It provides comprehensive and topical news with Livestock, Arable and Machinery sections; as well as business information and latest market prices.

Based in Preston, Lancashire, it was for many years owned by United Business Media but it, and sister title Pulse, were sold to UK business-to-business publisher AgriBriefing in February 2012 in a deal worth £10 million.

[3] The newspaper started life on 10 February 1844, priced 4½d, as the Preston Guardian,[4] and was founded by Joseph Livesey, the "father" of the total abstinence movement in Britain to support the campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws.

By then it had become a valuable commodity and was sold to local businessman and fellow teetotaller, Councillor George Toulmin JP (father of the journalist, newspaper proprietor and Liberal Party politician George Toulmin (1857–1923)), who owned the paper until 1883.

[4][7] John Boyle O'Reilly, a future Irish poet, journalist and activist in the United States, worked as an apprentice at the Preston Guardian in the early 1860s.