Published Sep 14, 2017

How to Listen to Podcasts

By Nick Ohde

Did you know that PFI has a podcast?

Our first season just wrapped up – our first podcast is called On-Farm: Conversations with Practical Farmers – and we have 17 episodes available. Basically, these episodes are a 45 min – 1 hour conversation between me and a PFI member. This year, we focused on people who hosted field days, so if you missed a field day that you wish you hadn’t missed, you might be able to find a pretty in-depth conversation with the host on the podcast.

But let’s take a step back. Do you listen to podcasts? Have you heard a lot about them but never really thought they were for you? Ok well if you’re in that boat, and like listening to the radio, you should probably get into podcasts. You can listen to pretty much any radio show for free in podcast form at any time.
Also, you can listen to many, many more podcasts that aren’t available on the radio. Like ours. (Ok, you could actually listen to our podcast on the radio on KHOI 89.1 FM in Ames and Story City on Saturday mornings at 9 AM, but we’re done with new episodes for the year).

How to Listen to Podcasts

Don’t have a smartphone? You can still listen – go to our podcast page, practicalfarmers.org/podcasts, and you can listen to individual episodes there.
Do you have a smart phone? If so, then the process is easy.

 

 
iPhone:
You open the Apple Podcasts app (it looks like this):
apple pod
When you open this app, you’ll see a search option at the bottom right corner of your screen. There you can search for whatever podcast you’d like, including “On-Farm”. But to make it easy, you can just click this link, and it will open your Apple Podcasts app to the On-Farm page. Our logo looks like this:
onfarm
There should be a button on that page that says Subscribe. If you click on that, new episodes will show up on the feed of your Apple Podcasts app. This means that you can check for new episodes of your favorite shows at anytime just by opening the app – they’ll be organized under the My Podcasts part of your app.
Android: 
There are many podcast apps, but probably the most popular is Stitcher (you can download it on iPhone too). There are a couple apps that you could use. The first is called Stitcher. You can download that from Google Play store.
play store
It should look like this:
stitcher
In Stitcher, search for On-Farm and click the plus sign (+), that’ll add it to your Favorites List. Now go to the Favorites List.  You can have it download new episodes by clicking the gear in the upper right corner. Ready to go!
From the play store, another option would be Google Play Music. Go back to the Play Store and Add the Google Play Music App
google play music
Open Google Play, click search icon in upper right-hand corner. Here you can search for On-Farm. When you find the On-Farm logo under the podcast section, click it to open all episodes. From here you can scroll down and play any episode you’d like to hear or you can click the 3 dots under the logo and select subscribe. You will see a menu box open with options to auto-download, notifications, and playback order. Set these to your preference, helpful tip, if you select auto-download you will download episodes when on a wifi connection to listen at another time with your having to stream them. This is helpful when listening in an area with poor signal.
Once you get this figured out, check out the podcasts of some of our members and friends (and some that I’ll surely miss). Let me know if you have a podcast we should be aware of!
Farmer to Farmer (Chris Blanchard)
Conservation Chat (Iowa Learning Farms)
Thanks,
Nick (Host of On-Farm)