Northern Ag Network: Montana's Farm and Ranch Broadcast Voice from Billings
The Northern Ag Network is the agricultural arm of the Northern Broadcasting System, a Billings, Montana broadcast company that has delivered farm news, commodity markets and weather to rural listeners since 1975. Operating from Billings, the network serves an audience for whom agriculture is not a niche interest but the region's leading industry and daily livelihood. Its programmes travel by radio, television and the web to farmers and ranchers across Montana, Wyoming and the western Dakotas, a vast and sparsely populated territory where a timely market report or a severe-weather warning can shape decisions worth thousands of dollars.
Listed in this directory from its Billings base at northernag.net, the Northern Ag Network is best understood as part of a wider family that also includes the Northern News Network and the Northern Sports Network. Together those services produce close to 200 radio programmes each week, according to the company's own description of its output, alongside daily agricultural television. This profile traces how a four-station experiment started by a future United States senator grew into one of the most recognised farm broadcasting operations in the American Northwest.
Overview
At its core, the Northern Ag Network is a syndicated programme service. It produces hourly farm news and market reports, weather programmes and special features in Billings and distributes them to affiliated radio stations, which carry the segments within their own local schedules. The network also produces two daily agricultural television programmes each morning, carried, in the company's account, on nine of Montana's leading television stations. That combination of radio and television matters in ranch country, where the working day often begins before dawn and information is consumed in a pickup cab, a barn or a kitchen rather than at a desk.
The audience is explicitly agricultural. Reports follow cattle, hog, sheep and grain markets from terminal markets down to local buying and selling points, and cover the previous day's marketing as well as the conditions producers will face today. Northern Broadcasting has described a loyal listenership built over decades, and outside summaries of the company have put its combined radio, television and online agricultural audience in the hundreds of thousands across the northern plains and mountain West.
History and Founding
The network was started in 1975 by Conrad Burns, who later represented Montana in the United States Senate. Burns had come to Montana through agricultural publishing and livestock exposition work, and had begun broadcasting agricultural market news in the state. Seeing that Montana's largest industry lacked a dedicated information service, he launched the venture, initially called the Northern Agricultural Network, with only four radio stations carrying its programmes.
The idea proved durable. Burns expanded the network through the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the service grew from those first four outlets to a regional presence serving dozens of radio and television stations in Montana and Wyoming. In 1986 Burns sold the network in order to enter Montana politics, a move that ended the founding chapter but not the business. The sale transferred Northern Broadcasting to new leadership that would define its next four decades and broaden it from a farm service into a multi-network broadcast company.
Ownership and Leadership
After the Burns sale, Taylor Brown became the network's president and chief executive and, with his wife Shannon, its owner. Brown had joined Northern Broadcasting in 1979 as a regional farm broadcaster, bringing a background that mirrored his listeners: he was raised on his family's cattle ranch near Sand Springs in eastern Montana, was active in FFA, and earned a degree in animal science from Montana State University, where he also served as student body president. Montana State later awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2021.
Brown's standing in the profession is unusually well documented. He is a past national president of the National Association of Farm Broadcasting, served for years as president of its foundation, was named farm broadcaster of the year, received the Oscar in Agriculture award for radio, and was inducted into the National Farm Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2010. He also served two terms in the Montana Senate from 2009 to 2016. In the next generation, his son Colter Brown has served as the network's ag director, leading a team of farm broadcasters producing daily radio and television programmes, after earlier work as an agricultural loan officer in eastern Montana.
Services and Distribution
Distribution is the network's reason for existing. Affiliated stations carry its farm programmes live by satellite and as scheduled segments, allowing a small station in a ranching town to offer market reporting it could never staff on its own. Historical industry listings described dozens of affiliated stations across Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oregon carrying farm programming, with a heavy schedule of agricultural programmes each weekday covering livestock and grain markets. More recent company and university accounts describe roughly 60 to 70 stations in four states carrying Northern Broadcasting content.
Flagship carriage is central to the model. Northern Broadcasting owns KGHL in Billings, broadcasting on AM 790 and FM 94.7, which serves as the flagship for the Northern Ag Network. Around that owned base, the affiliate system extends the same reports into communities across Montana, Wyoming and the western Dakotas, while television carriage adds a morning visual service for producers who want markets and weather before leaving the house.
Programming and Content
The programme mix is practical before it is decorative. Hourly farm news follows market openings, livestock sales and grain prices, while dedicated weather forecasts, presented over the years by meteorologist Ed McIntosh among others, combine general conditions with the agricultural detail producers need: precipitation prospects, temperature swings, wind and the severe-weather alerts that matter during calving, planting and harvest. The company has also taken part in efforts to alert Montana residents quickly to dangerous weather.
