About Offrange

Offrange

Offrange is an American agriculture and rural-life news publication, founded in 2022 as Ambrook Research, the editorial arm of farm financial software company Ambrook. It publishes original reporting on how food is produced, how land is managed and how rural communities live, in a weekly newsletter, on its website, in a podcast and in a semi-annual print publication. Its tagline describes its territory as the untold stories just beyond the fence line of American agriculture.

Edited by food and agriculture journalist Jesse Hirsch, the publication grew from about 600 newsletter subscribers for its first issue in December 2022 to nearly 140,000 subscribers by the time of its renaming, earned awards and accolades in agricultural journalism, and in its announcement of the new name presented the change as a reaffirmation of editorial independence from its parent company. The directory lists it in Denver, Colorado, consistent with recent descriptions of Ambrook as Denver-based, although its editor and much of its contributor network work nationally.

The parent company: Ambrook

Ambrook is a financial management company built for farms, ranches and other asset-heavy businesses that build and sustain the real economy. It was founded in 2020 by Mackenzie Burnett, Jeff Anders and Dan Schlosser, in some accounts dated to 2021 as the company took shape, to give agricultural operators bookkeeping, invoicing, bill pay, reporting and inventory tools designed for the realities of agricultural production, including the biological lifecycles of crops and livestock that general accounting software handles poorly.

The company grew to a customer base described, at the time of the Offrange renaming, as thousands strong among the agricultural community, and it raised substantial venture funding, including a Series A reported at about $26 million that brought its total to roughly $29 million. That commercial growth matters to the publication's story: Ambrook Research was created in part to build name recognition for a newcomer company in the agriculture space, a purpose its editors have described openly.

Launch as Ambrook Research

Ambrook Research began publishing in 2022, sending its first newsletter issue in December 2022 to about 600 subscribers, a group Hirsch later recalled was heavily padded with friends and colleagues. The editorial proposition was to cover modern agriculture as journalism, not as company content marketing: reported stories, written by working food and farming journalists and freelancers, for an audience of farmers, food professionals, academics and general-interest readers.

The early format settled quickly. Hirsch described the two-year-old publication in 2024 as publishing three original stories each week, a monthly podcast on American farmland, a semi-annual print publication, and a smart weekly newsletter then reaching nearly 80,000 readers. Stories were commissioned at professional freelance rates, with pitch guidance seeking work at the intersections of agriculture with subjects such as trucking, labour, technology and the environment, focused on the United States.

Jesse Hirsch and the editorial team

Jesse Hirsch, the publication's editor, spent years as a journalist focused on food and agriculture, most recently as managing editor of The Counter, the nonprofit food newsroom, before joining Ambrook Research. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, Bon Appétit and Eater, and earlier in his career he was print editor of Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan and New York editor of GOOD magazine.

Hirsch has written candidly about building the publication, including his initial question, on joining, about whether his colleagues were married to the Ambrook Research name. He recalled suggesting, as the kind of evocative title he hoped to build toward, The Furrow, the long-running magazine funded by John Deere, and being told, politely, not yet: the research name was meant to build recognition for the parent company. He has also described the light panic of sending the Monday newsletter as the audience grew past the population of Portland, Maine.

What Offrange covers

The publication's story archive shows the breadth implied by its tagline. Coverage areas on the site include crops, livestock, land, farm finance, labour, legislation, supply chains, technology, sustainability, environment, culture and aquaculture and fishing, along with perspective pieces, book reviews and a podcast feed. A single browsing session might move from irrigation with oil-field wastewater, to wolf patrols on ranch land, to tractor theft, to the economics of Dubai chocolate's effect on pistachio farmers.

Recurring contributor Lela Nargi, a veteran food systems and science journalist, has written for the publication on subjects including foreign ownership of United States farmland, a fungal disease devastating California farmworkers, and poultry farmers looking for an exit from a punishing industry. Other stories have examined synthetic cow embryos, oyster farming technology, agricultural labour protections, the Dust Bowl ninety years on, and farmland being raced for by buyers. The mix is deliberate: practical farm concerns and reported features for readers who may never set foot on a farm, in the same issue.

