Acres USA and The Sustainable Farming Movement From The Soil Up
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're excited to welcome back Ryan Slabaugh and Jorge Abrego for another podcast at Barn2Door HQ. Ryan and Jorge share the origin story of ACRES USA and the mission they have pursued ever since.
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Rory: 0:26
Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. We have a great conversation for you today with the ACRES USA team. ACRES is North America's oldest publisher on production scale, organic and sustainable farming for the last five decades their mission has been to help farmers, ranchers, and market gardners grow organically, sustainably without harmful or toxic chemistry. So I'm delighted to welcome ACRES general manager and publisher Ryan. As well as their advertising director, Jorge. So could maybe first you guys both talk about kind of what your guys' roles entail at ACRES.
Ryan: 1:01
Sure. I'm the general manager publisher, which I guess. It means I do whatever needs to get done that day.
Jorge: 1:06
Yeah, and I'm the advertising director. And so I primarily work with our partner clients who want to actually get close to and connect with our audience. And so big part of what I do is just really help facilitate that connection through the different media channels that we have.
Rory: 1:21
So for some listeners who may not have heard of ACRES, which isn't a whole lot of people, especially in the farming industry, but could you first maybe talk about how the organization started and some of your history?
Ryan: 1:32
Absolutely. A lot of people in farming are familiar with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and our founder, Charles Walters that really inspired him when he read that book. He was an economist at the time, which kind of is in a unique position for a farming company to be started by an economist. He was really challenged by the federal and national USDA model. That was Post-World War II, which was a one using a lot of industrial chemicals that were really unproven or certainly not really known of what their exposure in the food supply would be for our health. And then secondly, the super farm model that the USDA was really promoting overall, which said we're going to create one big farm in every county. And that would basically convert family farmers to workers and they would lose their ownership of their land. And so, when one of the large farming unions decided that that would be what they would support. He broke part of that and helped create the National Farmers Union, which really advocated for family farmers and sustainable farming overall. Before that, he started ACRES USA and one of the things that he needed as an economist was really the base level science to really understand how do we farm, and what is the connection between soil health and human health? As he traveled the country, everybody kept mentioning this name, Dr. William A. Albrecht, and as he learned, and this is before internet it's 1971, and before you can look things up, the phone book was just your town. But he figured out that Dr. William Albrecht was was a retired professor, still holding office hours at the University of Missouri. So he just drove up there one day. And when he walked into Dr. Albrecht's office, he saw another gentleman sitting there named Neal Kinsey. And William A., Albrecht turned to Charles and Charles smiled and Albrecht said, you must have grown up in Kansas. And Charles Walters asked him, how do you know that I grew up in Kansas? And Albrecht said, because you got good teeth. And one of his fundamental eight things that he was able to prove was the connection between soil health and human health through the dental records from World War II, which had cavities he had done soil health testing around the country to understand calcium levels in the soil and when he laid those two maps on top of each other, they matched. Those with heavy calcium in the soil, didn't have cavities. Those that did not, did. It seems really simple today, but at the time that was a pretty big breakthrough to prove that our farming practices actually do have a direct connection or the soil that we're farming actually does have a direct connection to the humans who are eating the food that's grown there.
Rory: 3:35
Wow. That's incredible. Could you maybe kind of talk about how the mission of ACRES has changed, like I said, in the intro five decades that you guys have been around this year actually.
Ryan: 3:45
It's our birthday. Yeah, exactly. Well, the guy who was sitting in that office with Albrecht, Neal Kinsey, he's a good example. Neil ended up becoming one of our fundamental authors and teachers over the next 50 years. And how the movement grew up is pretty phenomenal. You know, again, there wasn't really a big choir of people in the US, or the world talking about sustainable health, eco agriculture, organic farming, all these terms are fairly modern overall and how we use them today and how we define them. Neil just got back from the Ukraine, where he just got a contract to work with an a million acre farm there and implement the Albrecht soil science program across a million acre farms. Neil started as his company there, again there was no fertilizer companies that were doing weren't doing it. They were, they're all water-based fertilizer companies very heavy, toxic pest control. And weed control in Neil was out created his own company to help offset that and teach farmers. His test farm was 65,000 acres in the Ukraine and it worked and they called him and said, Hey, everything you said that was going to happen happened. And so they brought him back and again, that's a country that seen the NPK farming formula start to fundamentally diminish returns year in year, they've seen the graphs and charts. They're still getting some small gains, but they used to get 10% gains every year. Now they're getting 0.1% gains. They know where that graph is going, and that's going to be diminishing returns in long run. So they have to change their system. They're open to it and the Neil's helping them. The world is starting to open up to these concepts and I think the consumers as well are becoming so much more educated today about what is involved in the food supply and maybe some things they don't like about it.