Beyond the Ag Network itself, the wider system produces state news, sports and talk. The Northern News Network has produced multiple full-length newscasts each day for Montana stations, plus legislative reports, state sports, rodeo, gardening and outdoor programming. Its best-known talk offering, Voices of Montana, has been described as the state's only live, hour-long, daily statewide radio talk show, inviting politicians, business figures, state organisations and ordinary citizens onto the programme. That breadth explains why Northern Broadcasting functions as general rural infrastructure, not only as a farm wire.
Coverage Areas
Montana is the heartland. Affiliate communities listed for the networks have ranged across the state, from Billings, Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls, Helena, Kalispell and Missoula to smaller agricultural towns such as Glasgow, Glendive, Havre, Lewistown, Malta, Miles City, Plentywood and Sidney. Wyoming and the western Dakotas form the second ring, and accounts of the Brown era describe the service at its widest reaching parts of eight states in the Northwest and into Canada.
That geography shapes the editorial product. Distances are long, weather systems cross state lines, and cattle raised in Montana may be fed or sold in another state. A regional network therefore reports markets and conditions as a connected system rather than as isolated local stories, which is precisely the gap Burns identified in 1975 when a handful of stations first agreed to carry a shared agricultural service.
Clients and Media Partners
The network's customers are twofold. For stations, Northern Broadcasting supplies ready-made agricultural, news, sports and weather programming, complete with the specialist presenters a local outlet could rarely employ alone. For advertisers, it offers something equally scarce: a documented, occupationally defined audience of farm and ranch decision-makers gathered at predictable times of day. The company has long presented itself as a primary marketing tool for businesses across the West seeking exactly that target audience, selling its regional reach as an alternative to buying time town by town.
Institutional partnerships reinforce that position. The network's broadcasters work closely with Montana State University's agricultural community, commodity and livestock organisations, and events such as the NILE stock show and rodeo in Billings and the Montana Farmers Union convention, both of which feature in the network's events coverage. Those relationships keep its reporters inside the industry's calendar of sales, shows, conventions and policy meetings rather than commenting on agriculture from outside it.
Digital Platforms
Northern Ag's website, northernag.net, extends the broadcast service into a continuously updated agricultural news site. It carries market and policy stories, staff directories, station-finding information, advertising details and event listings, and it serves as the public face of the Northern Ag Network alongside the Northern Broadcasting corporate presence online. Social channels, including Facebook, supplement the site with programme promotion and breaking agricultural news between broadcasts.
Digital distribution does not replace the network's broadcast core; it mirrors it. Producers who miss an hourly radio report can read the underlying story online, stations can point listeners to fuller coverage, and advertisers gain a second surface alongside radio and television. For a service founded in the satellite era, the web completed a distribution chain that runs from a Billings studio to a station transmitter, a television screen and a phone in a rancher's pocket.
Notable Work and Recognition
Recognition has followed the network's leading figures. Taylor Brown's induction into the farm broadcasting hall of fame in 2010 recognised both his on-air career and his institution-building at the National Association of Farm Broadcasting, where his tenure helped professionalise the association's national office, marketing and foundation support for students entering agricultural communications. Conrad Burns himself was also honoured by the farm broadcasting hall of fame, a reflection of his founding role before his Senate career.
The network's everyday notable work is less ceremonial: keeping market and weather information moving during blizzards, droughts, cattle-market shocks and legislative fights over land, water and livestock policy. Farm broadcasters from the network have chaired conservation and grazing-lands initiatives in Montana and covered the state's agricultural community continuously for five decades, work that accumulates into trust rather than a single celebrated story.
Recent Developments
In recent years Northern Broadcasting has emphasised continuity with renewal. Colter Brown's move from agricultural lending into the network's ag director role, and the involvement of other members of the Brown family in management, mark a generational transition for a company still owned by the family that bought it from its founder. The programme slate described in current staff and network materials remains anchored in the same elements: daily radio and television ag programmes, state news, sports, weather and the statewide talk format.
The operating environment, however, keeps shifting. Rural stations face consolidation and advertising pressure, while producers increasingly check prices and forecasts on phones. Northern Ag's answer, visible in its investment in its website, social presence and television production, is to keep the trusted voices and market franchise built since 1975 while delivering them on every platform its audience now uses. Fifty years after four stations took a chance on a shared farm service, that combination of local trust and regional scale remains the Northern Ag Network's defining asset.
