Read It and Reap

Ann Marie Gardner has called her idea a “farming magazine for media professionals.”
Ann Marie Gardner has called her idea a “farming magazine for media professionals.”Photograph by Chris Buck

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.

Modern Farmer has its offices in Hudson, New York, two hours north by train from Manhattan. Gardner lives nearby, in Germantown, in a house among fields by the Hudson River. She was born in Queens, in 1964, but she grew up near Boston. She went to Boston College, and in the fall of 1990 she went to the Harvard School of Public Health to study behavioral science, and also, partly, to get a Harvard degree, so that people would take her more seriously, she says. After that, she was briefly married, lived in London and wrote for Tatler, among other magazines, then moved to New York to work at W. In 2000, she came to Hudson to do a story and ended up renting a barn that had been fixed up to live in. She had planned to use it on weekends, but when the moving truck came to her apartment in Manhattan, she says, she told the movers, “ ‘Take everything.’ I didn’t ever want to go back to New York.” During the next few years, she was the editor of T: Travel, the travel edition of the New York Times Style Magazine, and a founding editor of the British magazine Monocle. She had the idea for Modern Farmer in 2010, after travelling almost constantly for Monocle.

“I don’t have a farm,” she told me recently. “I sort of dream about it. When I told people I lived in the Hudson Valley, though, they would say, ‘You’re so lucky. Do you have chickens and goats?’ In Iceland, they wanted chickens or already had them. In Rome, they wanted goats. You go to Italy, you have to have a ten-minute conversation about olive oil and the tomato.”

We were walking down Warren Street in Hudson, which descends slowly to the river. Gardner is small and blond, with practical-looking hands that seem fitted to carry a tool. She has a round face and avid blue eyes that appear to have degrees of radiance, like headlights. She went on to say that, returning from abroad, she would see “all these really earnest, earnest young farmers coming to town meetings. They would be so idealistic about organic farming, and then you would have these old-time farmers who were full-on pesticide users, but they had a lot of experience, and there were just so many clashes. Anyway, I was doing a story in New Orleans, where this Hollywood agent guy mentioned a piece in Monocle about farmers in Japan going back to the land. He thought it could be a TV show, and I was, ‘Yeah, I think it should be.’ So I started trying to write a TV show, not in Japan but in Germantown. I was kind of imagining a show with the sort of epic landscape of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and all the clashes between old farmers and new farmers.”

We paused to let a car turn in front of us. “I didn’t really know how to write a TV show,” Gardner said. “The only way I could figure out how to do it was make the main character a magazine editor. Each episode would be about the stories she was doing. Basically, I disguised everybody I know in my town for each episode.”

Gardner decided that she should write a table of contents for the character’s magazine. Very quickly, she had a hundred-and-fifty-page issue with outlines for stories. “I had sections—global, local, people, places, and things, like farmers’ favorite tools. I had a story, ‘Is It Too Late for Poland to Save Its Soil?,’ because someone told me that Poland had the best soil in the world, and they were building strip malls over it. I had a Farmonomics report called ‘Weather Permitting.’ I did a Harvard Business School-type study on one small farm’s road to success. That’s when I decided there was too much information for TV. What it needed to be was a life-style brand with a magazine and a Web site to explain it.”

A car went by with a dog leaning out the window. “February, 2012, is when I really concentrated,” Gardner continued. “I just sat in my barn over that winter, working. I would have days where I thought, What the hell am I doing? I felt like I was turning a ship in my life. People think I’m brave, and I definitely am, but it’s really because I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid of being on a boat on the ocean, and when I had to do it on a story for Monocle I obsessed about rogue waves for a whole month before I went.”

We stopped and bought coffee, then kept walking. “ ‘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.”

