Today's Farmer
The voice of MFA
Published eight times a year, MFA’s membership magazine delivers news, technical articles, features and other relevant content for farmers and ranchers in the MFA Incorporated trade territory.
The magazine that helped start a movement
As the membership magazine of MFA Incorporated, Today’s Farmer has a different beginning than most company publications. In fact, it predates the cooperative by six years.
First published as The Missouri Farmer and Breeder in 1908, the paper’s owner, William Hirth, believed in cooperative agriculture as a way to bring bargaining power to the common farmer. In those days, farmers were at the mercy of the mercantilist on the buying side and sold into a dispersed and fractured market. Hirth envisioned local farmers banding together to buy and market goods. He used The Missouri Farmer and Breeder to build support for that idea with a constant message: Through cooperation, farmers could improve rural life.
Using his published suggestions, on March 10, 1914, seven farmers met at Newcomer Schoolhouse in Chariton County, forming a farm club to pool their purchases of binder twine and saving money by buying in bulk. A fledgling cooperative was born. Read more about MFA’s history.
In 1917, members named The Missouri Farmer as the official publication of the Missouri Farmers Association. After Hirth’s death in 1940, MFA bought the magazine from his estate. In 1967, it was renamed “Today’s Farmer” to better reflect MFA’s expanding trade territory.
Today, the magazine is published nine times annually with a mission that remains reflective of its early creed: to present a positive image of the cooperative by providing farmers and ranchers with viable, accurate and progressive agribusiness information. Each issue contains articles examining techniques and issues that help producers better meet the challenges of agriculture along with MFA news, general-interest feature stories, technical columns by MFA experts, and editorials from MFA’s CEO Ernie Verslues and Today’s Farmer Editor Allison Jenkins.
Click below to see the latest edition and archived articles of Today's Farmer Magazine.
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Today's Farmer Magazine Issues
CLICK TO READ the latest issues:
April/May 2025 Today's Farmer
February 2025
December 24 / January 2025
November 2024
October 2024
August/September 2024
The Today's Farmer magazine ARCHIVES
Some of these links will take you to an outside archive website page, todaysfarmermagazine.com.
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