As "Backyard Farmer" enters its 60th year of production, it has something else to celebrate. Ratings for the popular garden show reached an all-time high this year.
May sweeps reached 23,500 households, which was about a 46 percent increase in audience across the state, said Backyard Farmer Producer Brad Mills. The show was averaging 14,000 households since 2007.
"I think people are getting a lot more serious about growing their own food and they want to know how to do that," Mills said. "We've been concentrating on getting people back to their own backyards and getting the most out of their home gardens."
Mills also attributes the ratings to younger people who are buying homes for the first time and then want answers on how to make their surroundings look better.
"The show offers quick, economical and unbiased answers. We've always been able to fulfill those two priorities — growing your own food and making your landscape surroundings more pleasant to the eye as well as conservation and reducing pesticide use," he said.
Mills hopes these priorities will take the show another 60 years.
The show also received a bumper crop of emails, letters, samples and phone calls, Mills said.
It also is the most downloaded UNL program, said EdMedia's Mark Hendricks. In addition, the show has made a splash on iTunesU and YouTube, consistently being in the Top 10 of the science category on iTunes and No. 17 overall on iTunesU -- a distribution system for everything from lectures to language sessions, films to labs, audio books to tours and a way to get educational content into the hands of students and others.
The show also receives thousands of hits on its YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/bucslim.
"It's not just Nebraska anymore, it's going across the country," Mills said.
— Sandi Alswager Karstens, IANR News Service