M_odern Farmer_ prints a hundred thousand copies of each issue and has almost sixteen thousand subscribers. It costs $7.99, and it is sold in bookstores and on newsstands and at groceries, feedlots, and tractor-supply stores. Reading it is like spending time with Gardner. Her interest is inclusive and doesn’t linger. A short piece might be fewer than a hundred words (“Save Your Seeds, Canada!”), and there might be several to a page. A long piece (“Wild Pigs: It’s a War, and We’re Losing”) is usually fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred words. The slogan for the first issue was “The New Food Culture.” She also considered “Where Agriculture Meets Pop Culture.” Agriculture, however, “is just a word that people don’t like,” she says. “You just shut down when you hear it; it’s like hearing ‘healthy’ or ‘nutritious.’ The one we use now is ‘Farm. Food. Life.’ ”

In the first issue, there is a story about organic food in China, where the food chain is so polluted that prosperous people in the cities sometimes hire relatives in the countryside to grow food for them. There is a story about two British guys growing mangoes in Africa, and one about farm injuries. There is an interview with a woman who wrote a book called “The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks,” and there are brief interviews with farmers about their favorite possessions. A farmer in Kenya loves his big knife, which he calls a slasher; a farmer in Indiana loves his chain saw; a farmer in Australia loves his tractor; a farmer in Italy loves his boots; and a grape farmer in France loves his dynamizer, a machine that spins plants, herbs, and water until they blend together and can be sprayed on his vines. There is a piece about a couple in Amsterdam who built a house from bales of straw, which took nine months. Among the features that became columns are Ask an Ag Minister, an interview with a foreign agricultural minister (Jorge Mendes Ribeiro Filho, of Brazil), and Meet the Modern Farmers, from Canada, Germany, Uruguay, England, Massachusetts, Georgia, and California. A shopping section includes farm tools, boots, an outdoor shower on a tripod that hooks up to a hose, garden gloves, an implement called a dibber that looks like a top and is for making seed holes, a hammock, and a corn sheller. Since the second issue, each cover animal has had an animal cam, a live feed from a barn or a field which can be viewed on the magazine’s Web site. The most popular has been the goat cam, because goats do a lot. Compared to a goat, cows and pigs are sedentary.

Jesse Hirsch, the magazine’s senior editor, had been working as a restaurant critic in San Francisco; he moved to Hudson after he was hired. When he first heard Modern Farmer described, he said, “I thought it sounded like an Onion parody. Farm-to-table was everywhere, but then they asked me to do a story about wild boars, and I realized the magazine wasn’t going to be ‘Look at this gorgeous persimmon,’ or something a chef in San Francisco was going to do with tweezers.”

Modern Farmer is not widely read by farmers. The ones who encounter it tend to think that the title is literal and that the magazine presents a version of farming that is romantic, whereas farming is not. “Farming is boring,” a farmer told me. “Farming is not really in any way glamorous. There is not a whole lot of whimsy to farming.” This was a farmer named Lisa Seger, who, with her husband, Christian, owns Blue Heron Farm, in Field Store, Texas, where they raise goats and make cheese. Seger said that she subscribed to only two magazines, “The Stockman Grass Farmer, which is about how to grow grass for grazing, and Farm Show, which is about hillbilly farmers building things in their barns, because they don’t have the money to buy them new—a guy building a combine out of a tricycle and four screws.” Compared with Farm Show, Seger said, Modern Farmer was “a fashion magazine for farming.”

Accepting the National Magazine Award, Gardner described Modern Farmer as “the farming magazine for media professionals.” In Brooklyn, there is a club of writers and editors that meets occasionally on Sundays in a bar to discuss a magazine, like a book club. Recently, they discussed Modern Farmer. They were from such places as the Times Magazine, Longform.org, The Atavist, and FiveThirtyEight. The issue they had read was No. 5, for the summer of 2014, which had the dog on the cover. It included stories about farm deaths; orange wine, which is white wine that has been exposed to grape skins for longer than white wine is; Dutch farmers who raise pigs without antibiotics; entrepreneurs in Northern California trying to figure out how to farm in the midst of drought; and two people talking about romance in the context of farming (“After she’d been harvesting shallots all day, her blue eyes looked so beautiful in contrast to the black dirt on her face”). The group sat at a Formica-topped table in the back of the bar and drank cocktails.

