Frank Giustra-Financed Magazine Wins Big in NYC

Modern Farmer magazine
Issue No. 4 of Modern Farmer offers up an in-depth exploration of the modern dairy industry and shows how “climate change is turning Russia into prime wine-growing country,” among other topics.

The magazine that B.C. financier Frank Giustra helped get off the ground has won a prestigious U.S. National Magazine Award—this in only its second year of publication

Modern Farmer, a glossy quarterly devoted to exploring “the connections between what we eat, how we live and the planet,” has a print circulation of 100,000 and some 800,000 monthly pageviews online (modernfarmer.com). It was up against stiff competition at the National Magazine Awards, held May 1 in New York City, beating the likes of Vanity Fair, GQ and New York Magazine in the category of best “magazine section.”

The award caught founding editor Ann Marie Gardner by surprise. “I really wasn’t expecting that we were going to win,” she told a reporter at Mashable, one day after the win. “When they announced us, it was like everything went in slow motion and then I had a really long walk up to the stage. It was surreal. This is what it must feel like to be at the Oscars.”

Giustra, who is an equity partner in Modern Farmer through his Fiore Capital Corp., told BCBusiness in an interview last year that the magazine is a perfect fit for him. “The magazine is a timely investment in terms of where my interests are today,” he said of his decision to finance the magazine. “It was a nice coincidence that I found out about this opportunity because it’s an aspect of the food industry that I’m involved with now—about people caring about where their ingredients come from.”

Gardner, who previously helped launch Monocle magazine with Canadian expat Tyler Brulé, publishes Modern Farmer out of Hudson, New York, just north of Manhattan. She will be in Vancouver June 5 and 6 as one of the keynote speakers for the inaugural Slow Money conference.