Rory: 5:06
You brought up eco agriculture, which is kind of a unique idea that Charles Walters kind of started, and you touched on him being an economist at one point. Could you maybe kind of go into ecoagriculture and explain what that is and, and how that's unique to ACRES?
Ryan: 5:19
Yeah, we appreciate the chance. Yeah, we really define it. Not just ecology based agriculture, but economic based agriculture. One has to be in the other, right. I mean, sustainability is not just about having multiple generations or in an income on the farm and that the land continues to give back more than you put into it. And I think those are the two fundamentals that perhaps we got away from when we looked at our monoculture conventional systems and the quick gain and that's, you know, human nature, right? We're always going to look for the shorter way, the quicker way to do it. But sometimes we realize that shortcut hurts, so I think that's our role is to help, not rescue farmers, but certainly help those farmers that want to find a different way and see different ways to give them a soft spot to land. And I think that's where our partnership with Barn2Door really plays in, is you guys are creating an economic space for them to play that didn't exist before. And it goes down to, you know, what Jorge and I were talking about is really that farm ownership, getting, making sure farmers own their business and have a chance to own their customer base as well. And that's such a fundamental in every other industry and we're trying to get that back into farming.
Rory: 6:14
People often think of their farmer is just the person that provides their food. Like they think of just the single product or a couple of products that a farmer provides. But it's much more than that. They're cultivators of the land. They're having an impact on their communities with what they're feeding them and how they're raising their, products. And I think for us, like you said, that's, we want people to think of them, not just as a product, but as a small business, which is obviously a huge part of America, millions of small businesses. Jorge, could you maybe talk a little bit about how ACRES has kind of adapted and adjusted? Like we said, 50 years that's a super long time and things have changed a lot and especially in terms of how people consume media and things like that over that time.
Jorge: 6:52
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think one of the biggest things that we've seen over the last probably 20 plus years now is as the way in which we can deliver information obviously has morphed in so many different ways. Even though we're still at our core, a publisher of information, publishing and just the word publishing has taken on a different connotation because it doesn't necessarily just mean a magazine. Sure a magazine is still part of our content delivery mechanism, but a bigger part of it is that now we can disseminate content through so many different means that 20 years ago we couldn't do, right. So we've got a website, EcoFarmingDaily.com, which is our farmer facing content delivery that's a vehicle that enables farmers to now be able to really stay in touch on a much more up-to-date manner, we've got a weekly e-newsletter that goes out and of course we have all these spread events. And so essentially we're really a content brand that has these different channels by which we can disseminate the information. And one of the things that's really been interesting for us to see is just like everybody else that's out there in the world, farmers are no different. So it's important for us to remember that we have to figure out ways to continuously bring ways to educate, to empower, and to encourage the farmer. And that takes different forms of content, whether it's long form articles, whether it's news driven kinds of pieces of research, or just things that are that are just changing rapidly, to be able to deliver them in a way that the farmer can actually consume them and then actually put them into practice right away.
Rory: 8:15
Yeah. And I think something that we talk about here in terms of the content that we put out is making it super consumable for farmers, because farmers never seem to have a whole lot of spare time around. So that's one way the ACRES has kind of had to adapt to that too and make it convenient for farmers to consume what you guys are putting out?
Jorge: 8:32
That's a great question. And in fact, one of our more popular forms of disseminating information, is the podcast. We've all known that as a content delivery way it's really become popular in different segments in our market. It's called tractor time, because it allows the farmer to take advantage of that tractor time. It's a monthly program that we have and it's to date the single most listened to podcast in the agricultural industry.
Rory: 8:54
Yeah. I've listened to a few episodes. Barn2Door also does a feature on that with some of our different spotlights for farmers. It's a great resource for farmers as well as hear some of those spotlights too it's a great podcast. So I know events in terms of how you guys are putting things out, events have been a big part of what you guys do every year. Obviously the last year has kind of thrown everybody a whole curve ball in fact, all of our conferences have been virtual, and I know you guys do a whole different, like there's a whole scale and range of events that you guys have been doing. So how has that kind of been adjusting those and pivoting to make those still work and make them accessible to farmers?
