Practical stories from working farm life.
American Family Farmer keeps its feet in the barn aisle. Through guest-led interviews, it follows farms, family operations, farm-adjacent businesses, animal care, sustainability, therapy work, and the everyday economics of keeping rural enterprises alive.
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American Family Farmer is agricultural podcasting with a kitchen-table pace. It is built around conversations with people whose work touches farms, food, animals, farm business, and the practical survival of independent agriculture. The format is simple. A presenter introduces the guest, asks direct questions, and lets the answer run long when the story needs room. Recent episodes range widely, but they keep returning to the same ground-level concern: how people make farm life workable. Lynn Westmeister talks about Westmeister Farm in Shelby, Ohio, where exotic animals and public education grew from a private place to keep horses. Cannon Michael describes Bowles Farming Company as a sixth-generation family farming business shaped by history, distance, management, and return. Megan Moran explains farm-based therapy at Cultivate Farms, including clients dealing with autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, trauma, identity questions, and grief. Dawn Broder connects farm upbringing, teaching kitchens, dairy chores, alfalfa, corn, cattle, chickens, and interest in hemp. Warren Shaw brings the conversation into farm advocacy and the economics facing farmers, while also recounting a barn roof collapse under a late-season snow load. Norris Muth gives the show a science lane, explaining ecology and evolution through pollinators, flowers, spiders, and organismal relationships. Jody Scott brings in the business story of Green Goo, from herbs drying on screen doors to farmers market feedback and stores reaching out. Eliza McClain adds veterinary influence, Cane Creek Farm, and farming shaped by early animal-care work. The show is not slick. It repeats itself, carries sponsor reads, and sometimes wanders. That looseness is also part of its usefulness. It lets guests explain the route from idea to operation, from hardship to workaround, from family inheritance to present-day farm business. The result is a warm, practical record of American farming as a network of households, barns, markets, animals, land, and stubborn adaptations.
Made for: Best for listeners interested in small farm business, local food, family agriculture, animal care, rural entrepreneurship, and farm advocacy told in accessible language. It also suits people who prefer patient interviews over fast commentary.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by treating farm life as a working system of animals, land, health, family, business, weather, and advocacy. It gives guests room to explain the messy practical details that polished agriculture shows often trim away.
The American Family Farmer Show is the weekly voice for small, independent farm owners, as well hobby farmers and all of those interested in eating natural foods that make as few stops as possible from the farm to the table.
Maple taps meet therapy animals when your farm curiosity prefers dirt under its nails.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A farm-focused conversation turns glyphosate into a question of health, lawsuits, and who pays for modern agriculture.
Glyphosate is the pressure point in this single-episode review of farming, health, corporate power, and the legal rights of people who say pesticide exposure made them sick.
A career change grows from a 320-square-foot container into a 1.1-acre urban farm with a weekly produce-bag subscription.
This single-episode review follows a practical career pivot into urban farming. The guest's path runs from a business degree at NC State and years managing an intellectual property law firm to a 2014 workshop that opened the door to farming.
Maple season is presented as a careful blend of craft, timing, and farm business.
This episode follows Jacob Pausner of Baird Farm in North Chittenden, Vermont, as he lays out the rhythm of maple season and the farm business around it.
A scrappy small-business origin story shaped by plants, customer feedback, and homemade production.
The piece gives Jody Scott's Green Goo a distinctly domestic origin: a military childhood, a mother who loved plants, and years of moving potted plants from place to place.
Farm-based therapy at Cultivate Farms balances access, old-house constraints, and steady demand.
Cultivate Farms near Bolton, Massachusetts offers a farm-based therapy model that aims to feel less stigmatizing for clients who have never been in therapy or who do better with something more active than a stationary format.
Practical sustainability talk for working agriculture.
Odd questions, followed patiently down to the incentives.
Mike McVay interviews American Family Farmer host Doug Stephan about his childhood connection to farming, Easley Farm, and the pressures facing American farmers.
Doug Stephan interviews Megan Moran, executive director of Cultivate Care Farms in Bolton, Massachusetts, about farm-based therapy.
The host introduces the podcast's mission to support small and family farms through conversations with agricultural experts and farmers sharing solutions.
A biology professor discusses the fields of ecology and evolution, explaining their differences and how they study organismal interactions over different time scales.
Host Doug Stephan introduces the show and interviews Ann Malloy, a fifth-generation Gloucester native and co-owner of a farm business.
Interview with a farmer about growing up on a dairy farm, current farming practices, and interest in hemp cultivation.
Interview with Warren Shaw, president of Massachusetts Farm Bureau, discussing economic challenges and a barn collapse on his dairy farm.
Interview with Cannon Michael, president and CEO of Bowles Farming Company, discussing his background and the family farm business.
Interview with Jack Algier, director of agroecology at Stone Barn Center, discussing sustainable farming practices and the history of the farm.
Interview with a hobby farm owner about her exotic animals and how she started her farm.
American Family Farmer host Doug Stephan interviews Kelly Ryerson, known as the “glyphosate girl,” about glyphosate’s history, agricultural use, and health concerns.
American Family Farmer interviews Tammy Perdue of Sweet Peas Urban Gardens near Raleigh, North Carolina, about moving from intellectual-property law to urban organic farming.
Doug Stephan talks with Jody Scott.
Doug Steffen interviews Jacob Pausner from Baird Farm, a fourth-generation maple syrup farm in North Chittenden, Vermont.
The American Family Farmer host says seed companies can inspect crops and sue farmers when plants carry their genetics.