Each issue of Modern Farmer, the stylish agrarian quarterly, has an austere portrait of an animal on the cover. So far, there have been six. The animals look remote and self-satisfied, as if nothing you said could matter to them, just like human models. The first cover had a rooster with an eye resembling a tiny dark paperweight. The second had a goat looking haughtily askance. The third was of a sheep whose gaze is so penetrating that she seems to be trying to hypnotize you. The fourth was of a pig in profile whose ears flop forward like a visor; according to a note by the photographer, a pig’s flopped ears trap smells as it searches for food. The fifth had a hulking farm dog with a ruff like a headdress, and the sixth has a serene-looking cow with a black face and a white forehead and nose. Ann Marie Gardner, the magazine’s founder and editor, says that she always thought she would have animals on the cover. The art director, Sarah Gephart, says, however, that she had nearly finished designing the magazine when Gardner told her that the cover would have animals. “We thought it would be people,” Gephart said.Modern Farmer appeared in the spring of 2013. After three issues, it won a National Magazine Award; no other magazine had ever won so quickly. According to Gardner, though, Modern Farmer is less a magazine than an emblem of “an international life-style brand.” This is the life style of people who want to “eat food with a better backstory”—from slaughterhouses that follow humane practices, and from farmers who farm clean and treat their workers decently. Also, food cultists who like obscure foods and believe that fruits and vegetables taste different depending on where they are grown. Also, aspirational farmers, hobby farmers, intern farmers, student farmers,WWOOFers—people who take part in programs sponsored by the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms movement—and people who stay at hotels on farms where they eat things grown by the owners. Plus idlers in cubicles searching for cheap farmland and chicken fences and what kind of goats give the best milk. Such people “have a foot in each world, rural and urban,” Gardner says. She calls them Rurbanistas, a term she started using after hearing the Spanish word rurbanismo, which describes the migration from the city to the countryside. Rurbanistas typify the Modern Farmer audience. (...)
‘Magazine’ is a word I learned very early on not to use,” Gardner said. “Investors didn’t want to go near you. I would say I was trying to make a brand around the idea of modern farming. My friends would say, ‘I don’t get this, it has nothing to do with your life.’ ” Photographers began to send pictures of distressed trucks and falling-down barns. “ ‘Here’s a photo shoot we could do,’ they would say, and I was, ‘No, we’re not doing that photo shoot, ever.’ Everybody also wanted to shoot tables in fields. And another one they thought was so clever was a farmer in a field with a laptop.”
Warren Street is lined with stores selling vintage furniture. Gardner stopped in front of a window with a display of metal lawn chairs. “I am so looking forward to spending money again,” she said. “I’m still in startup mode. We are really close to being super successful financially, and I can’t wait. The one thing everybody told me was ‘You guys are never going to sell a magazine with an animal on the cover,’ and I’m so happy that’s not true.” (...)
Including people who sell ads, Gardner has a staff of eight. She owns a small portion of Modern Farmer. The majority belongs to a Canadian investor named Frank Giustra, to whom Gardner was introduced by someone she knows in Vancouver. Gardner would not disclose the amount that Giustra put in, but among the investors that she courted she was known to be seeking two to three million dollars. In an ideal angel investor situation, Giustra might have received twenty to thirty per cent of the company. A lawyer later told Gardner that she had signed one of the three worst deals he had ever seen. (...)
Sometime after the first issue, however, during the summer of 2013, it became apparent that Gardner had likely overestimated the first year’s revenues and that the magazine would eventually need more money. Giustra apparently hadn’t expected to contribute more than he had already, and, Gardner said, he told her that she should find another investor. (Giustra declined to comment.) In May, 2014, after the National Magazine Award, Giustra said that he would pay for one more issue—the one to be prepared over the summer and published in September. When July arrived without Gardner’s having found someone else to put money in, Giustra told her that he would invest more only if she gave him a portion of her shares, an arrangement that is customary in such circumstances. However, he proposed additional terms that Gardner regarded as inequitable. Meanwhile, not knowing how much longer Modern Farmer would last, some of her staff began looking for other work.
Gardner must overcome two obstacles to find new investors. One is that Giustra owns too much of the company. “In venture capital, usually you have several investors, no one of whom owns more than fifty per cent of the company, and they all share an idea of the future,” Kevin Powers, the controller and finance director of the company Vox Media, told me. Powers is also a member of Modern Farmer’s advisory board. Second, an investor would wonder why Giustra was behaving as if he wanted to sell. According to Sam Holdsworth, an investment banker who raises money for early stage media and entertainment companies and who has started several magazines, “When the principal investor tries to leave early, it makes you wonder why.”
by Alec Wilkinson, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Chris Buck