Ryan: 9:29
That's a good question. I hope they still work. The mission is not to have an event. Honestly, the mission is education and farming. And I think that challenges us as much as anything last year. You know, how do we accomplish the mission without the fundamental tool that we used to have with us? You know, this is where our team back in Greeley, Colorado were just phenomenal that you know, no complaints and it was just, let's go figure this out. And we dove in and we were able to get, you know, 70 to 80% of our average attendance from our in-person events who converted over to our virtual events. And that was a big win for us, you know, last year when, when you start from zero and no expectations of what was going to happen the community certainly rallied. And again, that just reinforced that the mission is still critical, right? That they still need to connect with each other and they still need to connect with information. But I think the big takeaway is the why. And I think that's generally why we're so excited to be back in person this December, fingers crossed that we all can manage this Delta variant and get back to Cincinnati. It'll be in December 6-9th. And when we're there together, we're really going to focus on the why as much as anything because of how A, how much has changed in the last year and a half. How much we've talked about human health through very limited aspects. Overall, we have an opportunity to expand that conversation beyond just preventative, how not catch a disease I should say. But more into how do we restore the values across our country and expand that conversation that, okay. we, hopefully one day we'll be able to put the mask down, but are we picking up healthy food in its place, and we have access to healthy food more importantly. So many people in our country and our world don't even have the choice to eat healthy food. And so I think those are the two things that I really don't believe in a sea change anywhere in social movements, but I do believe. We've certainly seen the dial move in the last year and a half with our conversation about what human health is, and what makes healthy food supply. We certainly saw that disrupted quite a bit last year, and it made people recognize the value of that local farmer.
Rory: 11:09
What other kinds of virtual elements that maybe things you kind of stumbled upon because of the situation in the last year that you're looking to carry on going forward?.
Ryan: 11:17
That's a good point. I think you know, certainly those webinars were really successful and I think that's a really great chance for people to stop in a more edible way, for lack of way to put it, you know, within, get something in a half an hour, an hour and digest versus the big events where it really is a commitment to be there all day or for multiple days and to travel. So certainly we saw that it just opened up access to our information. When did go virtual we had people who had never been able to attend our events, get the ACRES USA experience and, we're able to tell us. And that was just a wonderful thing to hear that they'd always wanted to go. And we finally gave him that opportunity. So I think that the key for our team is that we keep expanding the ability, like you said, to have access to what our mission is. And we, we always say, if somebody doesn't like what we do, it's rarely the content it's most of the time, the delivery vehicle. So that's what we are always trying to find is the right delivery vehicle to deliver this message and that information.
Rory: 12:05
Yeah. On the other end of that, you guys have been able to do some on-farm intensives which I think this is a really cool idea. That is a great way to be able to appeal to any way someone likes to learn with any of the five senses they can do it at a on farm intensive. Could you maybe talk to people about what those are, how they work and maybe even how they could attend one?
Ryan: 12:23
Yeah, absolutely. We just started our first one with Gary Zimmer on his farm in Wisconsin and Lone Rock, Wisconsin. He's the author, The Biological Farmer and longtime instructor within our company. He and his daughter are starting a new consulting company, but he runs a wonderful farm up there. And so we were able to bring about 30 farmers into his farm to spend two days learning soil health, management practice, basically how to prepare your fields for your soil health program. And then also looking at kind of what could you do once you get your system built and start to running? Both from, you know, livestock integration, dairy industry, to permaculture, to advanced cover cropping techniques where, you know, Gary is harvesting his rye and turning it into a distilled rye whiskey, and those types of things that you that can get into the economic aspect of how do you get your cash crops paid for. Or excuse me, it's cover crops paid for, but I think that overall is when we have a farmer on a farm teaching farmers, it doesn't get any effective than that. To transition the information and pass it, books are wonderful. Magazines are wonderful. Our conference is wonderful, but we know, and this isn't me saying, this is all the farmers in our community saying, when we ask them, how do they want to learn and where do they want to learn? It's on a farm, which kind of makes sense, if you're gonna learn how to play football, you're not going to go to a tennis court.
Rory: 13:30
Yeah. I kind of, along with that you talked about like, that's the way they prefer to learn. What are some of the things that farmers have reached out to you guys a lot about in terms of what they want to be learning about, especially in the past year?
Ryan: 13:42
So much comes down to um, how I start? When a farmer is trying to get off the commodity market, and I know you guys work with a lot of those types of farmers, and then there really is a life-changing moment, you know, Will Harris will talk about that. When you know, he led White Oak pastures with his daughter. They have 180 employees now and, that's not where they started. They started in the commodity market, and very few employees and a lot of labor per person and a lot of hard work. And now you know, it's a very diverse operation and he's like I said, 180 employees, what farmer wouldn't love to have that level of support and be able to afford that to run their operation. So that independence is coming back into farming. So lots of questions, how do I make sure I can own the farm, and my kids can own the farm? Secondly this next generation coming in, just like any generation doesn't want to do it the way the parents did. Right. And we're at the benefit of the parents being mostly conventional farming industry. And so when you have the new mindset coming in and they want to do things differently, that's where we find a lot of farmers at our conference who are looking for an alternative. So I think a lot of the, how do I transition? How do I have those conversations with those types of folks who are maybe mandating a system that isn't as effective as it used to be and how to make change happen.