One of them liked the story about farm deaths. “It feels gritty and crimey,” he said. Another young man said, “I think it felt dutiful.”

Other remarks: “I had an experience I don’t always have with magazines—I heard about things I hadn’t heard about before. Mostly, magazines now, we package things we’ve already seen on the Internet, especially with culture.”

“I wonder who the ideal reader is. My assumption is that it’s people who will never farm.”

“I think it’s an aspirational magazine, in the same way that GQ has all this fashion I would never buy, but people still subscribe.”

“I think there should be a column, How I Became a Farmer. There was not anything actually written by a farmer.”

“I was surprised there was nothing about kids on farms: ‘I didn’t want to raise these kids in the city anymore.’ What about a kid, he’s kind of dirty, and he’s best friends with a pig. I could see a cover of farm kids.”

“A kid cam.”

“Maybe that will happen when they run out of animals for the cover.”

Issue No. 6, which came out in September, has a piece about cowboys in southern Texas called tick riders. Tick riders patrol the Rio Grande on horseback for stray cattle that might carry a pernicious tick called the cattle-fever tick. There is also a piece about a rancher named David Munson, Jr., who raises grass-fed beef in Detroit, Texas, which is north of Dallas, near Paris. For two days at the end of July, I went to Texas with Gardner so that she could attend the photo shoots. She had hoped to see the Rio Grande, but it rained heavily, and the tick-rider shoot was cancelled, partly because the cowboy didn’t want to ride his horse amid lightning. That afternoon, Gardner flew to Dallas, and the next morning we drove to Munson’s ranch.

Munson had a bowl of tamales on his kitchen table. “People are getting hamburgers, but they’re not getting real meat,” he said. “These are made with my grass-fed meat. It’s not feedlot. You better dig into them and prove me wrong.”

“Do I need a fork?” Gardner asked.

“I always use one,” Munson said.

After we finished the tamales, we got in Munson’s truck and drove around the ranch. Passing a barn, we saw several tractors. “I have a lot of machinery,” Munson said. “If I could have a machinery ranch, I’d be very happy. A really good cattle rancher, though, doesn’t like machinery. They’re like a people person. They know where every cow and where every calf is.”

“You have llamas,” Gardner said. One faced us in a pasture behind a fence. “To protect my goats,” Munson said. “Llamas don’t like dogs, they don’t like coyotes, they don’t really like people—they put up with them because they bring food. Some are more protective than others. Mine were raised as pet llamas, I think, and they just didn’t go after the bad guys. They would walk off and leave the goat. The predators often kill for fun. You have all these goats that are torn up, and that’s unpleasant. It’s a combat situation.” The llama in the pasture was a retired llama. “I replaced the llamas with guard dogs. I think they’re Great Pyrenees. You’re not supposed to pet them. We feed them right out in the pasture with the goats.”

“What goes after your goats?” Gardner asked.

“Anything that can,” Munson said. “Coyotes, probably cats—bobcats—and feral dogs. I have three hundred goats, and we lost about a hundred last year. Everybody says there’s not a panther in here, but they’re extremely elusive.”

We drove slowly along a two-track road through tall grass. “I have to be careful out here for hog holes,” Munson said. We came to a fence around some woods that had hogs in it, but they saw us coming and scattered so fast that they left the leaves on the underbrush vibrating. When we arrived at a piece of high ground overlooking a muddy river, Munson said, “That’s the Red River. It’s just constantly chewing up this land. That’s why it’s red.”

“I had to stop watching the news—it was making my own problems seem insignificant.”

Then Munson said that he had a neighbor who had “a big cattle farm in Africa. He’s going to put in a combined fish, rice, and cattle operation. He’s thinking feedlot, but I’m trying to get him to go grass feed. It’s a multi-year operation, and right now he can’t stand up and say he’s a cash engine.”

