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Barn2Door partners with ACRES USA for Eco-Ag 2021
120 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're excited to host Ryan from ACRES USA for the first in-person podcast at Barn2Door HQ. James and Ryan will discuss what will be in store for the attendees of the upcoming Eco-Ag conference in Cincinnati, Ohio this December.
Show Notes:
https://www.acresusa.com/
https://ecoag.acresusa.com/
https://www.barn2door.com/resources
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Direct Farm Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We'll talk about the four levers for farm success, which are quality, brand, price, and convenience. We'll hear from outside industry experts and producers like you to delight your customers, save time and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
Meet James Mayocco and Acres USA
00:00:26
Speaker
Hey, welcome everyone to the Direct Farm podcast. I'm your host, James Mayocco, COO over at Barnadore. We've got a great conversation for you today with Acres USA. Acres is North America's oldest publisher on production scale organic and sustainable farming.
00:00:43
Speaker
They're celebrating 50 years this year, dedicated to providing farmers, ranchers, and industry professionals with the information and resources to build healthy and resilient operations.
Ecoag Conference Overview
00:00:53
Speaker
This December, Acres is hosting their annual conference and trade show, Ecoag. And I'm super excited that Barnard Org gets to join them this year. Today, we're joined by Ryan from Acres, who's traveled all the way here to Seattle, where we get to meet in person face to face, my first face to face podcast since the pandemic.
00:01:12
Speaker
And so we're talking to you from the Barnador headquarters. So anyways, Ryan, great to see you. How are you doing today? Good. It is amazing to be here, even more amazing than it ever would be based on what you just said. Now, from what I understand, for the last five years, you've been general manager and publisher over at Acres, right? That is Crackstart in 2016.
00:01:32
Speaker
Wow, that's pretty amazing. So how many of those print and web publications have you put out under your leadership? Boy, uh, not enough. I think it would probably be what most people say. Uh, but no, we're, we put out 12 magazines a year and three or four new books a year and a couple of events a year. So we're busy, but we've also done a lot in the five years to really help the previous ownership with the Walters family worked. We're amazing family helped us get started, but they need some help modernizing it overall. So that's what we've been trying to do. And that's where our, uh, partnership with barnadore comes in as well.
00:01:59
Speaker
Well, that's awesome. Books never get old. I absolutely love to have the feel of a book in my hands. I read it actually a hard copy book every night. And it's also so fantastic for taking notes, right? And especially when you're out in the barn, you want to be able to look at something very quickly. Acre is a great resource to get those books that you need to guide you.
Acres and Barnadore Partnership
00:02:16
Speaker
Hey, for our listeners who are joining us today, I wanted to share that Barnadore and Acres USA have been partnering for the past year and a half. And we've been really excited about where this partnership is heading. We've attended many Acres USA conferences in the past, and this year we're excited to work more closely with Ecoag. So really excited. We'll dive into that in a minute. But before we get started, Ryan, can you share just a little bit about Acres USA and kind of a little bit like what your business looks like between being a publisher and hosting events?
00:02:44
Speaker
You mentioned it was our 50th anniversary so it's our birthday all year long but in 1971 we were started by a guy named Charles Walters. He was an economist by trade who worked with and help start the national farmers union to really bring them to national stage to really advocate for family farmers at the time the model that was chosen by the USDA and.
00:03:02
Speaker
you know, many countries around the world was the massive farm model where you have one farm per county, the USA would then fund that farm and generally it would turn family farmers into workers on the farm and not owners of the land. Charles struggled with that on an economic model, both for how do we save the family farmer, but also he fundamentally felt like that was a really bad direction for us to go for national sovereignty as well.
Acres's Origins and Philosophy
00:03:24
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like an economic theory from someone's classroom rather than real life.