Rory: 14:41
So we're getting into some recommendations here because I know the bookstore is a big part of what you guys do. So who are two or three of the most prolific authors that you're excited about right now? And then could you maybe talk about why they are?
Ryan: 14:53
Oh boy, you're going to get me in trouble with all my authors with that question. I might talk about a couple of the books we're working on right now and that we're going to come out with. Paul Dorrance has been, he spoke at your event actually. So we're gonna come up with his first book this year. And we're really excited about that. He's been speaking at our conferences and events for three or four years. He's a really thoughtful teacher and educator in the farming space, and we're really excited to get his first book out there. It's pretty much a workbook that's going to be focused, kind of to help farmers craft their plan and their vision, for their transition into a new farming system. We've got a book by Andre Leu that a lot of our community would be interested. He's an Australian rancher. Who is the international director for regeneration international. Which has really focused on helping farmers in on the policy level, helping governments fund the regenerative farming movement. We haven't found as a real manual, the practices that we're talking that the regenerative farming movement is trying to implement. And so what we asked Andre to do was write those. And so we got a book coming out from Andre to clear the book and we're sending it to the printer. So it's a big, big day in our world, but that book will be available very shortly. And it's called Growing Life. And it's really the focus on regenerating farming and ranching, so it's hopefully going to be a fundamental manual that it really any non-profit advocate or farmer who wants to do this should read. And then the last one you might like we got a collection of interviews that we've published for the last 50 years, in our magazine that kind of in the centerpiece of our magazine. And we decided for our 50th anniversary to go back and choose some of the best interviews from Phil Callahan and Charles Walters and Albrecht, and Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture and the Elaine Ingram, you know, the founder kind of the promoter biology in the soil and even Vandana Shiva and and her work around the world. So those are the ones that we're working on. I guess to be to highlight one book that I would say is is kind of the core of our audience or two books would be Neal Kinsey's Hands On Agronomy. That was written in the late nineties and has been updated four or five times. He's working on a fifth edition now for us to update that. And Gary Zimmer's the biological farmer. Those are 400, 500 page books that I have never found anywhere that really capture not just what they do. And they're very different. You know, Neal Kinsey is very much a chemistry first and Gary is very much a biology first. And so they're there depending on what your opinion is, your philosophy, you can, you can find what you want in those books, but they're going to last another a hundred or 200 years and the practices in their work they're very based on case studies. It's not just, here's what I do. It's, here's what I've learned through of all these different farmers. And so those are two books that rarely let people down.
Rory: 17:07
Yeah, that's good to know I also got a little sneak peek there into the book of the week, but I'll keep an eye out for when some of those come up. So we work with a lot of farmers on. All ends of the spectrum. Sometimes we're working with farmers that are kind of just starting out. And so I was wondering what would be a great book recommendation for a farmer who's maybe just starting their farm business and getting started?
Ryan: 17:26
It's a great question. Marty Travis have called My Farmer, My Customer that we really appreciate. And it really is that, Marty Travis might be another good success story that I share with you, he runs a farm called the Spence farm in Illinois it was a family farm he inherited it. He was actually a wicker furniture maker for many years, or shaker furniture maker, excuse me. And he did the Macy's day rocking chair parade for Santa Claus, if you're ever wondering. Yeah, that was Marty, Marty, Travis, his claim to fame, but he he got tired of it. He yelled at me. He was like, I'm tired of having building things for rich people's discretionary income is really what he felt like his patient was. And he was sitting on this farm. And so he converted his family farm over to become a sustainable family farm. Not only that, he built a co-op around it with about 30 different farms. Now in the region that all worked together to serve the Chicago restaurant market. And now he's expanded it where he's got a hundred farms around the country that he's found the top growers to help serve the Chicago market and provide a boutique market for some of the growers around the country to serve as well. So he's one who again, thinks differently. It looks different than he wrote a book called My Farmer, My Customer, that kind of outlines how he did all that and really, focused on who your customer is and he wanted to change it from that grain elevator buyer to the best restaurateurs in Chicago. So he's got some of the best chefs there, and he sits down with them once a year with a seed book and says, what do you want me to grow? And they get to circle things in the seed book that he goes back to his co-op and it gets them to grow and they have to figure it out.
