The following is excerpted with permission from the January 1999 Rural Electric Nebraskan.
By JACK MERRITT
The huge snow drifts that covered the prairie in the winter of 1947-48 were beginning to melt when farmers and ranchers began talking that spring about the need for a statewide radio station.
The devastating losses from that blizzard might have been lessened had ranchers been warned about the severity of storms that had hit the prairie over and over again that winter. Farmers and ranchers also needed a station that reached all of Nebraska and one that would keep them informed about commodity prices and trends in an agricultural market that was then becoming international.
The early days
Max Brown recalls those early days of KRVN: “I believe the most important byproduct of the establishment of KRVN was the unity its creation forged among existing farm interests and organizations.”
“There were 43 representatives of farm organizations and associations present on May of 1948 when articles of incorporation were adopted and the Nebraska Rural Radio Association was formed,” the 87-year-old pioneer farm broadcaster said.
“Shortly before the North Platte Meeting, I was brought down from South Dakota by the Nebraska Cooperative Council,” Brown says. “Because I was an outsider, I was accepted by the various farm groups to be their hired hand on the radio project.”
“Many said it would be a cold day in hell the day Nebraska farmers and ranchers got together on anything,” said Brown, the first manager of what has become the nation’s largest and most influential farmer/rancher-owned radio station.
“And they were right,” he adds with a chuckle. “It was a bitterly cold day that first day in February in 1951 when KVRN began broadcasting from the second floor of a mortuary in downtown Lexington.
“In a way, Lexington chose us for the station,” Brown recalls. “The Lexington Chamber of Commerce wooed us, and the city gave us land for our transmitters.”
He also said that Lexington’s location conformed to the desires of the 4,755 farmers and ranchers who paid $10 to become members of the association. “They wanted a station in central Nebraska so its signal could reach most of the state,” the senior Brown said.
Market information
Even before the blizzard dramatized the need for a radio station, farmers and ranchers were thinking about establishing one. “Those attending a meeting of the Nebraska Cooperative Council in North Platte in the fall of 1947 expressed a need for market information,” Brown said. “So we began to survey farmers and ranchers and then asked a representative of a station owned by the Ohio Farm Bureau to come to Nebraska and tell us how Ohio did it.”
“We picked call letters that would reflect our mission,” Brown says. “Rural Voice of Nebraska — that’s what the letters stood for in the beginning and that’s what they continue to stand for,” Brown said.
Max Brown retired from managing KRVN in 1979. His son Eric, who began sweeping the station’s floors and emptying its wastebaskets in 1960, was hired to succeed his father. That was after the younger Brown had earned a Ph.D. in journalism from Ohio University in 1974.
Objectives
Eric Brown talked about those enduring principles the day the Rural Electric Nebraskan interviewed his father: “We’ve made many technical improvements over the years, but I’m still guided by our original objectives.”
Those include complete and timely market reports and the best possible weather information, two objectives that were at the top of that original list.
“We serve, rather than lead, “ Eric says. “That means the station itself is unbiased and only takes a position on agricultural issues (such as the creation of a regional school of veterinary medicine) that are supported by all of the state’s farm organizations.”
KRVN began by providing free air time for all of the state’s farm organizations to state their views. “And we still do,” says Eric Brown. “Our listeners — three out of every four farmers and ranchers from Nebraska and more than one half of the Kansas farmers — hear a “multitude of tongues” on various agriculture issues.
Among those listeners are the farmers in the Platte River valley who irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of corn and soybeans.
“Dawson Public Power District and several other PPDs rely on KRVN to inform our irrigators participating in our load control program of the need to reduce power use when our load peaks in the hot summer,” say Bob Heinz, general manager of Dawson PPD, also headquartered in Lexington.
Radio format
In a time when radio stations change their formats every year or two, KRVN’s format has remained pretty much the same over the years. “We still carry Paul Harvey, Monogram Money and University of Nebraska sporting events, and we still play country/western music,” Eric Brown says.
“But technically, today’s operation is state-of-the-art,” he says. “We have the latest, digital solid state transmitter and audio processing, a digital microwave, excellent studio equipment — all of which combine to give the listener the best sound possible.
Regarding KRVN’s advanced technological capability, Brown said, “Our Internet operation continues to grow rapidly. Our Web site offers farm news, weather and market information. If someone is unable to listen during the day, they can get this information later. We’ve had as many as 1,000 hits on our Web site in a given day.”
In 1989, KRVN moved its operation from its old location to what had been the Federal Land Bank and Production Credit building on Plum Creek Parkway.
“We began as a daylight only station with 25,000 watts of power. We changed to 880 and 50,000 watts full-time in 1972. Now, we also operate stations KNEB AM/FM in Scottsbluff and KTIC/AM and KWPN/FM in West Point,” says Brown.
“We’re truly a regional radio network. Our signal reaches all of Nebraska, most of Kansas, eastern Colorado and Wyoming and southern South Dakota.”
“And late at night, some listeners (according to our market research) are as far away as California,” he adds.
Max Brown smiles. “And to think that a lot of folks said we wouldn’t last a year.”