“We can all relate to that,” Gardner said.

Most of the time I spent in Texas, Gardner was preoccupied with the affairs of the magazine. She was going through what Natalie Massenet, a friend of hers who’s the founder of net-a-porter.com, a luxury fashion retail site, told me was “Chapter 2 of startup. Chapter 1 is you raise an amount of money, never enough for what is expected. Then you must raise more money, always in a period of vulnerability, and meanwhile you have to keep your employees and your advertisers and your investors on your side.”

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.

Giustra’s wealth was made mostly in mining. He is perhaps better known, however, for being friends with Bill Clinton, who travels occasionally on Giustra’s plane. Recently, for his philanthropy, Giustra received something called the Dalai Lama Humanitarian Award. In the video accompanying the award’s announcement, Clinton says of Giustra, “The thing I like about him is that he is both idealistic and very hardheaded, so he doesn’t want to waste his money, and he doesn’t want to waste his time.” Several years ago, Giustra gave Clinton’s foundation thirty-one million dollars, and he later pledged at least a hundred million dollars and half of his future earnings from natural-resource ventures. The reason that the second issue of Modern Farmer has an interview with Clinton is that Gardner asked Giustra if a reporter could fly with him and Clinton, and Giustra said no, but he delivered Clinton for a conversation.

Businesspeople talk about having patient capital or impatient capital. Modern Farmer has impatient capital. Giustra had never invested in a magazine before. In bygone days, investors might wait five years for a magazine to make money. Currently, according to David Carey, the president of Hearst Magazines, a backer might spend three to five million dollars to start a magazine and expect to recover his investment in two years. “Definitely, if you’re not profitable by the third year, something is amiss,” Carey said. I asked Giustra if this accorded with his assumptions. “Absolutely, I agree,” he said. “All startups are the same. If you don’t understand those issues, there’s going to be some surprises. But it takes passion and focus and discipline. Did you see her passion? You don’t see that often.” He also said, “I’m committed to it and have put up all the money so far and happy to put up more.”

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.”

“Frank feels I’ve been unsuccessful raising money, and I have been,” Gardner said, as we drove from Munson’s ranch to the Dallas airport. “He doesn’t believe in what I’ve accomplished, because it doesn’t work on the spreadsheet. But what you do in the first couple of years is build the brand and then that gives you value. Every single investor has told me the same thing, though, that it’s too soon to sell. They would buy us at a fire sale. No one wants to go near—I don’t want to finish that sentence.”

Giustra is accustomed to investments in mining, where there is a concrete asset. You own the asset, an investment consultant told me, and you can squeeze its elements for better terms. This is a difficult playbook to extend to media investing. There’s no mine, he said; no materials in the ground, no asset you can drive out and look at. There are only people. Squeezing doesn’t work. A few days after we got back from Texas, I walked into Gardner’s office as she was talking on the phone to her lawyers. When she hung up, she was downcast. “There is no question the magazine will go on, but it might go on without me,” she said.

The climax arrived early in August, while the September issue was closing. “The apocalypse, literally and metaphorically, is looming large at Modern Farmer,” Gardner had written in her editor’s letter. “The end. It could happen.” The issue, which she was calling the “pre-apocalypse issue,” was devoted “to preparing for the worst.” During the first week of August, Gardner needed to pay the printing bill, and her staff was waiting to hear if this issue was the last. “You’re here on the worst day of my life,” she told me one morning. Whatever happened likely had to be resolved by the end of the afternoon.

All day, Gardner’s lawyers exchanged proposals with Giustra. He kept insisting on his terms, and she kept refusing to give in. I asked what the complications were, and she said that she was prevented by confidentiality agreements from telling me. “We’re just very far apart,” she said unhappily. Late in the afternoon, a proposal arrived, and she read it while biting her lip. After a few moments, her phone rang.