Rory: 18:47
Very cool. I know a lot of chefs kind of love that challenge too. I think more and more people are finding these different variations of products or produce. So we do work with a lot of livestock raisers and I'm sure that's a very large portion of your guys' audience. Could you maybe go into , some of the things you guys are diving into in relation to them and maybe some of the climate change aspects that they're kind of confronted with, right now?
Ryan: 19:07
Boy, they're having a hard time aren't they right now of being blamed for a lot of what's happening in the world right now is getting put on a cattle farmers and that's fundamentally wrong. Certainly there's bad practices in every industry that are contributing to climate change. You can't take livestock out of that, but when we look at the ability for small farmers to earn money with livestock, I think that's been really the challenge for them, but we know, you know, to your point that cattle are essential to restoring our land. And so when we've got a dilapidated land, we need inputs into it and you can either go to the store and buy those inputs, or you can create animals on your land to create those inputs. And I think that's, it's a different type of mindset of how we're using animals on the land. But I think it's one that, millennia, we were adopted too, right. That you would have a cow and a chicken and a goat, or a few chickens, ultimately, you know, and that would be kind of be part of the farm, even if you were a cash crop farmer. And the other thing I think we fundamentally know is it, if consumers put the same expectations on how they manage their own land, as they did on farmers, We'd probably accelerate that that's not just farmers that need to stop spraying stuff on their properties. So I think some of it's the mindset of consumer supporting, you know, beef farmers. And it does irk us when we hear celebrities, virtue signaling. I hate to say it by owning the cattle industry without really understanding what they're saying or what they're doing to a lot of family farmers. When they say that, that it, it hurts us. It does.
Rory: 20:21
What would maybe be some resources that that you guys have available that if somebody wanted to read up more on that, or kind of look into that more that they could go to?
Ryan: 20:28
Nicolette Hahn Niman's book or Neiman's book Defending Beef is a great one that we carry. We didn't publish that book, but we carry, it, and it's a good defense of that.
Rory: 20:36
Awesome. That's great to hear. Well, and then I know you guys just did a whole podcast on the upcoming Eco Ag Conference, but could you maybe just give a brief overview of kind of what you're going to be diving into in that where it is?
Ryan: 20:47
Yeah, it's our 50th anniversary for acres USA. So we're really hoping to bring back the community this year to connect, network, and share best practices. Just like always, but with a little extra vigor this year, after a one year lay off last year. We're going to be in Cincinnati, Ohio, December 6th through 9th you can learn about that at EcoAg.AcresUSA.com and registration is open for that.
Rory: 21:06
So maybe just briefly to kind of wrap things up, what do you guys see as kind of up next for ACRES in terms of maybe new areas you guys want to conquer or new projects you're working on? What's what's coming up next?
Ryan: 21:18
Well, that's a great question. We want the next 50 years to happen, you know, at this point. We've gone through a lot of change the last four or five years to both digitize a lot of our content and move that. And we see you certainly see the importance to make sure again, we talked about it's rarely the content, it's the delivery mechanism overall, and to make sure that. You know, when we survey people and ask them how they want to learn, everybody wants to learn every different way. Right. So we have to continue adapting and making sure we haven't created false limitations for people to have access to our information. At the same time we see great opportunities to grow with key partners, like Barn2Door. When Charles first started this there weren't too many people out there that we could share the vision with and share a goal for what farming could be or should be and March that direction. But you know, 50 years is a short amount of time geologically speaking, but a long time technology speaking. I think we see a lot opportunities with tech partners you know, can we get that done then the next 50 years where we've gone from where the organic farmers and the sustainable farmers keep having to prove our existence in our worth and our value and the reason we're doing it. And can that be flipped and 50 years where that is what healthy food is expected. And that is what our food supply is built on.
Jorge: 22:24
Yeah, no we're so we're always trying to figure out ways to disseminate that content, one of the things that we've done is taking the whole idea of an intensive and taking it to sort of a, an economy of scale, if you will, by scaling it up. So we're, we're doing more and more products like white papers, where we take a specific topic that we can then go really deep on and then make it accessible to farmers by being able to have people download that information. And those kinds of things for us are really important because it helps us to bring those intensive environments to scale. Not everybody can come do an intensive farm event, but we feel like there's so much value in those kinds of things where you can go a lot deeper. And we look forward just coming up with new ways in which we could do that in a more democratic way.
Rory: 23:03
Awesome. I want to extend my thanks to Ryan and Jorge and the entire staff at ACRES USA, at Barn2Door. We are delighted to serve farmers in all 50 states, helping them grow and manage a direct farm business. For more information on ACRES USA. Visit www.acresusa.com. To learn more about Barn2door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm. Go to www.Barn2Door.com/resources. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.