A Centennial of Agriculture Today
Agriculture Today: Keeping Kansas agriculture informed for 100 years
By Jacob Klaudt
The date was Dec. 1, 1924.
“Ring…Ring…” went the sound of the clanging bell in Anderson Hall, inaugurating a revolutionary communication opportunity for Kansas State University’s extension service, and a legacy in radio broadcasting.
K-State’s Agriculture Today radio show, known as the Farm Hour until the 1960s, celebrates its centennial later this year, marking 100 years of distributing research-based information to agricultural producers.
Interestingly, the history of radio and agricultural broadcasting in the United States has strong ties to what was happening on the Manhattan campus early in the 20th century.
Radio arrived at K-State in 1902 through the physics department. K-State then began broadcasting the first regularly scheduled weather forecasts in the nation to agricultural producers across Kansas, licensed as 9YV in 1912.
“They started out with a telegraphic radio station that was in Morse code. That’s how the weather forecasts went out. Farmers and their sons would make a receiver and the operator would tap out code very slowly, so it could be written down,” said Mary Ellen Titus, the wife of the late Ralph Titus, a former KSAC station manager and member of the founding committee for National Public Radio.
Eleven years later in Milford, Kansas, J.R. Brinkley – known to history as the “Goat Gland Doctor” – formed a radio station called KFKB (Kansas First Kansas Best) with the ability to transmit audio that reached across middle America.
“If it hadn’t been for KFKB and Dr. Brinkley, there may not have been a radio station at K-State or Agriculture Today,” Titus said. “It was a very providential moment.”
K-State physicist Eric Lyon, horticulture specialist Louis Williams and extension editor Sam Pickard then recognized the unique opportunity that stood before them, potentially capitalizing on KFKB’s position as one of the most powerful radio stations in North America.
“Those three men thought since Milford was so close that radio would be a good way to communicate for K-State. They did a show called the ‘College of the Air,’” Titus said. “It was classes you could take over the radio and they had lots of professors that would lecture on (topics) like agriculture, engineering, home economics and general science by long-line telephone.”
“College of the Air” stood at the cutting edge of broadcasting and in 1923, brought a whole new meaning to extension’s mission of taking the university to the people.
According to Titus: “It was very successful. People in Kansas got to take the classes for free. If you lived anyplace else, you were charged 50 cents. By 1924, K-State and those three men had been so good at promoting extension and the station that they got money from the state of Kansas to put KSAC on the air.”
KSAC, call letters that stood for Kansas State Agricultural College, pioneered educational broadcasting. The first educational radio station in Kansas started with a five-hour broadcast called the “Voice of the Kansas Aggie” and was the home of Agriculture Today for 78 years.
“When KSAC began, they did have the Farm Hour intact with farmers and agricultural people listening in on a variety of topics from crop production to livestock to agribusiness,” said Eric Atkinson, former 39-year host and agriculture director for KSAC/KKSU.
From the onset, Agriculture Today committed itself to delivering information that agriculturists in Kansas and the surrounding areas would find useful. Titus recalled a segment that aired during the1930s that provided farmers and ranchers with crucial financial advice to help save their operations.
“They had a half-hour show called Farm Business during the Great Depression. It talked about how farmers could make it through the economic depression and how to make budgets and things of that nature,” she said.
The Farm Hour continued to generate practical content that delighted listeners with unique perspectives. During the 1950s, the show covered a program developed by K-State’s Smith County extension office that established a working farm within a single day.
“It was a huge educational effort that had all kinds of experts on from crop production to livestock to agricultural engineering,” Atkinson said. “They built things and literally started a farm from scratch.”
A decade later, former host and Kansas radio legend, Paul DeWeese, followed a truckload of wheat harvested near Wichita through the exporting process to Europe.
“He wanted to show people what really happened to Kansas wheat. He took the year off, went to all the countries over there that used our wheat and sent back recordings to play over the air,” Titus said.
The name of the show changed from the Farm Hour to Agriculture Today in 1961. The show stayed grounded in its roots, however, and continued distributing helpful knowledge from experts on pertinent topics ranging from weekly market reports to industry-changing events like the Farm Crisis of the 1980s.
