What Happened To the Canadian Farm Radio Forum?

Abstract

The Canadian listening group project, the Farm Radio Forum, was the subject of great praise in its 25 year history before its demise in April, 1965. The project was established in 1940 because of converging influences through a working agreement between three organizations—the Canadian Association for Adult Educa tion, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. The author has attempted through analysis of correspondence, interviews, and available literature to account for the decline of the project. Three tentative con clusions are: 1. as the sponsoring institutions matured their con cerns diverged more and more, 2. a fully-working field struc ture for organizing and maintaining the listening groups was never established, 3. the groups never become integrated into the Ca nadian national system of institutions or its power structure.