New Broadcast Council Member Doug Stephan has been around cows all his life, and he has been on the radio since he was 17. Those two experiences came together a few years ago along with a realization that many American family farmers were getting the short end of the stick. Over the years, this led Stephan to do lots of different things on the radio and in various other media.

He started a syndicated morning show in October 1988, three months after Rush Limbaugh went national. Prior to, and since, he has been doing local radio in small to huge markets and working in hundreds of markets with various talk programming on networks.

Stephan seems to have found the secret to good radio is being a good listener. Also, he has figured out how to run a radio business. He now produces a daily morning show, called The DJV Show, with three millennial female hosts. On his own, he produces and hosts weekend shows on health, how the mind works, and the relatively recent American Family Farmer. He has no partners, no churches, no big-business, and no corporate-radio-company ties. It seems Stephan values independence and independent operators who like to do business with people who are happy to take programs with no strings attached.

“The farm show presents new ideas impacting the family farmer, such as how to survive in an era of corporate and government unfriendliness and profiles of people running all sorts of smaller, family-farmer operations,” Stephan said.

“You can hear the contents of nearly all the shows by checking out AmericanFamilyFarmerShow.com. The complete show is there for stations to download and play when it works for them. You also will find a podcast at the same web address every week with fresh material,” Stephan added.

Stephan’s motto has always been, “We are all here to help.” He seems to have gotten that from observing how things were done on the New England farms he grew up around and worked on during his formative years.

“My favorite exploratory question when I’m talking to someone new is ‘Were you a farm kid?’”

Stephan says it is lots of fun to hear the stories from some of the newer, brighter beginners and then the seasoned veterans, just to compare their realities.

No matter what, Stephan hopes his membership in NAFB will lead to great connections to the individual farm stations, their owners, and listeners.