“We were taking the information our (K-State) people were generating here through their research and through their interactions with peers. It was unbiased, impartial information based on science, based on research, and we were getting that information out to agricultural producers, supporting industries and agribusiness,” Atkinson said. “That was an ongoing goal of the show from day one.”
Arguably the most influential moment in the show’s history occurred when K-State sold the broadcasting rights of the station carrying Ag Today, KKSU (known previously as KSAC), to its air-time partner, WIBW.
“Agriculture Today was still very much intact at the time and doing well with listenership. Then the rights of the station were sold. We were fortunate that a major farm broadcaster, KFRM, out of Clay Center, Kansas, contacted us and inquired as to whether we'd like to air the program on their airwaves as a regular daily weekday program. Surely, we jumped at the chance to do that,” Atkinson said.
Agriculture Today broadcasted for the last time on 580-AM with five-thousand watts over KKSU on Nov. 27, 2002. The station aired the “The Final Day” program. Ralph Titus summed up the excellence of its broadcasting with the following sentences:
“All the information programs provided a source of information of consequence. In short, presenting, on a daily basis, the world of ideas. Doing what those three men set out to do in 1924: taking the university to the people.”
A couple of months later, in January, 2003, the show resumed. Since that time, Atkinson and other hosts have governed Agriculture Today with strict guiding principles that revolve around improving the life of the Kansas farmer and rancher through connection.
“Ag Today offers us a vehicle to share with the public our new initiatives and research, and the success of our programs and services. A major part of being successful in extension and engagement is making people aware of our efforts and connecting them to the resources they need. Agriculture Today is an important part of that,” said Gregg Hadley, K-State assistant vice president and director of extension.
Despite such incidents as a fire that destroyed all broadcasting equipment in 1968, the show going off radio and other unfortunate events in its history, Agriculture Today has proven to be resilient against forces hindering its ability to deliver information to the public.
“It has just proven itself over and over again to be an extremely effective way of reaching agricultural producers and their allies,” Atkinson said. “If you provide good content that’s of value to the listener, then they will listen and that’s carried the day for us.”
Even with audiences possessing more forms of media now than ever before, agricultural broadcasting maintains a loyal listenership. According to surveys conducted by Aimpoint Research for the National Association of Farm Broadcasting (NAFB) in 2021 and 2022, listeners choose agricultural radio as their daily source of information over other forms of communication.
“More than 75% of our farmers surveyed recently said that they listen at least five days a week. This is true among several different age groups, not just older farmers. Close to 50% of our respondents say that they listen to agriculture radio for more than 60 minutes a day,” said DeLoss Jahnke, former Agriculture Today employee and current vice president of the NAFB.
Those statistics speak to K-State’s potential to meet its future engagement and outreach goals.
“It will provide us an opportunity to continue to maintain a connection with rural, agricultural communities, in particular, folks that are in those sectors that need the information and benefit from the findings of agricultural research and innovation. I also believe it enables us to reach out to people who may not be traditionally involved with agriculture who hear the stories that come out on broadcast radio,” said Marshall Stewart, K-State senior vice president for executive affairs, university engagement and partnerships.
Recently, Agriculture Today started streaming on all major podcast listening platforms, a sign of how readily the show evolves with its audience’s listening habits.
“We’re really good at catching on quick to how people consume information and that’s one of the reasons we’re so successful,” said Jeff Wichman, K-State Research and Extension communications specialist. “Right now, the podcast works well because we archive all our shows. It's something that they can access either right away in real time, or they can go back and listen to a program when they have the time. “
Technology and the way people consume information change constantly. While the distribution of Agriculture Today may change in the future, Atkinson hopes the essence of the show will persist.
“Twenty years ago, podcasts weren’t even on the radar at all. Now, podcasts are a mainstay of communication, so who knows what will be the next best thing 20 years from now. I would like to think that whatever shape it takes, it will retain some of the same elements that we look at now in agriculture broadcasting, like good information,” he said.
He adds: “I think the public is still going to want to look into something that has some value to it. It's in the preparation; it's in the understanding of the topic. It's in the willingness to convey that information in an understandable way. It's all this basic stuff that has existed back in the early genesis of radio; it's still intact today. I think all that will remain so.”