Ohio Ag Net: Ohio's Farm Radio Voice, from ABN Roots to a Statewide Network
Ohio Ag Net is a farm radio network based in Columbus, Ohio, operated by Ag Net Communications together with Ohio's Country Journal. Founded in 2007 by Bart Johnson and broadcaster Dale Minyo, it supplies agricultural news, markets and weather to more than seventy affiliate radio stations across Ohio, under the slogan the network itself uses: the voice you know with the news you trust. It is both a modern digital media service — website, podcast, e-newsletter and social channels run through ocj.com — and the direct heir of one of Ohio's oldest farm broadcasting traditions.
That inheritance matters to understanding the network. Ohio Ag Net was not created from nothing in 2007. It was created by the Johnson family business, Agri Communicators Inc., which had published Ohio's Country Journal and previously built the Agri Broadcast Network, known as ABN. When that earlier network passed out of family hands, the family rebuilt — and Ohio Ag Net is the result.
Overview
Ohio Ag Net and Ohio's Country Journal are affiliated companies whose shared goal, in the description carried by industry references, is to provide the Ohio farming community with the information it needs to help make its farms profitable, through print, radio and online offerings. In practice that means a single newsroom serving three products: a farm newspaper dedicated exclusively to Ohio, a radio network heard across the state, and a digital platform at ocj.com where radio reports, print stories and podcast episodes converge.
For affiliate stations, the network provides what a small local station cannot easily produce itself: a dedicated farm department. Morning and midday farm broadcasts anchored for most of the network's life by Dale Minyo, market and weather updates, field reporting from across the state, and coverage of events such as county fairs, field days and the Farm Science Review. For advertisers in seed, equipment, finance and crop inputs, it offers a concentrated statewide farm audience through one buy.
Roots in Agri Communicators and ABN
Agri Communicators Inc. was founded by the late Ed Johnson in 1972 to serve Ohio farm families. The company founded ABN Radio and TV, produced daily radio reports for the ABN Radio Network, and produced the weekly television programme AgriCountry, which aired on eleven television stations across Ohio and ran for more than 1,000 episodes over a twenty-year run. Ed Johnson's on-air style set the template his successors inherited: he believed in telling the good news about agriculture, a philosophy Dale Minyo has explicitly credited as shaping his own approach.
The family business changed shape around the turn of the century. Following the sale of ABN to Clear Channel, the Johnson family maintained Ohio's Country Journal, but AgriCountry was cancelled. Bart Johnson, Ed's son, who had worked part-time in the radio studio from 1984 while in college and had taken over ownership of the company after his father died in 2001, continued publishing the newspaper with his wife Sheryl. What the family no longer had was a radio network — the gap Ohio Ag Net was created to fill.
Founding in 2007
The opportunity came in early 2007. Bart Johnson and Dale Minyo, who had worked for the Johnson family after graduating from college, rejoined forces to launch a new farm radio network. Ohio Ag Net's first day of programming came in April 2007 — preview coverage at the time put the start on 9 April on about twenty stations — and the network began with twenty-three stations in the account later given in its advertising materials.
The relaunch was deliberately personal. Minyo and Johnson went back to stations Ed Johnson had visited years before, rebuilding relationships and re-establishing the familiar voice Ohio agriculture knew. Johnson later described the effort as bringing everything back and making the business feel whole again, while Minyo called it a new beginning built on sitting down with stations the family had served many years earlier. In a nice continuity detail, since 2011 Ohio Ag Net has used the classic seven-note ABN synthesizer logo, played in the style of a banjo — a sonic signature linking the new network to the old ABN.
Ownership and Leadership
For its first thirteen years Ohio Ag Net was owned through Agri Communicators by Bart and Sheryl Johnson, with Bart serving as publisher of Ohio's Country Journal and overseeing the daily operation of Ohio Ag Net. That changed in 2020, when Ohio Farm Bureau purchased Ohio Ag Net. The network continues to operate as a stand-alone business under that ownership, a structure the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation itself has described when profiling the team.
On the broadcast side, leadership centred for decades on Dale Minyo. He served as the anchor of the morning and midday broadcasts and, in later years, as general manager of Ag Net Communications, the role in which he welcomed new Lima-area affiliates. More recently, Ty Higgins has been named as general manager of Ag Net Communications in the network's 2026 affiliate announcements. Matt Reese, who joined Ohio's Country Journal in June 1999 as assistant editor, serves as editor, oversees content for the newspaper and ocj.com, conducts interviews used on radio, print and the Ohio Ag Net Podcast, and hosts that podcast.
Dale Minyo and the Broadcast Team
Dale Minyo's career is inseparable from the network's identity. He joined ABN Radio and TV in 1989 fresh out of Ohio State University with a degree in agricultural economics, made his first radio broadcast in May 1995, and worked alongside Ed Johnson. Apart from a five-year stretch working for Clear Channel Radio, he worked for the Johnson family and Agri Communicators across his career. As a farm broadcaster he anchored most of Ohio Ag Net's programming from its 2007 launch.
