CASE STUDY
British Farmer & Grower – NFU Publishing
The Client:
​
NFU Publishing is the publishing arm of NFU Mutual, one of the UK's leading rural insurers and the home of the National Farmers' Union. Their flagship title, British Farmer & Grower, is the primary editorial voice for farmers and agricultural professionals across the UK - a title with significant reach, a complex advertising operation, and a production challenge unlike almost any other magazine ATG has worked on.
The Brief:
British Farmer & Grower is not one magazine. It was seven at the time - seven regional editions (now further consolidated to four), each of varying pagination, each carrying a majority of shared national editorial alongside a regional section specific to its geography. Advertising adds a further layer of complexity: some campaigns run nationally across all seven editions; others are bought for specific regions only.
The brief was to find a way to produce, flat plan, copy-chase and manage all seven editions simultaneously - and to make the resulting workflow transparent and usable for both editorial and sales teams at NFU.
What We Did:
ATG developed a bespoke production methodology capable of flat planning all seven regional editions in parallel, with shared national content handled centrally and regional sections managed independently. The copy-chasing process was rebuilt around this structure, ensuring advertising placed nationally or regionally was tracked accurately across every edition.
​
The solution was integrated directly into ATG's PageTrak system, giving NFU's sales team real-time visibility of available advertising space across all seven editions — so they can see exactly what is available to sell, in which regions, at any given point in the production cycle.
​
The final piece was a CMS integration. NFU Publishing uses a custom-built editorial CMS, and ATG developed an automated link between that system and PageTrak — enabling editorial content to flow directly from NFU's CMS into ATG's production workflow, and designed pages to be returned automatically, removing a significant volume of manual file handling from both teams.
​
The Outcome:
What began as a genuinely complex brief - seven simultaneous editions, mixed national and regional advertising, a bespoke CMS - is now a managed, repeatable, transparent production process. NFU's sales team can see live space availability across all editions without contacting the production team. Editorial content moves between systems automatically. And all seven editions go to press on schedule, every issue.
​
It is, frankly, one of the more technically demanding production challenges ATG has taken on - and one of the projects we're most proud of.