Progressive Farmer
Progressive Farmer is an American agricultural magazine published by DTN and based in Birmingham, Alabama. Founded in 1886 as a weekly farm newspaper in North Carolina, it has been published continuously for 140 years, growing from a regional Southern paper into a national magazine for farm and ranch families. Its official website is dtnpf.com, where the print magazine sits alongside DTN's market, weather and news services for agriculture. The magazine's stated purpose, restated by its editors on its 140th anniversary in 2026, is to help farmers and ranchers make money, save money and enjoy their rural lifestyle while adapting to shifting agronomic, market and political conditions.
Founding in North Carolina in 1886
The first issue appeared on February 10, 1886, published by Leonidas Lafayette Polk, a North Carolina farmer, Confederate veteran and former state commissioner of agriculture. Polk, who had been wounded at Gettysburg, returned home to farms damaged by war and concluded that Southern farmers needed a publication devoted entirely to agriculture and its problems. The early Progressive Farmer was an eight-page weekly broadsheet, first associated with Winston and Raleigh, North Carolina, carrying practical information on crop and livestock production for the agrarian economy of the Southeast. Polk died suddenly in 1892, after which his widow kept the paper going with J. L. Ramsey as editor.
The Clarence Poe Era
The defining figure in the magazine's history is Clarence H. Poe. Hired at sixteen as a writer and office boy in 1897, Poe became editor in 1899 and, in 1903, bought the publication with partners for a few thousand dollars, when weekly circulation was only about 5,000. He would remain editor-in-chief for nearly six decades. Under Poe the paper became a magazine, incorporated first as the Agricultural Publishing Company and later as the Progressive Farmer Company. Poe promoted what he called two-armed farming — diversifying into both crops and livestock rather than depending on a single cash crop — along with cooperative marketing, better rural schools, soil conservation and support for land-grant colleges and their Agricultural and Mechanical programs. The magazine also campaigned for rural health, rural electrification and women's suffrage in its early decades.
Regional Editions and the Move to Birmingham
In 1908 Progressive Farmer bought and merged with the Southern Farm Gazette of Starkville, Mississippi, founded by veterinary professor Tait Butler. The combined circulation was about 36,000, and the merger pioneered a major publishing innovation: regional editions with editorial content specific to each circulation area. To serve editorial offices in both Raleigh and Starkville, the company established a central production and printing plant in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1911, and Birmingham became the magazine's long-term home. Through further mergers — the magazine ultimately absorbed more than a dozen other farm titles, including the Southern Ruralist of Atlanta in 1932 — circulation climbed to about 1.4 million by 1930 in some accounts and reached a high of about 1.3 million in the 1960s, with five regional editions and editorial bureaus in Memphis and Dallas.
The Birth of Southern Living
Progressive Farmer also gave rise to one of America's most successful regional magazines. Its home section, renamed Progressive Home and then Southern Living in October 1963, was split off as a standalone magazine with the February 1966 issue, modeled in part on California's Sunset. The launch, led by publisher Emory Cunningham and the Progressive Farmer editors, gave the new title an instant distribution and advertising base among suburban readers, while allowing Progressive Farmer itself to refocus more completely on production agriculture and the farm household. In 1980 the Progressive Farmer Company renamed itself Southern Progress Corporation to reflect its wider magazine portfolio, which grew to include titles such as Southern Living, Cooking Light, Health and Coastal Living.
From Southern Progress to Time Inc. to DTN
In 1985 Time Inc. purchased Southern Progress Corporation for $498 million, making Progressive Farmer part of the Time Warner publishing empire, published through Southern Progress in Birmingham. In the early 1980s the magazine had launched a distinct Midwestern edition covering twelve states; by the end of that decade the Midwest edition was folded into the main edition, making Progressive Farmer a genuinely nationwide production-agriculture and rural-lifestyle publication with circulation above 700,000. In 2007 DTN of Omaha, Nebraska — a provider of real-time market, news and weather information for agricultural and energy markets — acquired Progressive Farmer from Southern Progress. DTN said the title was the largest publication serving the farm lifestyle market, and magazine operations remained in Alabama.
What the Magazine Covers
Editorially, Progressive Farmer covers the full working life of a farm operation. Its core subjects are crop production — corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and other major crops — and livestock production, including cattle health and nutrition. It reports on farm machinery and new equipment, precision technology, agronomy, soil and weather, commodity markets and farm business management. Alongside production coverage it has long carried rural-life material: farm safety, energy conservation, property and legal issues, alternative income ideas, horses, rural recreation and the outdoors. Long-running departments noted over the years include news, markets and weather coverage and reader-oriented columns celebrating country life.
Frequency, Circulation and Audience
The magazine is published multiple times a year — described in recent DTN material as eleven times a year, and in reference listings as fourteen times a year including special issues. Historical circulation figures trace its scale: roughly 500,000 to 550,000 around its 125th anniversary in 2011, more than 600,000 subscribers at the time of the DTN acquisition in 2007, and over 1.3 million at its mid-twentieth-century peak. Its audience is primarily commercial farm and ranch families in the United States, first in the South, then the Midwest and now nationally, together with agribusiness professionals who follow production agriculture.
Progressive Farmer and DTN Today
Today Progressive Farmer operates as DTN/The Progressive Farmer, combining the print magazine with DTN's digital services at dtnpf.com. DTN delivers market information, cash commodity prices, industry news, analysis and location-specific weather to agricultural subscribers, and the magazine's journalism is integrated with that data-driven service. Gregg Hillyer and Greg Horstmeier are among the editors-in-chief associated with DTN/The Progressive Farmer in recent years, and its reporting team covers Washington policy, markets and farm production from bureaus serving the major growing regions. The 140th anniversary coverage in February 2026 framed the magazine as a chronicler of American agriculture through Reconstruction, the Great Depression, two world wars, the postwar technology boom and continuing industry consolidation.
Anniversaries and Historical Record
The magazine has marked its milestones publicly and used them to document the industry's history. For its 125th anniversary in 2011, under Telvent DTN, its editors drew on the magazine's archives and photo collections for a year-long series revisiting the major issues of each decade as the magazine originally reported them, in both print and digital editions. For the 140th anniversary in 2026, editor-in-chief Greg Horstmeier framed that same archival role for a new generation, noting that the founding word progressive implied a forward-looking philosophy favouring modernisation and efficiency. That self-documentation is itself a resource: because Progressive Farmer reported farm policy, technology and rural life continuously from 1886 onward, its back files form one of the longest running records of American agricultural change, consulted by historians of the South, of land-grant education and of farm technology alike.
Place in American Farm Publishing
Few American magazines in any field can match Progressive Farmer's longevity or its direct influence on a single industry. It introduced regional editions to American publishing, helped build the audience that launched Southern Living, campaigned for the land-grant college system and rural electrification, and under Clarence Poe became one of the most influential opinion-shaping publications in the South. For directory purposes, its key facts are simple: founded 1886, published by DTN, based in Birmingham, Alabama, and still serving U.S. farm families with production, business and rural-life coverage in print and online.