Minyo's working method was presence. He logged nearly 40,000 miles a year travelling Ohio's back roads to county fairs, Farm Science Reviews, field days and Feeding Farmers in the Field events, living by the saying he repeated often: the world is run by those who show up. The wider team reflects the same farm-rooted staffing. Joel Penhorwood joined after Bart Johnson spotted his Buckeye Agriculture podcast while Penhorwood was a student at Ohio State, took a part-time job and internship, and became a full-time farm broadcaster and field reporter after graduating. Sales and production staff profiled by Ohio Farm Bureau — including managing editor and operations director Kim Lemmon, a twenty-four-year employee — are themselves largely farmers or farm-raised.
Programmes, Podcast and Digital Services
Radio programming is the core service: farm news, markets and weather delivered to affiliates through the day, presented as the voice Ohio farmers know. The network's slogan, the Voice You Know with the News You Trust, was used explicitly when welcoming new affiliates, and it captures the product's promise to stations — a recognisable, trusted farm voice without the cost of a full-time farm director.
Digital services extend that radio core. At launch in 2007 the founders already planned a daily email containing an audio file of Minyo's morning report, so a farmer could listen while reading email — an early, pre-podcast-era version of on-demand farm audio. Today the Ohio Ag Net Podcast, hosted by Matt Reese, carries long-form conversations and field segments, including a 2025 history episode bringing together Reese, Bart Johnson, Minyo and Penhorwood to recount the network's roots. The ocj.com website unifies the newspaper and network output, and social, video and e-newsletter channels round out an offering that advertisers can buy across radio, podcast, web, social and video placements.
Coverage and Affiliate Growth
From twenty-three stations at launch, Ohio Ag Net grew to more than seventy affiliates across Ohio. A 2023 Ohio Farm Bureau profile described the combined team reaching a large farm audience through Ohio's Country Journal subscribers and more than fifty radio affiliates, and 2026 network announcements describe statewide coverage on over seventy affiliates serving rural and urban audiences alike. The variation in counts over time reflects normal affiliate turnover, but the sustained level — dozens of stations in a single state, for a single-topic network — marks Ohio Ag Net as one of the larger state farm networks in the Midwest.
Recent affiliate news shows the map still being filled in. In the Lima area, WFGF-FM 92.1 The Frog, WDOH-FM Fun 107.1 and WCIT-AM/FM — The Legend on 98.5 FM and 940 AM — began carrying Ohio Ag Net news and markets in early September, strengthening coverage in Allen County and surrounding areas. Welcoming them, the network emphasised the stations' strong local history and their commitment to covering the industry it calls the most important to everyone: agriculture.
Community Presence and Signature Events
Ohio Ag Net's visibility in farm country comes as much from showing up as from broadcasting. Its Feeding Farmers in the Field programme, run with AgriGold Hybrids, selects Ohio farms during planting season, brings lunch to the farm family and broadcasts the midday programme from the farm itself, with interviews from the field. The 2014 edition opened on a 1,000-acre corn and soybean operation in Union County, with Minyo broadcasting from the farm alongside staff and sponsor representatives.
Team members also serve the institutions of Ohio agriculture directly. Penhorwood has served as head swine barn announcer during the Ohio State Fair, and the newsroom's daily work spans county fairs and Farm Science Review as standard beats rather than special occasions. That presence is a deliberate part of the business model: a network whose reporters are visibly at the fair, the field day and the farm gate earns the affiliate loyalty and listener trust that a purely studio-based service would struggle to match.
Recent Developments
Two recent developments define the network's current era. The first is generational: in February 2025 Minyo announced that, after more than thirty years of sharing farm news across Ohio, he would retire from Ohio Ag Net and Ohio's Country Journal at the end of 2025, while allowing that listeners might still hear his voice from time to time. A December 2025 tribute, recorded around the Farm Science Review, framed his legacy as one heard around Ohio, built on putting the network and its listeners ahead of his own name.
The second is continued expansion under Farm Bureau ownership. In March 2026 Ag Net Communications announced a new partnership with 104.9 The River in Columbus, bringing Ohio Ag Net farm news, weather, markets and features to central Ohio listeners on weekdays at 5 a.m., 10:15 a.m., 12:15 p.m. and 3:15 p.m. General manager Ty Higgins framed the addition as connecting both farmers and consumers in a rapidly growing Columbus region where agriculture remains part of the economy and identity. For worldnm.com, Ohio Ag Net illustrates how a legacy family farm-media business reinvented itself — newspaper roots, a rebuilt radio network, Farm Bureau ownership, and a podcast-era digital service, all under one Ohio-only brand.