00:03:27
Speaker
It was, and they had to, you know, they were a couple test farms that came out in the 60s that failed miserably because, you know, when you try to grow a monoculture crop over an entire county, they just learned that ecologically that was fundamentally impossible to do in a way that the point of the diminishing return happened pretty quickly when you, when you try to scale up at that level. So he helped, he read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1966. For those who haven't read that book, the premise was Rachel had grown up in the Midwest and was used to hearing the birds and the bees and
00:03:55
Speaker
One day just noticed they were gone and that was related to the massive exposure to pesticides, especially toxic pesticides that were out in the environment at the time. And so Charles kind of put two and two together and thought about an ecological model that would support family farmers based, you know, focused on soil health. He didn't have the base level of science or knowledge at the time. And that's when he connected with Dr. William Albrecht at the University of Missouri. William Albrecht was famous for his dental study where he was basically able to link
00:04:20
Speaker
calcium in the soil back to world war two dental records and show where cavities came from or where their calcium was leased in the soil and at the time that was a big breakthrough the first time that we were able to Connect, you know living environment and ecosystems to fundamental human health at some point so William all worked ended up giving acres USA his research catalog to publish and That launched us into what we are today and we still a lot of our authors are now updating our
00:04:45
Speaker
the Albrecht science and that's really what we're challenged to do is to continue updating what William Albrecht put on paper in the 1930s and 40s ultimately. Wow, it's amazing that those truths still are evident today and are just as relevant to the work that farmers are doing with their land.
00:05:02
Speaker
It has been the bedrock, I should say, really has been the underpinnings of this good soil for farmers, right? And you mentioned the importance of just having that diversity, ecological diversity. Boy, I can't tell you that's so well aligned with our vision here at Barnard Door 2. And we're delighted to partner with you guys, especially given that you guys have a strong history and your guys' ongoing commitment to sustainable practices. That's fantastic.
00:05:23
Speaker
Well, let's talk a little bit about, you know, you guys have all these great authors. I've read several of your authors. We had Paul Dorrance here last year working with us, who I know is one of your authors as well. Great people,
Transition to Conferences
00:05:33
Speaker
lots of great knowledge, great publications, but for everyone who's not reading a book, you guys also have conferences where they get to meet these types of farmers in person, right? Tell me a little bit about that before we shift over to Ecoag. But just thinking about conferences, you know, what prompted that shift from just being a publisher to being also, you know, a conference organization?
00:05:52
Speaker
A good question, because I think it's fundamental to the movement that happened. When Charles in the mid-70s realized he didn't have a choir at the time, and there really wasn't a connected network of soil health farmers, organic farmers, or sustainable farmers, whatever word you want to use, there wasn't a word for it at the time. So he invented the term eco-agriculture at the time to help connect these folks. And as he traveled around the country, he noticed that there were a lot of them. And you know, from the Amish and Mennonite communities to southern plantation farmers resisting the BT crop systems that they were being to the
00:06:20
Speaker
You know anti you know really at the time it was two four d and d d t products that were you know around and it was. Kind of a common sense point to a lot of community that he was looking at that just didn't want everything to do with that so he brought together nineteen seventy six for the first time. I'm kansas city and called the conference and that.
00:06:37
Speaker
Really became the first. Regular group of people to attend and start to share these best practices and out of that. Got a Neil Kinsey came out of that. He was one of the early authors. He was also one of the last students of Dr. William Albrecht. And he started as a agronomy company at our conference into the eighties when you had Dr. Lynn Ingham talking about her first biology in the soil. It was so chemistry driven before that people walked out of our conference because I just
00:07:00
Speaker
just didn't want to believe it. And then in the 90s, you had the first talk of Lee Fryer standing up at our conference and going, what if we created a certification for you guys? And we called it the organic certification for the US. And that was in 1996, announced at our conference. And in 2000, we adopted the first organic certification rules in the US.
00:07:17
Speaker
We always like to think we've been helping lead the movement along, and it really comes from those family farmers who just think differently and want to farm differently. Wow. And I think I read the other day that 20% of farms now in California are organic, which is amazing to think that this was just an idea 20 years ago. And here we are thinking about the downstream impact that's having in terms of health, in terms of our climate, in terms of just our society. It's just huge. So really well done to Acres.
00:07:45
Speaker
For me, learning more about that just makes me even more committed to working with you guys as partners given our shared vision for improving the lives of people and improving the life of our planet too. Let's talk a little bit about ECOWAG specifically, right? So you just shared with us a little bit about the history behind getting started with conferences.
Highlights of Ecoag 2023
00:08:04
Speaker
This year is obviously super exciting because everybody's coming out of lockdown.
