As Last Paid Editors Depart, Modern Farmer’s Future in Doubt

Modern Farmer, the quirky 100,000-circulation quarterly and website that tried to link effete urban farmers’ market culture with the practicalities of actual farming, became a magazine without an editorial staff on Friday, when its remaining paid editors walked out its doors.

With editorial operations suspended, the future of what remains of the Modern Farmer brand is uncertain.

Despite more than a million unique page views a month and support from advertisers like Dodge, Eden Foods and Shinola, the Detroit watchmaker, the magazine’s fate had been in question for months.

In December, the magazine’s founder, Ann Marie Gardner, left. The spring issue was canceled. Ms. Gardner remains in a dispute with Frank Giustra, a hard-nosed Canadian financier who owns a majority of the company.

“It is part of a genre of very niche publications that say one thing we can do is create this beautifully designed artifact,” said the author and magazine veteran Kurt Andersen.

The problem, he said, may simply have been one of audience and execution.

“I don’t want to speak ill of the dying, but what is the plausible audience in such a magazine?” he asked. “It was too kind of nitty-gritty and old-fashioned, back-to-the-land hippie magazine for the food-farm porn market, and yet too ‘What about the dairy situation in the Philippines?’ for people who are really raising chickens for a living.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 24, 2015, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: After Its Remaining Paid Editors Depart, the Future of Modern Farmer Is in Doubt. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

The New York Times