been farmed," Ronald said. "There is fourfold less water available per person on Earth than we had 50 years ago. These problems aren't going away."

 

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Hawaii sees first case of tomato curl disease

 

(Big Island Video News.com) – Pepeekeo farmer Richard Ha, whose Hamakua Springs Country Farm grows tomatoes known all over the state, recently alerted Hawaii to a new threat to the island tomato industry via his blog.

 

According to Ha, the University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources said they found the "tomato yellow leaf curl" in Maui tomato samples.

 

"As far as I know, this is the most devastating tomato virus worldwide!" warned plant pathologist Dr. John Hu in a November note. "It has been reported in many other countries including the mainland USA. However, this is the first time we have seen it in Hawaii. Potentially, it could be a very significant problem for you and the entire tomato industry in Hawaii. Plus, we may have similar viruses in other vegetable crops in Hawaii."

 

According to info CTAHR provided Ha: Tomato yellow leaf curl is a destructive viral disease of tomato caused by Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV). In tropical and subtropical regions, total losses of tomato crops have been reported. TYLCV is widespread and can be found in most places where tomato is grown. In Hawaii, TYLCV was first discovered in Wailuku, Maui, and Poamoho, Oahu, in November of 2009. It is not known how TYLCV entered Hawai‘i.

 

 Symptoms of tomato yellow leaf curl

   

The new growth of plants with tomato yellow leaf curl has reduced internodes, giving the plant a stunted appearance. The new leaves are also greatly reduced in size and wrinkled, are yellowed between the veins, and have margins that curl upward, giving them a cup-like appearance. Flowers may appear but usually will drop before fruit is set.

 

    Spread of TYLCV

   

TYLCV is primarily transmitted by the sweetpotato whitefly (Bemisia tabaci) and the biotype B (or silverleaf) whitefly (Bemisia argentifolii). These whiteflies can acquire the virus in as little as 5 minutes by feeding on infected plants, and they remain infective for life; the virus, however, is not passed on to their progeny. TYLCV is not spread by other whitefly species such as the greenhouse whitefly, Trialeurodes vaporariorum, which is also common in Hawai‘i. TYLCV cannot be spread by seed and is not mechanically transmitted (e.g., by pruning equipment or by touch). Long-distance spread of TYLCV occurs primarily by movement of infected plant material or by wind dispersal of whiteflies harboring the virus.

 

"At the farm we will scout specifically for plants with these types of symptoms," Ha wrote in his blog. "But we are very worried that this disease will come to the Big Island. The history of invasive species makes it likely that this disease will get here."

 

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Solar powered irrigation a boon to West Africa

 

(Stanford University) – Solar-powered drip irrigation systems significantly enhance household incomes and nutritional intake of villagers in arid sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new Stanford University study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

 

The study found that solar-powered pumps installed in remote villages in the West African nation of Benin provide a cost-effective way of delivering much-needed irrigation water, particularly during the long dry season. The results are scheduled to be published the week of Jan. 4 in the online edition of PNAS.

 

"Our case study on women's farming groups in rural Benin revealed solar-powered drip irrigation – a clean, cost-competitive technology – significantly improved nutrition and food security as well as household incomes in one year," said lead author Jennifer Burney, a postdoctoral scholar with the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford.

 

"Solar-powered drip irrigation systems break seasonal rainfall dependence, which typically limits farmers to a three- to six-month growing season, and support the production of diversified, high-value crops in rural Africa," Burney added.

 

She and her co-authors noted that much of sub-Saharan Africa's rural population is considered "food insecure," surviving on less than $1 per person per day. "And whereas most are engaged in agricultural production as their main livelihood, they still spend 50 to 80 percent of their income on food, and are often net consumers of food," they wrote.

 

Benin pilot project

 

In 2007, with support from Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment, Burney and her colleagues partnered with the nonprofit Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) on a pilot irrigation project in rural Benin. SELF financed and led the installation of three solar-powered drip irrigation systems in two villages in Benin's Kalalé district. Each system is used by a local women's agricultural group, which typically consists of 30 to 35 women who share the maintenance costs of the new irrigation technology.

 

"In Kalalé, 80 percent of the villagers live on less than $1.25 per day, which is representative of a number of poor, rural communities in Africa," said study co-author Rosamond Naylor, director of the Program on Food Security and the Environment and a professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford.

 

In rural Benin, women and girls traditionally are responsible for hauling water by hand, often from very long distances. The solar-powered irrigation systems were designed to free them from hauling water to grow vegetable crops, particularly during the dry season.

 

To measure the impact of the solar-powered drip irrigation technology, the researchers monitored the agricultural groups using the new irrigation systems, as well as two "control" villages where women continued growing vegetables in traditional hand-watered gardens. Household surveys were conducted at the start of the project in November 2007 and again in November 2008.

 

Nutrition and income

 

The results were striking. "In just one year, we saw that photovoltaic drip irrigation systems had important implications for food and nutrition security, as well as household income," Burney said.

 

The three solar-powered irrigation systems supplied on average 1.9 metric tons of produce per month, including such high-valued crops as tomatoes, okra, peppers, eggplants and carrots. In villages irrigated with solar-powered systems, vegetable intake increased to three to five servings per day – the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Recommended Daily Allowance for vegetables – with most of the improvement taking place during the long dry season. In a world where 20 to 25 percent of global disease burden for children is due to malnutrition, such improvements could have a large impact over time, Burney said.

 

"Seventeen percent of project beneficiaries reported feeling less food insecure, demonstrating a remarkable effect on both year-round and seasonal food access," Naylor added.

