Acres U.S.A.

Today I'm talking with Taylor at Acres U.S.A. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Taylor at Acres USA. Good morning, Taylor. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm great. You're in Wisconsin? Yes. Did Acres USA start in Wisconsin? No. It's...

00:28
It started in Kansas City and then moved to Austin, Texas. And then the company that acquired it from the founders had moved it to Colorado and that's where we ended up buying it from and then moved it to Wisconsin. Okay, cool. All right. So, tell me about yourself and Acres USA because no one who hasn't heard about it probably knows what it is. So, tell me all about it.

00:56
Yeah, well, Acres USA was founded back in 1971 and the founder was Charles Walters, who truly was a visionary and he was inspired by his youth when he was a farmer in Kansas and then he ended up becoming an economist. So he believed from early on that farming had become disconnected from nature and it was becoming destructive to the soil and human health and the environment.

01:25
So through Acres USA, he began to champion the principles of ecological agriculture and published some groundbreaking research by soil scientists, farmers, and thought leaders like Dr. William Albrecht. And then over the decades, Acres USA grew from just a magazine into a full movement. And we published books, host conferences, have digital resources. And the goal is to...

01:53
empower farmers to work with nature and also profit from it. So today we remain committed to Charles Walter's original mission and that's to prove that ecological farming is not only sustainable but also economically sound. And I think that's always kind of a key part of Acres USA is, you know, we talk about ecological principles but we also focus on the economics behind it.

02:23
Is that right? Correct. Okay. How did that happen? Well, that's kind of a long story. That's okay. We've owned it for just over a year now. I grew up in southwest Wisconsin and did not have much agricultural background at all. I always liked land though. My first introduction to land was through hunting.

02:51
And I kind of have a little bit of an obsessive personality. So I was kind of obsessed with hunting and interacting with the land. I became a police officer when I was 20 and that was the first career that I jumped into. I knew, you know, shortly into that, that it probably wasn't going to be able to get me into a position to actually buy my own farm or have my own land to manage myself. So.

03:21
I jumped into the entrepreneurship world, learned about business. When I was 25, I moved back in with my parents and said I was going to make a go of it in the business world. And then two years later, we were able to buy a farm. And while we had that farm under contract, the initial idea was still revolved around farming or revolved around hunting. And I knew I kind of wanted to create a.

03:49
a media company that talked about managing land and interacting with land because I did love – I've always loved just interacting with land and manipulating it and doing different things with it. I found Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown and Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard and I got bit by the regenerative agriculture movement and I realized Mark was actually just 20 minutes from me.

04:19
So I started, I probably listened to his book that winter five different times and I would just drive by his farm and try to figure out what all he was talking about in that book. And finally, I just knocked on his door and Mark and I have been working together ever since and Mark is, you know, like I said, the author of Restoration Agriculture which is probably the highest selling book that Acres USA has.

04:49
So I got introduced to Acres USA, bought a ton of books, and that's how I began my journey into regenerative agriculture. My business world from the side had kind of morphed into marketing agencies and working with tech to help business owners create books and courses and events, but it was completely separated from agriculture.

05:17
COVID happened, that business kind of took a little bit of a hit just because the majority of our clients were pretty affected by COVID. So I jumped into real estate, took our agency and began doing more of a local type marketing services and then became a realtor specializing in working with land and helping people find regenerative.

05:46
or find conventional type farms with the plan of transitioning into organic or regenerative type practices. And Mark was always kind of in my ear because I had the experience with books and courses and different things that, you know, he kept pushing me towards this Acres USA idea. So it took about two years and of back and forth and negotiations and we finally acquired it last December. So we've been running it for about a year now.

06:16
And that's how we landed with Acres USA. Wow. That is a lot of pivoting going on there. And I'm assuming you're in your 30s? Yeah, I'm 31. Yeah. That's a lot of things in 10 years. Sorry, not 20 years. Yeah, it's kind of like every different little pivot has led to these different things and put me in a position to...

06:44
where I'm confident we can run a business like this. So every little thing throughout my life has given me either different experiences or perspective to be in a position to do this. Well, I think that's awesome. Not very many people your age have the, I don't know, luck, insight, brilliance to make those pivots to get to the situation that you're in.

07:14
My dog is yelling at me. She'll it doesn't matter. She's always in the background. Um, So I have questions about the actual magazine because as I'm sure you've heard Print is dead, but print is not actually dead. So how there is a print version of the magazine. Yes, correct. Yep, and

07:37
How is it doing? Because I looked at your website and I see that you share some of the articles on the website, but not everything. So how is the print magazine doing? Yeah, the first thing that we did last year was actually get the articles online. So anyone who has a print subscription gets access to the website. It's similar to newspapers that have articles and there is a paywall function. We release four to five articles a month that are free to anyone.

