For Modern Farmer Magazine, a Bad BATNA

In business negotiations, our mistakes sometimes end up affecting not only the current deal, but our best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, in deals that lie down the road. That's a lesson that Ann Marie Gardner, the founder and editor of the hip new magazine Modern Farmer, has learned the hard way. After settling in New York's Hudson Valley, Gardner got the idea of starting Modern Farmer in 2010, Alec Wilkinson writes in a New Yorker profile. The quarterly magazine's aesthetic - artistic cover shots of animals and articles on topics like growing plants for cocktails - attracts the type of urban dwellers who aspire to raise their own chickens rather than actual working farmers. Gardner calls it a "farming magazine for media professionals."