 

As for household income, the authors found that women who used solar-powered irrigation became strong net producers of vegetables and earned extra income from sales, allowing them to significantly increase their purchases of high-protein food and other staples during the dry season.

 

Project benefits quickly spread to other community members, Burney said. For example, an elementary school curriculum was developed to help village children learn about the benefits of solar drip technology. "There was an overwhelming sense of pride in the new system by teachers, children and women participating in the farmer groups," she added.

 

Sustainability

 

Each solar-powered drip irrigation system is about 1.24 acres (0.5 hectare) in size, costs approximately $18,000 to install and requires about $5,750 a year to maintain, the authors said. Based on the projected earnings of the farmers, the system should pay for itself in about 2.3 years, they concluded. And despite higher up-front costs, the durable solar systems should be more economical in the long run than less expensive irrigation systems that use gasoline, diesel or kerosene pumps, with the added benefit of being emissions free, they added.

 

Focusing on novel irrigation technologies for farmers could be the needed tool for escaping poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Burney. "The photovoltaic irrigation drip system could potentially become a 'game changer' for agricultural development over time," she added.

 

"Solar-powered irrigation provides a cleaner source of energy that is less susceptible to global price fluctuations," Naylor said. "Improved agricultural productivity in the developing world can play a critical role in global poverty alleviation, and productivity-enhancing technologies provide a sense of hope for persistently poor households."

 

Other co-authors of the PNAS study are Lennart Woltering and Dov Pasternak of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Niger and Marshall Burke of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California-Berkeley.

 

The research was supported by an Environmental Ventures Projects grant from the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. The Program on Food Security and the Environment is jointly run by the Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.

 

Ashley Dean is communications manager at the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University.

 

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Mixed niches yields big success for rural TV

 

(Forbes.com) – Give Patrick Gottsch credit for candor in building his 24-hour cable television network for rural America. "I've never had an original idea in my life. We've stolen all of our concepts from urban media," he laughs, standing on the deck of a sailboat off the coast of Maui in January.

 

It's taken Gottsch 10 years to hit cruising speed. He launched his channel, RFD-TV, in 2000 using old re-runs from the Nashville Network and a new concept: bridging the rural divide between farmers and ranchers. To do this, he blended four program genres: agriculture, horses, rural living and country music.

 

Any one of those niches might have failed, but as a mix they aggregate a Nielsen-rated audience of 13 million weekly viewers from small towns and farm communities across the U.S. "No matter where you go, agriculture is important. Everybody's gotta eat," says Gottsch.

 

He has a point, but how hungry is the audience? "There are 27 million television homes outside urban areas in the U.S., most with no access to media coverage of agriculture issues or rural lifestyles," he says. And as evidence of crossover appeal, consider this: Farming has become a killer app on social media. Facebook's FarmVille, where players create their own farm and grow crops, is the most popular gaming app on the site, with 74 million active users.

 

National news organizations, based in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, tend to cover rural America through the lens of natural disasters. Gottsch doesn't dwell on droughts and tornadoes. One of RFD's biggest hits is a Larry King Live copy called RFD TV Live. Instead of Tyra Banks or Bono, executives from John Deere show up to chat about their new tractor line.

 

The network carries 92 such programs, most produced independently with advertising or underwriting from marketers like Wrangler Jeans, General Mills and Monsanto. There are shows on bull riding and women's pro rodeo. On Animal Makeover, sponsored by Ralston Purina, the topics include crawfish farming, creating a well-lit rabbit hutch, how to prevent gallstones in goats and tips on grooming show lambs. In a segment on hay, equine nutritionist Katie Young kneels in front of a horse pen and offers tips for the buyer (hay stems should be narrow, soft and pliable to the touch). Horses who snack on stale greens will get chubby--"grass belly," she calls it.

 

Sure, these shows are populated by cattle consultants and steeped in product puffery (the health benefits of Purina's "Goat Chow" are talked up like a bowl of granola). But it's entertaining fare for an audience that knows its hogs from its heifers.

 

Gottsch knows a commodity when he sees one. A former farmer from Nebraska, the 56-year-old was once a broker on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. His first swing at launching the channel in the late '80s struck out (rural TV was a tough sell with venture funders and cable operators). Gottsch lowered his sights, cutting production costs by working with independent producers and pitching the network to satellite channels instead.

 

Satellite carriers bit, and now nearly every big cable outfit carries RFD. With a staff of 50 working out of production studios in Nashville, Tenn., Gottsch says RFD's $25 million in revenue nudged it into the black last year. The money comes from subscriptions to an RFD-produced magazine, fees from programmers and product advertising. Newt Gingrich's civic involvement group, American Solutions, bought a series of 30-minute segments on RFD during the last presidential race. Gottsch wants to capitalize on the buy. "There are more rural states and senators than there are urban states and senators," he says, believing RFD should be a go-to platform for red-state political campaigning in 2012.

 

But first he plans to launch a national prime-time rural news broadcast. It would feed news gathered from bureaus in Chicago (which will cover the Merc and Board of Trade) and Washington, as well as overseas bureaus he plans to open in Sydney and London. Gottsch launched a sister channel in the U.K. last year, Rural TV, that is available via satellite in Western Europe.

 

Gottsch wants a bureau in Sao Paulo, too. "Brazil already has five agricultural channels," he says.

 

Can Gottsch wrangle even more carriage for his rural channel with cable and satellite operators, and raise the bushels of seed money it'll take to launch operations elsewhere? That'll take a different kind of horse trading.

 

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