Farm Progress: America's Oldest Agricultural Media Company, from Prairie Farmer to Informa
Farm Progress is an agricultural media company based in St. Charles, Illinois, and owned by Informa, publishing a family of regional farm magazines led by Prairie Farmer, along with national farm news, data-informed editorial, digital editions and major farm shows including the Farm Progress Show. Its website is farmprogress.com. Through titles such as Wallaces Farmer, Nebraska Farmer, Dakota Farmer and Kansas Farmer, it serves commercial farmers state by state, in a localised model it has operated for well over a century.
The company's history reaches back to 1819, making it one of the oldest continuously operating media businesses in the United States. It has been owned, in turn, by farming families, a radio broadcaster's parent, ABC, Capital Cities, Disney, an Australian rural publisher, Fairfax, Penton and finally the British events and intelligence group Informa. This profile follows that chain, the magazines that survived it, and the show, first staged on an Illinois farm in 1953, that became the largest outdoor farm event of its kind in the country.
Overview
Farm Progress is the United States arm of a simple idea: farmers trust information written for their state, their crops and their conditions. Rather than one national magazine, it publishes a portfolio of regional titles, each with its own editors, many of whom farm or come from farm families in the states they cover, all sharing the company's reporting, business and digital infrastructure. Farm Progress also produces four annual farm shows, anchored by the Farm Progress Show.
Since 2016 the company has sat within the Informa Markets division of Informa, after Informa's acquisition of Penton. Under Informa it operates as a specialist agricultural media and events business, combining print magazines, websites and newsletters for each title, digital editions, and live events that bring equipment manufacturers face to face with tens of thousands of farmers.
History and Founding Roots
The company traces its start to 1819, with the American Farmer magazine. Its most famous title, Prairie Farmer, began in 1841 and became the voice of Illinois agriculture, chronicling mechanisation, the Civil War for its readers, the fight against railroad rate abuses that helped produce Illinois's commerce regulation, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, after which its editors, having saved the subscription books and back issues, mailed the next issue on time. Wallaces Farmer followed in Iowa in the nineteenth century and was owned and operated by three generations of the Wallace family, Henry Cantwell Wallace, Henry A. Wallace and Henry Browne Wallace, the middle of whom became United States Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President.
These were not passive chronicles. Prairie Farmer campaigned, organised and educated, and in the twentieth century it moved into broadcasting: in 1928 it purchased Chicago radio station WLS from Sears, Roebuck and operated it primarily as a service to farmers, with market, weather and farm programming and the hugely popular WLS Barn Dance. The station was housed in the Prairie Farmer Building on West Washington Street in Chicago for 32 years, an era when a farm magazine quite literally owned one of America's best-known radio voices.
Ownership Through the Broadcast and Publishing Eras
In 1959, American Broadcasting-Paramount Theaters bought the Farm Progress Group, largely to acquire WLS and consolidate it with its Chicago station; the farm magazines came with the radio prize. When ABC merged with Capital Cities in 1986, the magazines passed to Capital Cities/ABC, which in 1991 acquired the farm magazines of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, enlarging the group. The Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities/ABC in 1996, briefly making Disney the owner of titles such as Prairie Farmer.
Disney sold the Farm Progress Companies in 1997 to Rural Press, the Australian agricultural publisher. Rural Press merged with Fairfax in 2007, and in 2012 Fairfax sold Farm Progress to Penton Media of the United States. On 2 November 2016, Penton was acquired by the United Kingdom-based Informa, and Farm Progress and its publications were integrated into the Informa Markets division, where the business remains. Few media properties can show a two-century thread of continuous publication running through so many of the defining owners of American media.
Publications and Coverage Areas
The current publication list maps the American farm belt. Prairie Farmer covers Illinois, Indiana Prairie Farmer covers Indiana, Wallaces Farmer covers Iowa, Nebraska Farmer, founded in 1859, covers Nebraska, and Kansas Farmer, Michigan Farmer, the Ohio Farmer, Wisconsin Agriculturist and The Farmer, for Minnesota, cover their named states. Dakota Farmer serves North and South Dakota, Missouri Ruralist serves Missouri, American Agriculturist serves the Northeast, and regional titles cover the Carolinas and Virginia, the Mid-South, the Southeast, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico through The Farmer-Stockman, and the West through Western Farm Press and Western Farmer-Stockman. Farm Futures provides national coverage.
Each title mixes the shared concerns of commercial agriculture, markets, crops, livestock, machinery, farm management, conservation and family succession, with intensely local material: state policy, university extension research, local auctions, weather and the people of that state's farm community. Digital editions of the print magazines are published for the major titles, readable on phone, tablet and desktop, with archives, narration features and marketplace information arriving ahead of the printed copy.