The newsletter and audience growth

The weekly newsletter, sent on Mondays, is the publication's engine. Hirsch chronicled its growth in the newsletter itself: approaching its 100th issue, the list passed 100,000 subscribers, growth he attributed to a multilayered strategy of advertising on Meta platforms, in-person sign-ups at professional events, outreach to public lists of food and agriculture professionals, and organic growth.

By the renaming announcement, nearly three years after launch, the figure had reached nearly 140,000 subscribers. For a specialist publication covering agriculture, a beat most national newsrooms had shrunk, that audience demonstrated a substantial readership for reported rural stories distributed by email rather than by homepage or social feed. The website's story archive, running to dozens of pages of features, serves the same audience between newsletters and gives the work a permanent home.

Print, podcast and other formats

Unusually for a start-up digital outlet, Ambrook Research maintained a semi-annual print publication alongside its digital work, a format Hirsch listed among its regular products in 2024. Its monthly podcast addressed American farmland, extending the same questions about land ownership, value and stewardship into audio.

The publication also syndicated and placed work in wider venues: Ambrook Research stories and explainers appeared under its byline in Fast Company, on subjects ranging from farm exoskeletons and salt-tolerant hay to fungi that degrade soil contaminants, a Texas shrub that could support domestic rubber production, and earthworm experiments for growing food in space. That placement carried its agricultural reporting to a general business readership that rarely encounters farm stories reported at this depth.

Awards and recognition

In announcing the new name, the publication stated that Ambrook Research had earned accolades and awards and established itself as a strong voice in the modern media landscape. Its own summaries of the renaming, echoed in the directory description, credit it with winning agricultural journalism awards during its first three years, recognition that helped a company-founded outlet establish credibility with working journalists and with the farm audience it needed.

Recognition also came in the form of who wrote for it. The contributor roster drew established food and agriculture writers whose previous work appeared in national newspapers, magazines and nonprofit newsrooms, and its stories were cited and shared within the agricultural press. For a publication of its age and size, that professional acceptance was a significant part of the record on which the rename was justified.

The rename to Offrange

The renaming was announced in an essay by Hirsch addressed directly to readers. With the software company grown and thriving and the publication's milestones achieved, he wrote, Ambrook Research would become Offrange. The stated purpose was to reaffirm a commitment to editorial independence and to clarify that the publication's news and perspectives are not directed by, and do not represent the views of, the parent company.

The name itself was the product of a long creative search. It was chosen to capture the publication's farming roots while evoking America's wide open spaces and natural beauty, and to describe its core purpose: bringing stories off the range, from farms, ranches and agrarian communities, to a broader audience. The outlet's web address remained within ambrook.com, at ambrook.com/offrange, reflecting the continuing corporate home beneath the new editorial brand.

Editorial independence as a stated model

The rename made explicit a tension inherent in company-funded journalism, and Offrange's handling of it is part of its significance. The publication began as a brand-building exercise for a young software company, by its editor's own account, and argues that it converted that start into an independent newsroom identity once both sides of the house had grown strong enough for the separation to be credible.

Hirsch's comparison point at launch, The Furrow, is instructive: company-supported agricultural publishing has a long history in the United States, and readers judge it by the quality and candour of the work. Offrange's stories about farm labour, corporate consolidation, environmental damage and industry failure sit alongside practical farm finance coverage, and the publication presents that range as the evidence for its independence claim.

Offrange today

Offrange continues to publish under Hirsch's editorship, with its Monday newsletter, web features organised by topic, podcast and calls for pitches and contributions from freelance writers. Its invitation to readers defines its audience broadly: anyone interested in how food is produced, how land is managed and how life in rural America thrives amid substantial challenges.

For the directory, Offrange represents a newer species of American online news: a specialist newsroom incubated inside a technology company, which built a six-figure newsletter audience in under three years and then renamed itself to stand apart from its founder. Its record, from 600 subscribers in December 2022 to an award-winning national agriculture publication, is a compact history of how reported beats discarded by legacy media are being rebuilt by new patrons.