Hobby Farms (magazine)
US magazine

Hobby Farms is a bimonthly magazine, devoted to the life of hobby farmers, homesteaders and small producers. Its editorial offices are based in Lexington, Kentucky. Hobby Farms magazine's tagline is "Rural Living for Pleasure and Profit". The magazine is known for its award-winning design and photography.
History
The magazine was the brainchild of Norman Ridker, founder and chairman of BowTie Inc. In 1999, he was visiting a friend and business associate in upstate New York who enjoyed making maple syrup on his farm in his spare time. Looking around at the farm and his friend's life—a working professional who enjoyed farming as a hobby—he realized that no magazine existed that served him and others like him. He enlisted editors to begin researching "hobby farmers" and the seeming groundswell of urban professionals moving to the country seeking a more meaningful existence and with a desire to farm in their spare time. Finding that a very real need existed for education and basic information about farming for such individuals, BowTie trademarked the term "hobby farm", and launched Hobby Farms magazine in the spring of 2001.
In 2004 Hobby Farms editorial office moved from Irvine, California, to Lexington, Kentucky.
The public source identifies “Hobby Farms (magazine)” as uS magazine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hobby, Farms and magazine.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5874930. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2001 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hobby Farms (magazine)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.