The Rural World

Mark Newhall is the editor and publisher of Farm Show, a newspaper dedicated to the quirky side of farming life.

Maybe farming is the real mother of invention.

That’s the conclusion you’d reach from reading Farm Show, a quirky little newspaper published for the past 27 years out of Lakeville.

It focuses almost entirely on new and sometimes wacky equipment, inventions, products, problem-solving ideas, money-saving shortcuts and money-making schemes invented for and often by farmers.

Recent issues, for example, had articles on turning an old school bus into a hay bale hauler, making jewelry from corn, creating a propane gopher blaster and using an oil-filled squirt gun for treating chapped cow teats.

There are stories about an artist who specializes in cow portraits, a lawn mower powered by a jet engine, a train caboose turned into a backwoods cabin and a recipe for squirrel jambalaya.

Diesel-powered motorcycles? Diapers for incontinent dogs? An all-terrain wheelchair? A 40-foot-long bug zapper? Using pitchforks with fondue? Here’s where you can read about it.

Imagine, in other words, a combination of Popular Mechanics, Consumer Reports and Ripley’s Believe It or Not for the combine and tractor set.

Unless you’re a farmer, you probably haven’t heard of Farm Show. But even if you don’t care about the latest in self-propelled sprayers or that someone has a new idea for drying hay with microwaves, there’s still something irresistibly readable about this chronicle of rural ingenuity.

Each issue of Farm Show is a window into a world of handy, self-reliant country folk explaining how they make do: "Combine to Snowblower: ‘It’s Not That Hard to Do.’ " "She Makes Clothing Out of Pet Hair." "She Papered Kitchen With Old Cereal Boxes."

Or how they amuse themselves: "He Built His Own Backyard Roller Coaster." "They Teach Llamas to Square Dance." "Farm Couple Builds Pentagon Outhouse."

Or how they built a better mousetrap: "Device Lowers Toilet Seat After You Flush." "He Built His Own 5-Ft. Radio-Controlled Mower." "Hog Hearse Makes It Easy to Move Dead Hogs."

And who wouldn’t want to get the story behind headlines like "He Shot His Well" or "He Cut His Tractor in Half."

The newspaper itself is an example of old-fashioned, do-it-yourselfism.

Started in 1977 by veteran farm journalist Harold Johnson, Farm Show declared it would be entirely reader supported. It would carry no advertising and would devote itself exclusively to new products and product evaluations.

The paper sticks to the same editorial niche and business model a generation later, according to Mark Newhall, editor and publisher.

Newhall, 49, grew up on a turkey farm in western Minnesota and studied ag journalism at the University of Minnesota. He started working for Farm Show after its first year and bought out Johnson in 1994.

He and a staff of six put out the 44-page tabloid six times a year. They work out of a 1960s ranch house with a pink bathroom, bedrooms converted into offices, a fax machine sitting on the kitchen counter and a garage full of back issues.

"This is our international headquarters," Newhall said.

There’s no ad sales staff because there are no ads. But to drum up subscriptions, they do everything from sending out a million pieces of direct-mail solicitations at a time to asking readers to leave their old copies in the barbershop.

A year’s subscription costs $19.95. The paper has about 175,000 paid subscribers, with about 22,000 going to Canada and 500 to 600 sent to other countries.

Story ideas also come from around the world. The paper sends reporters to farm equipment shows in North America and overseas, looking for innovative products to feature.

"It’s weird. You’ll be in Paris, going down the Champs-Elysees, and you walk into this hall, and it’s like being in Des Moines. There’s all this equipment and tractors," Newhall said.

He and his staff also pore over 200 to 300 publications from the United States, Canada and Europe — ranging from farm magazines to rural newspapers to the Wall Street Journal — trolling for first-of-its-kind inventions.

And they constantly solicit readers for reports on their latest made-it-myself project or money-saving repair.

"Here’s a guy down in Arizona who made a house of refrigerators and used appliances," Newall said as he rooted through his inbox of reader submissions.

If they decide to write about that, Farm Show will call up the inventor, interview him over the phone and ask him to send in a photo.

The stories are short and straightforward, usually with no byline. But almost every article lists the inventor’s address and phone number.

The paper lets the idea speaks for itself. It doesn’t comment on the market viability of the inventions. So, if you use a pig spleen to predict the weather or you invented an ice-fishing rod that will page you on the phone when you get a bite, Farm Show won’t say you’re nuts.

"They think half of the ideas are crazy, and they think half are ones they can use," said Ben Schleuss, an associate editor, who gets lots of e-mails and calls from readers.

The ideas pour in and readers eat them up because farmers tend to be mechanically gifted tinkerers. To make a go at farming, they constantly need to find a new way to do things cheaper or faster, and they can’t afford to buy a new piece of equipment whenever something breaks.

Not surprisingly, Farm Show contributors are born recyclers. They turn silos into houses, furnace fans into snow blowers and hog manure into electricity.

And they’re willing to share rural small-business ideas — harvesting deer urine, making goat-milk soap, raising herds of bullfrogs, lobsters or worms — so other families can survive on the farm without having to go to town to find a job.

"That’s a really unusual thing about farmers. They share ideas with each other. They don’t see other farmers as competitors. They see themselves as all being in it together," Newhall said.

There’s also a regular feature in which farmers get to laud good equipment like the beloved pickup that ran a million miles or vent about badly engineered gear like the cordless drill that was a dog.

"That’s sort of a rudimentary Consumer Reports thing. It’s all anecdotal, but that’s the sort of coffee shop talk that farmers like," Newhall said. "If you spend $200,000 on a combine and it’s a lemon, unfortunately, it’s a pretty big event in your life."

Thrift is a large part of every Farm Show. The most recent issue has a letter from a Wisconsin man with a prosthetic right arm who wants to contact anyone missing a left arm so they can swap gloves.

But necessity is not behind every invention.

Lots of stories apparently were inspired by a why-the-heck-not moment of goofy inspiration, like the woman who in a post 9/11 fervor painted her horse to resemble the American flag, the man who carpeted the exterior of his car, the woman who painted her house plaid or the guy who made a treehouse out of a pickup truck hoisted into the branches.

"That’s different. That’s better than drugs or drinking," said Kenneth Randt, a Farm Show reader from Willmar, who once was featured for his barbecue grill shaped like a giant pistol.

"I just thought to myself, ‘Why not? Why not an ice bike?’ " said Harold Fratzke, a Cottonwood, Minn., farmer of one of his inventions written up in Farm Show.

There are also lots of rural world-record stories, like the world’s biggest pliers collection, the world’s largest cloth seed-corn sack collection, the world’s largest stuffed boar, the world’s largest cap collection and the world’s longest cornfield. And those are just the ones that can be found in Minnesota.

"A lot of people, they want to get on the cover of Farm Show," Newhall said.

Farm Show sells videos of its best stories and a CD-ROM with stories from back issues. "A lot of farmwives like to buy it for their husbands so they can throw away their dusty old issues," Newhall said.

But in one way, the paper is a bit resistant to innovation itself. The design hasn’t changed much in 27 years. As newspapers go, it looks pretty old-fashioned. Some would say even dowdy.

Newhall hired a consultant to modernize the way the paper looks, but he hasn’t decided to implement the redesign.

"People like it the way it is," he said. "I think a lot of hesitation for changing is it’s paying the bills the way it is."

For more information on Farm Show, call 800-834-9665, send e-mail to editor@farmshow.com or visit www.farmshow.com.