“I’m just reading what he put the valuation at,” she said soberly. Then, brightening, “I think Richard can live with that, don’t you?” Richard was one of her lawyers. She appeared to gather herself, and then said, “Let’s do it.”

She hung up the phone and said, “I’m in shock. We have runway.” Her eyes seemed to widen. “When you came this morning, we were discussing my exit and whether I would go amicably,” she said. “I was getting ready to call the moving van to pick up the furniture. I woke up at four and thought, I can’t live like this anymore.”

Gardner had engaged for that evening an excursion boat to take the staff out on the river to celebrate her executive editor and her managing editor, who were leaving. One was going to Cook’s Illustrated, and the other to Fast Company. It was now nearly time for the party. “What we’re going to do is walk to the boat and get some champagne,” Gardner said. Then her phone rang. “You O.K. with me to sign this?” she asked. “I mean, I’m so scared. What if there are tricks in here? It’s like the scariest thing I’ve ever signed. So I’m actually signing this, right?” Her gaze was fixed on her computer.

“Am I allowed to tell everyone tonight that we’re in business?” she asked. “Would that be premature?” Then she let out a long breath and said, “Tell them, ‘You got a deal.’ ” The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but as part of it, in exchange for more money from Giustra, Gardner’s shares were diminished.

That evening, the staff walked down Warren Street. On the river, Gardner gave the departing editors mock covers of the magazine with their photographs on them. “I hate that you’re leaving, but I understand that the world awaits,” she said. She allowed about half an hour to pass before pouring a glass of champagne, and then announcing, “We have had some low points, and they’ve been getting lower and lower, and then they got lower, but at five o’clock tonight I signed a deal, and we’re going to be alive for a couple more years. It really happened. We’re going forward, we’ve got runway, and we’re not going to live month to month anymore.”

Strangely, everyone sat looking glumly at their feet. The next morning, I asked Jesse Hirsch why. He said that they had lived amid uncertainty for so long that they were stunned. “We were looking for the conditions,” he said. “ ‘You all have to take a forty-per-cent pay cut and move to Vancouver and work half the day in a mine.’ ”

The peace held for several weeks, but by the end of October Gardner and Giustra were again disagreeing about how the business should be run. When I asked her how I should describe the future of the magazine, she said she wanted to speak to her lawyer. Then she sent me this sentence: “The relationship between the company and the primary investor remains tense and the company is still looking for long-term financing.”

A few days after the party on the river, Gardner gave a dinner at her house, more or less on the second anniversary of one she had given for Giustra’s financial team when they visited Germantown. That morning, she drove to Northwind Farms, in Tivoli, to buy chickens to grill. “The farm’s run by Richard Biezynski, and his family all work there,” she said. “They have a slaughterhouse, and the animals all have these amazing lives. I think we want to make him a Meet the Modern Farmer.”

Gardner parked by a red barn. In a white room with metal tables, two men in aprons were spraying down chicken carcasses. One of the men asked how many chickens she needed.

“Fifteen people, so I probably need three or four,” she said.

“All I have is frozen chickens,” the man said. “If you can wait, I can get it done in twenty minutes. They’re in there now,” he said, pointing to a room on the other side of a small opening in the wall, like something food might pass through at a restaurant. A bird in the other room squawked, and Gardner flinched. “That’s fresh, that’s real,” she said. “That’s a little real for me. Let me think about this. We really need chicken.”

She walked out to the parking lot and called the chef who was to grill the chickens. “I’m having a crisis, because they haven’t killed the chickens, and he’s going to kill them for me,” she said. “I’m really seriously thinking, Couldn’t we just do pasta?” She walked in a tight circle. “It’s true, it’s very fresh chicken,” she said, nodding. “That’s one way to look at it.” When she walked back inside, the man said, “Next ones coming through the window are yours.” Gardner took out her checkbook. “I love the chef’s attitude,” she said uncertainly. “ ‘It’s very fresh.’ They’re not sentimental about it.” Another bird squawked, and Gardner put her hands to her cheeks, then pressed her fingers to her eyes. “People who raise chickens say that if you saw the individual personalities they have you’d never want to eat chicken again, so I guess my next up is to get some animals, huh?” Sniffling, she wrote a check for $84.93, and took the chickens, which I had to carry, because when she touched them she discovered that they were still warm.

