Rodale Press Planting Seeds in the Soviet Union : Perestroika: The U.S. publisher of Organic Gardening is helping start New Farmer for Soviet subscribers. Other publications may follow.

Making sausages isn’t a talent very often associated with success in publishing, but Robert Rodale has found that joint ventures in the Soviet Union at times require unconventional strategies.

His Rodale Press, which puts out such magazines as Prevention, Organic Gardening, Runner’s World and Bicycling, is now planning a fall launch for New Farmer, a Russian-language magazine for 200,000 Soviet subscribers.

Emphasizing organic, or “hygienic,” farming methods, as they are called in the Soviet Union, New Farmer will offer agrarian tips six times a year to “renters,” the entrepreneurial Soviet farmers who have been allowed to break away from sprawling, unproductive state cooperatives.

“There is tremendous potential for great increases in production on reasonably small-sized farms,” Rodale said in an interview, noting that tiny garden plots already yield a vastly disproportionate share of Soviet harvests. “That’s what we’re going to be teaching them how to do.”

Rodale’s partners are Vneshtorgizdat, the tongue-twisting publishing house of the Soviet Foreign Trade Ministry, and the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution State Farm in Kudinova, 40 miles east of Moscow.

Kudinova comes into it because of the 60,000 pigs the farm raises on a diet of Moscow garbage each year. Processed into high-grade salami, the pigs will help pay for New Farmer’s paper and printing.

Rodale, a member of the 1968 Olympic skeet-shooting team, first met the Soviets through athletic competitions in the 1970s. Contacts continued when he got into bicycling and sponsored races at an indoor velodrome he built near his Emmaus, Pa., corporate headquarters.

A Soviet team taking part in one event was being covered by Vasily Senatarov, a journalist who knew some of Rodale’s skeet acquaintances and who later was asked by Vneshtorgizdat to create a farming magazine.

“So he said to his boss,” recalled Rodale, who turns 60 this month, “I know this American, Bob Rodale, who is big in farm publishing. So the two of them contacted me by telephone and more or less urged very strongly, ‘Get the hell over here, we’ve got to do something with farming.’

“They hit me right away with this,” he said of his trip in 1989. “The first thing we’ve got to do is produce salami.”

Despite its ministerial backing, the venture had to come up with a way to pay in dollars or other Western money for glossy coated paper and high-quality printing to be carried out in Yugoslavia. The solution was sausages.

Rodale Press is investing $240,000 in the the venture, called Periodicals, Trading and Service, or PTS. That will cover the purchase of state-of-the-art U.S. sausage-making machines, among other costs.

Half the production will be sold to the Soviet public for rubles. The other half will go on sale in “Beriozka” hard-currency shops and other outlets taking in convertible monies, such as seaports. Of ruble profits, 95% will fund an agricultural-research station at Kudinova modeled after the Rodale Research Center in Maxatawny, Pa.

Rodale hopes Western corporations also will take out ads aimed at the Soviet rural market, yielding more hard-currency revenue.

What’s in it for Rodale Press, a $230-million-a-year business with 1,100 employees? Not a lot--at least initially.

“We’re not going to make much money in this for a long time,” said Rodale, whose nonprofit Rodale Institute promotes agricultural education in Africa and other Third World areas. “There definitely is a possibility we could earn hard currency at some point--but not for five years.”

But the farming journal is just the thin edge of the wedge.

Vneshtorgizdat wants to launch a Russian-language edition of Prevention--”the real moneymaker in this thing,” Rodale said.

With a monthly circulation of 3.1 million, Prevention is the flagship of Rodale’s magazines.

Translations of Rodale books are in the works, and the eclectic publisher envisions running “adventure travel” groups to remote, exotic Soviet regions.

While Rodale is “kind of unique,” as the publisher put it, its experience may offer some lessons for other companies looking to get involved in perestroika --Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s bold restructuring program.

“Definitely you can’t go over there and sell a lot of products and expect to make a lot of money right away,” Rodale said.

“I’m thrilled about this mainly because I like the people,” he said. “I’m very much moved by the change from the Soviets being an evil empire to being potential friends. We just seem to get along.”