Farm Radio Gains a Fertile Mind

Janet Macy is a long way from the farm.


It is 6 A.M., and Macy is drinking cup after cup of black coffee in a sound booth at Radio Nadezhda. She hasn't resorted to cigarettes yet, except for a few lapses around sunrise, as she put finishing touches on the morning's script for the show she helps produce, "With the Roosters." On the air, host Marina Skalkina is gurgling optimistically about the weather and the market price of eggs.


Macy, 59, left Minnesota last summer, her knowledge about Russia limited to an acquaintance's insight that "the weather is just like Duluth, and people dress the way they do in downtown Minneapolis." Her project, funded by the non-profit Winrock Corporation, was to produce a radio segment on farming, targeting Russia's 24,000 privatized state farms. After 37 years as a radio and television journalist -- a job which has taken her to Mexico and Canada -- she gathered up her degrees in journalism and social science in anticipation of the challenges ahead.


As it turned out, she needed to reach further back.


"My brother and I grew up on five acres outside of Omaha. I was a 4-Her for nine years," Macy said, referring to the agricultural program for youth. Advanced degrees notwithstanding, Macy realized that Russian farmers were more interested in small-scale marketing than agribusiness. "What we were drawing upon was what we had done as 8- and 10-year-olds, at roadside stands, out of the back of a truck," she said. "You know what I'm doing now? Digging out my mother's Nebraska State Fair pickle recipes."


So "With the Roosters" began to take shape, adding an hour to Radio Nadezhda's daily air time and extending Macy's segment to a full hour. Although Russian and American farming methods are based on different climates and soil types, local farmers are extremely curious about foreign techniques, especially for organic farming, said Svetlana Bobrova, a producer at the show. From a technological standpoint, Russian farmers "have the knowledge and wherewithal that we had in the '60s," but even urbanite listeners proved surprisingly knowledgeable about fruit and vegetable farming, Macy said.


Eventually, Macy and her colleagues decided to broaden the show's focus; above and beyond recipes and canning advice, the revised program would tackle issues such as consumer rights, marketing and family counseling.


So Skalkina, the show's host, now supplements her quiz shows and light news with items like a daily price list for market shoppers and advice on food preservation. One segment researched the hazards of buying unrefrigerated meat at city markets under conditions that Macy said she found "horrifying." But the habit of displaying meat on counters is ingrained in Russian salesmanship, and not all of her advice was well taken. "When I suggested that they display plastic models or photographs, they just laughed."


Macy, who had been active in consumer advocacy in the United States, hopes eventually to foster Russian interest in institutionalized quality checking. "Eventually I would like to see them make demands for the kind of protection we have," she said. "You don't have the Environmental Protection Agency here, or the Food and Drug Administration, or the Consumer Product Safety Administration. You don't have the Better Business Bureau. You don't have quality control," Macy added. "You have to know what you're buying."


More broadly, Russian consumers need to feel empowered to demand higher safety standards, a sense that never developed under communism, she said. "They don't believe in the power of the dollar."