That week, Gardner was having the ceiling of her living room and two walls painted black; the rest would be white, a color scheme that suggested Sweden, she said. She had decided that her new living room would have fewer things in it, so she was planning a yard sale. The afternoon of the party, a friend of hers named John Patrick, the designer of the clothing brand Organic, was in the barn putting price tags on the furniture. “I made this table six hundred,” he said, “and the chairs are a grand.” Gardner asked if the prices weren’t a little high. “I just think, if anyone shows any interest in something, sell it to them,” Patrick said.

Then Patrick looked at me and said, “I need your attention.” He wanted to talk about Gardner. “We met when she first landed in Germantown,” he said. “Late 1999 or 2000. She had a dinner party that defined what was going to go on for the next five years. Tables outside, and some Italians came, and you felt you were seeing something that was interesting. When she did Monocle, she brought to it an enthusiasm and a very rapid set of eyes.” He gave me a searching look, as if to be sure I understood.

“How Modern Farmer came about is she was always rooting out the next thing,” he went on. “I was getting wrapped up with the anarchist farmers. The anarchists farm with no land. They do crop mobs and seed bombs. For a seed bomb, you take a bunch of clay and you put seeds in it, and you bomb it where somebody has told you that you can’t plant.”

“Were you in the TV show?”

“I was this fashion designer, going, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a good farmer making buttons, isn’t that great?’ ” he said. “Then I get deeper and more involved with the young farmers.” Gardner came walking toward us across the lawn. “With Modern Farmer, people don’t think anything of whacking up a fence and getting some goats anymore,” he said. “I think Ann Marie’s what Gloria Steinem was when Ms. came out. She’s embraced this notion and led the way.”

Gardner arrived. “I’ve got a new magazine we need to do,” Patrick said. “Woodworking. I’ve been hanging out at lumberyards, and—oh!” He rolled his eyes and made like he was going to faint.

The guests began arriving in the evening, some of them with children. Among them was a woman named Tambra Dillon, who is a co-director of the Hudson Opera House. “Ann Marie had this idea, and no one got it,” she said. “Period, full stop. It took a long time. You could see a huge movement going on, you saw it in Brooklyn, you saw it in the Hudson Valley—an interest in small farms, not Big Ag, the American version of the English countryside. What shelter magazines did for the home, Ann Marie saw Modern Farmer doing for this new food movement. Now it’s two years later, and people have this thing they can touch and feel and read, and they’re, ‘Oh, I love Modern Farmer.’ I would’ve given up a hundred times before now.”

After dinner, when it was dark, a small group of men and women sat in chairs under a tree. Gardner had strung lights in the branches, and you could just see their faces. Among them, lying back in a chair, she looked, for the first time in a while, at ease.

Each morning, Gardner takes her three dogs for a walk through a field across the road from her house. The field leads to the river and belongs to a neighbor. She had always wanted to buy it, but it was never for sale. In September, though, another neighbor offered her two acres next to her property.

“I’m going to have an experimental farm,” she said, “and I’m going to get some rescue animals.” I asked about the magazine. “We’re planning a big story on water,” she said. “And I want to work on modern barn design, and also designing a car you can put animals in, because I can’t have a nice car with my dogs. A pickup truck, maybe, like the old ones with the bench seats, so the dog can sit shotgun. And I want there to be a live thing of extreme weather on our Web site, and where it is in the world. Someone smart must know how to make this. I want to do more international stories, more travel, more sustainability, more stories on the Web site, maybe television, and I want to get involved in clothing,” she added. “I’m trying not to get too excited.” ♦