00:08:08
Speaker
So for our listeners who would be very keen on attending and getting back out, you know, and meeting people face to face, hearing about all these great ideas, share the details about Ecoag for 2021. Well, thank you. We really missed not having it last year during the pandemic. It was the first year ever since we started that we weren't able to have it. So we are officially overdue for the first time for a conference and we are excited to see everybody. So we can't share enthusiasm enough and we really want to make sure that we get as many people as there to celebrate
00:08:36
Speaker
the community and the networking as well as the learning and education that's at the core of the mission, but this year especially it's going to be about seeing our friends again, seeing our peers again, and one of the takeaways from our conference is always to re-energize the movement, that we really want to send the farmers back with an understanding or a re-confirmation of why they're doing it. It's not easier to grow these ways and to use these tactics and it does take a sense of community and a sense of why to get there and that's what we're hoping to
00:09:03
Speaker
Bring back this year with as much enthusiasm as we can we'll be in cincinnati ohio december sixth through ninth you can learn more eco act dot acres usa dot com. I go there and we'll be continuing updating will have a lot of our core author paul dornes will be speaking again you mentioned him we're actually releasing his new book at conferences here so really excited about that we'll have a new book from a guy w joe louis there who's a long time entomologist.
00:09:24
Speaker
down in Georgia who really proved, he was the first one to prove how bull weevils and wasps work together and share signals and bull weevils actually called wasps and wasp will learn to kill the bull weevil on a plant and a really interesting researcher that we'll have and we'll have his book there. And we'll also have some
00:09:40
Speaker
amazing farmers. Will Harris and Jenny Harris from White Oak Pastures is going to be keynoting our conference this year. We're going to have Rick Clark who's a really pragmatic former conventional farmer who's transitioned and is still transitioning and he gives a really compelling presentation on that. One of our keynotes is going to be Fred Provenza. He's pretty common in our audience and not just a wonderful human being
00:10:00
Speaker
all the way around and really to connect the nourishment side of the equation and a lot of the research he's been doing is on really the energy feedback that we get as human beings and how to create healthy humans and food's a part of that but I think people might be able to learn how food's connected to other things like happiness and energy levels and communities and even national security at some level.
00:10:20
Speaker
I absolutely believe it. I'm a fundamental believer in everything you just said. It's just so important you are what you eat at the end of the day. And I'm excited. That whole lineup sounds incredibly exciting. I think the one speaker you mentioned that gets me excited is Will and Jenny Harris from White Oak Pastures. Talk about somebody who has been committed for a lifetime to fantastic practices, but also somebody who's shown that you can build an incredible business by, again,
00:10:48
Speaker
helping to educate the market about the value of their product and how well it's going to make them. Talk to me a little bit about, like, you know, when you think about the attendees coming to this conference, for somebody who's never been, what should they expect when they arrive? I've been at a conference and the Ecoag conference is a little different than what most people would think of another farming conference. Let's talk about the, you know, what it looks like to be at an Acres USA conference.
00:11:10
Speaker
It's an interesting question. We have a very unique audience overall, like you said. And it really starts with that diverse mentality that they bring. And so we will have young folks who are really revolutionaries trying to change the world through soil health. And we will have Amish and Mennonites who are doing it because God called on them to farm this way. And those groups are able to have really logical common sense conversations about chemistry and biology in the soil and farming practices.
00:11:36
Speaker
That is the energy that we love if you see me at the conference you might see me in the corner just with my arms crossed across my chest smiling for a second and that's probably me just taking it in the buzz that's there and that's really how we measure the experiences that the networking and the energy that's going on in the hallways between our sessions and we know our speakers have a lot to do with energizing that but it really is the people that attend that make our show and why it's so important that we get everybody there this year.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really special experience for those of you who have not attended an AcresUSA conference. I highly recommend this one. I will be there personally in attendance as well, along with many of my colleagues from Barnador and farms that we work with. Because this is a conference that I think brings together the best in everybody in terms of their commitment to soil health and to good farming practices.
00:12:25
Speaker
But also people who are also bringing a willingness to share those best practices, to share that information and pass it on or pay it forward. You know, prior to getting set up for recording, talking about how it may not be uncommon to see somebody who's standing there with dreadlocks standing next to, you know, a Mennonite with their children in tow. And how cool is it to just see that type of diverse audience, you know, again, geeking out about soil health and caring about us so passionately, but also just building a bond out of that experience.
00:12:54
Speaker
I mean, I just think of, we got some new speakers coming in this year, Kamal Bells coming in this year from the Carolinas. And he runs a very small community farm, but he does amazing things to impact his neighborhood. And then we'll also have folks like Nicole Masters who travels the world and works with large, you know, massive farmers. And I can't wait to see those two having a conversation, you know, because I think they're just amazing advocates and world travelers who also really understand the measurables behind what they're doing.
