Carey Martin (Louisiana Farm Bureau Radio Network), right, said his interest in radio started in high school when he would listen to the DJs count down the top-10 hits each night on the radio. “Since I was a farm boy growing up on a beef cattle and dairy farm, it made sense that I would pursue a career in farm broadcasting. During college, I was fortunate to work internships with Doug Thomas at the Southern States Network, Don Molino at the Louisiana Agri-News Network and Mike Danna at the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation. Through my membership in the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, I met Taylor Brown, and he encouraged me to attend the NAFB convention during my senior year.” Carey continued, “At that convention, I landed my first farm broadcasting job at KVOO AM/FM (Tulsa, OK). After two years in Tulsa, Ron Hays at the Oklahoma Agrinet had an opening and Oklahoma City became my next home. One of the highlights of my career came while I was at the Oklahoma Agrinet.” The NAFB launched a new award designed to recognize new, up-and-coming farm broadcasters who showed promise to contribute to the industry. “At the 1995 NAFB convention, I was honored to be named the first recipient of the NAFB Horizon Award. I’m pretty sure that Ron Hays deserves the credit for me getting that award,” he said. “My next career stop was a short one-year stint at WOW AM/FM (Omaha, NE). It was short because a rare opportunity to move back to Louisiana came up, and we headed back to Baton Rouge to join the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation.” His first job responsibility was to launch the Louisian Farm Bureau Radio Network. “We didn’t have a satellite uplink, so I did it the old-fashioned way and fed programming over the phone to my first five stations. There had been a lot of audio streaming on the internet using RealAudio. But the quality was very low, and there were constant buffering problems, so RealAudio wasn’t a reliable option.” He added, “Being an ‘80s music nut, I found that you could download music files from certain websites. They had solved the file size problem by using a compression algorithm called MP3. I had found my way around a satellite uplink, and started e-mailing all of my farm programs as MP3 files to all of my stations. I had started the very first internet-based farm radio network on planet Earth,” he claims. “I have no way to prove this, but I’m am convinced that it’s true, and it’s something I’m very proud of to this day.” In 2003, he left the farm broadcasting business, but he still worked for the Louisiana Farm Bureau as a field representative. Two years ago, he moved back into radio and digital media. “For the past two years, Don Molino and I have split the daily broadcasting duties on what is now known as The Voice of Louisiana Agriculture Radio Network. We’re a multi-media operation now. I run the VoiceofLouisianaAgriculture.com website and the @VoiceofLaAg Facebook page and Twitter account. Don and I produce a daily e-newsletter titled The Daily Voice. We continue to produce the weekly television show This Week in Louisiana Agriculture, now in its 37th year on the air in Louisiana.”