Services and Distribution
Distribution runs on three rails. Print magazines are mailed to subscribing farm households, often across generations; Nebraska Farmer's editors describe readers whose families have taken the magazine for a hundred years, and explain subscription, newsletter and advertising routes to young farmers starting their own operations. Digital distribution carries the same titles as websites under farmprogress.com, daily news and market updates, e-newsletters and the digital editions. Events provide the third rail, putting editorial brands physically in front of their audiences.
For advertisers, equipment, seed, crop protection, livestock and financial companies, Farm Progress offers state-level targeting of commercial farm decision-makers in print and online, plus exhibition access to the largest gatherings of farmers in the country. Informa Markets' wider infrastructure supports that offer with the data, marketing and events systems of a global organiser, while the editorial product remains deliberately state-branded rather than consolidated under a single national name.
The Farm Progress Show and Events
The Farm Progress Show began in 1953 as the idea of Prairie Farmer editor Paul Johnson and advertising manager Vern Anderson, who wanted a forward-looking successor to the cornhusking contests Prairie Farmer had sponsored until 1941. Instead of looking back at hand labour, they invited manufacturers and agribusinesses to demonstrate their wares to farmers. The first show was held on 2 October 1953 on the Earl Bass farm at Armstrong, Illinois, with 112 exhibitors and more than 75,000 people attending.
By 1960 the show had expanded to three days and was rotating among farms in three states with more than 250 exhibitors, described as the biggest gathering of Midwest farmers in the nation. The rotating model continued for five decades before the show settled onto permanent sites in 2005: Decatur, Illinois in odd-numbered years and Boone, Iowa in even-numbered years. Recent shows have presented more than 600 exhibitors across about 90 acres of exhibit space, with field demonstrations, ride-and-drive areas and new product launches, and Farm Progress produces four annual farm shows in total, making events a pillar of the business equal to publishing.
Clients and Media Partners
The company's commercial partners are the suppliers of American production agriculture: tractor and implement manufacturers, seed and crop input companies, livestock equipment and animal health firms, and the banks, insurers and services that finance farming. They buy print and digital advertising inside trusted state titles and exhibition space at the shows, and they value the same thing readers do, that the audience is verified, commercial-scale farmers rather than a general rural readership.
Institutionally, Farm Progress works inside the fabric of farm-state life: land-grant universities and their extension services supply research its editors translate for producers; commodity and farm organisations share its platforms; and its own history is intertwined with FFA, farm broadcasting and state fairs. Its editors are recruited from those communities and write as participants, a positioning the company summarises by telling young readers that its staff know what farm families need because, at heart, they are those families.
Digital Platforms
Farmprogress.com operates as an umbrella over the individual title sites and sections, carrying daily agricultural news, market coverage, management advice and the digital edition directory for titles from American Agriculturist and Dakota Farmer to Prairie Farmer, Wallaces Farmer and Wisconsin Agriculturist. Each magazine issue is published in a digital edition with interactive features and article narration, and the titles maintain social channels for their state audiences.
The digital strategy mirrors the print architecture rather than replacing it: a Nebraska reader lands in Nebraska Farmer content, an Illinois reader in Prairie Farmer. That preserves the local trust accumulated over 180 years while giving Informa a single technical and commercial platform underneath, a balance many legacy publishers attempted and few with roots this deep have sustained.
Notable Work
Farm Progress's notable work is cumulative. Prairie Farmer's nineteenth-century campaigns on railroad rates, its reporting through the Civil War and its refusal to miss an issue after the Great Chicago Fire are part of Illinois journalism history. Its ownership of WLS made it a pioneer of farm broadcasting and of radio's role in rural life. The Farm Progress Show created, in 1953, a new institution, the modern outdoor equipment demonstration show, that still anchors the industry's calendar.
Individually, its titles hold similar standing at state level: Nebraska Farmer since 1859, Dakota Farmer marking 145 years of publication, and generations of editors who are fixtures at state farm meetings. The through-line is service journalism for a single occupation, maintained across every change in ownership, technology and farm structure since 1819.
Recent Developments
Under Informa, recent development has meant integration and continuity in equal measure: the publications sit within Informa Markets alongside its global agriculture and events portfolio, the shows celebrated milestones including twenty years at the permanent Decatur site in 2025, and the magazines continue to publish in print and digital editions with current issues dated through 2026 in their online archives.
The company that began with the American Farmer in 1819 now reports on autonomous tractors, drones and precision data for the descendants of its first subscribers. That continuity, through ABC, Disney and Informa, through radio, print and the web, is Farm Progress's distinction in this directory: not simply an agency or outlet, but the institutional memory of American commercial farming in media form.