00:13:17
Speaker
So it sounds like again, it's going to be a fully packed conference, you know, this year, and we're delighted to have a chance to partner with you guys at this event. You know, for those of you who are listening, Barnard Door has been again, a partner with Acres USA for the last year and a half. This year, we're going to have a chance to sponsor the pre-conference and bringing together some farmers who have had some great success building a resilient farm business.
00:13:41
Speaker
by bringing the high quality products that they've been producing by employing many of the practices Ryan was just sharing, but then also building a really strong business so they can provide for their family and
What to Expect at Ecoag
00:13:52
Speaker
their communities. And no matter what happens in the economy or in politics or what have you, they're going to be able to, again, have consistency of income, which is really critical.
00:14:02
Speaker
So anyways, we're really delighted to have that chance. Thank you so much for the opportunity to partner with you guys on this upcoming event. Any last words or suggestions or feedback for folks who might be thinking about attending or any other resources they should look at before, before, you know, stepping up and making a commitment to attend the Acres USA Eco-Ed conference.
00:14:20
Speaker
It's a good question. I mean, certainly check us out. There's a lot of wonderful people in the soil health space. If you're wondering how you can build your board of directors for your farm, or if you're looking to make a major change and you need some resources and people to really be your partners, you will find them at our conference. And that is the nature and the spirit of it. And it will be some of the speakers, you know, that our speakers make themselves available after they talk. We do consulting rooms where they just sit in a room with anybody who wants to and talk and work with them.
00:14:45
Speaker
A lot of that continues well beyond our conference once they leave at that point so that's when i know we're being successful as we're not just giving somebody an hour less and we're actually connecting them with. The right people for the rest of their life to help them manage their farm and make the make smarter decisions and and learn generation to generation and.
00:15:01
Speaker
do the things that get hard during a pandemic but we really wanna. I bring that back and get get hard as we get isolated with technology and so it's one of the things that we really. Appreciate about the in person event is is a put the phones down for a second looking at each other in the eye and sharing really good information at that point and that's the two things we really. You know promise you don't get that at our conference call me.
00:15:19
Speaker
And I'll be worried and I really will work with you to make sure we happen and that's the pledge I'll make to anybody that shows to our conferences. If you don't get what you want, we are, we really are concerned about it and we want to help you. And at that note, before I go, I really need to thank the team back in Greeley, you know, Sarah and Rachel and Jorge sitting next to me here and Jessica and Chad and the whole group back at Acres you say that makes things happen. We just want to say thank you for them because they care as well. So if you find anybody at Acres at our conference, let us help you if we can.
00:15:45
Speaker
that you guys have a fantastic team and I can certainly attest to the quality of work that they produce and to the outcomes of that conference. I won't forget a few years back when Joel Salatin had gotten done speaking and sure enough, there he is sitting on the side having conversations with people. Granted, the line was a little long for Joel, but that said, all the farmers are really willing to share their feedback and their honest opinions about things with anybody who's an attendee.
00:16:11
Speaker
Stay tuned for more announcements coming from Barn to Doors regarding the upcoming Acres USA eco-egg conference in December. We're excited to partners with the Acres USA team to sponsor this event where Barn to Door will also bring you the first three hours of content at the eco-egg in a pre-conference event.
Barnadore's Role in Ecoag 2023
00:16:28
Speaker
Thousands of farms will be in attendance this December in Cincinnati. Whether your livestock, dairy, produce operations, farmers just like you will be there to learn tactics and best practices to grow and manage their business.
00:16:39
Speaker
You'll hear some of the farmers that we highlight consistently at Barnadore too, who will be there in person as well. Like Ryan said, they'll be there to answer your questions, share their feedback, what worked, what didn't work, give you the honest truth about what it takes to build a direct-to-market farm business. And you too can then gauge what's best for you, what's right for you in terms of how you want to proceed going forward.
00:17:01
Speaker
I want to extend my thanks again to Ryan and Jorge here and the entire staff at AcresUSA at Barnadore. We're delighted to serve farms in all 50 states, helping them grow and manage their direct business. And we're proud to be partners with AcresUSA and excited to see you all at Ecoag.
Where to Find More Information
00:17:15
Speaker
For more information on AcresUSA, please go to www.acresusa.com. And to learn more about Barnadore, including access to numerous resources, please go to www.barnadore.com backslash resources.
00:17:30
Speaker
Thank you for joining me today and for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Direct Farm podcast.