08:07
and then the rest of them are reserved for our subscribers. So we have a digital option along with the print option. If we weren't in this specific niche, I would probably be a little bit more concerned about the print just because yes, in general, the print magazine world is struggling. The paper world is struggling. All of our printers and folks that are in that world, they don't seem to be having a very fun time.

08:36
But we also have a little bit of a unique audience in the sense that our folks do tend to stay a little bit more disconnected from technology. And we have a plain community that is the fastest growing population in our country that only consumes information through print still. So that's part of our big plan to expand that audience.

09:04
while also then giving all the digital offers that come from the magazine. Because the magazine is really a content-making machine, and you're forced to, you know, find these articles, find these stories on a monthly basis. So our goal is just to make sure that we offer those on digital avenues, but then also continue to support the folks who consume things in print. Okay. And how do you find your writers? Are you...

09:33
Are you open to freelance writers or do you have staff writers or how does it work? We have a main editor who works with us, Paul Meyer. And he, well luckily that was a thing that we inherited that was actually moving pretty well. It's a good system. So we have a Rolodex of writers that have written for Acres USA for a long time. So we kind of rotate through them.

10:03
four to five writers that will put a monthly piece together in specific type of areas that we're talking about. But yeah, we have freelance writers that if you ever have an article idea or something you'd like to submit, you can submit it to Paul. His email is editor at acresusa.com. He sifts through those ideas, matches them into the specific months of what we're talking about in the magazine. And if it doesn't...

10:32
hit the actual print. That's also the good thing about the online articles is we end up publishing any type of overflow that doesn't hit the print online. Nice. You have just made every freelance writer's day in saying that because it's really difficult to break into writing for magazines. I have done it. I don't write right now, but I have written for some magazines and trying to get your foot in the door as a freelance writer.

11:00
is a lot of work and a lot of patience and a lot of sad. So I'm really happy that you shared that because one of the things I've learned this past year about homesteaders and farmers and ranchers is they have stories and experience to share. And they don't quite realize that they could share it in a magazine if they knew how to get to it. So hopefully... Yeah. And that's something that we're trying to bring.

11:30
a lot of just farmer type stories. I'd say right now we're publishing a lot more agronomy type columns and we do have a little bit of the high level science where a lot of these articles are even way over my head. But we do want to find those farmers that have a story and also if you mean if you're a freelance writer and you know some of these farmers too, a lot of the time they just need help getting their ideas out of their head and onto paper.

11:59
That's where our editing team comes in handy too, because myself included, I'm no special writer, but I will kind of throw up ideas on a paper and it turns into a nice article. That's because of our editing team. Editors are the miracle of every print, everywhere. Yes. I should have gone to school to be an editor. I am.

12:23
terrible about reading and just being thrown out of what I'm reading because there's something not right in what I'm reading. It drives me insane. Okay. So my podcast is about homesteaders and farmers and ranchers and people who grow things, whether it's plants or animals. And I try to throw in a topic that is adjacent to that now and then because I think it keeps it interesting. And I just, I don't know, I saw Acres USA and I was like, huh.

12:53
That's something I haven't really delved into is a magazine that puts out stories about this stuff that I'm hearing about every day. But it sounds like you're also a publishing company. So what books have been put out? Yeah, we have 127 books that we've published. Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard is probably one of the most widely known ones. We also published...

13:22
the Albrecht series, which Albrecht is kind of the first person that talked about mineral optimization in soil where if we optimize our minerals in the soil, you know, we can accomplish a lot of the same things that we end up doing with synthetic fertilizers without the chemicals. From that, people like Gary Zimmer, the biological farmer, is one of our books that we've published

13:52
a form that's easier for folks to consume in today's age. And we have a laundry list of them. Charles Walters, our founder, obviously was an exceptional writer. I think if anyone sees some clips from our conferences past year, you had Joel Salton breaking down into the tiers just talking about how moved he would be by Charles Walters writing. So his name is on...

14:21
I think 18 to 20 different book titles where he ended up just speaking with some of these farmers and people that were in the ag world doing these things and help them get a book written. So, we publish a broad spectrum of things. Most of it's evolved around ecological farming practices, but we're in the biodynamic world, radionic world, homesteading world.

14:51
you know, 350 titles from either self-published authors or other publications. So our Rolodex of books is pretty large on our site and it's all in the name of organic and ecological farming. Okay. You mentioned radio, radionomic, is that how you said that? Radionics. What is that? I have not heard that one yet. It's kind of a...

15:20
It's a parallel idea, similar to biodynamics. I'm not the person to give you the lowdown on it. We just have these subsets of practices. I think anybody in this world usually finds an avenue that they find themselves in. We try to carry all those different types of ideas.

15:49
Some people might call it a little bit of witchcraft, but I think it's important that if people are getting results from things to allow their ideas to flourish and allow the people who consume that information to try it for themselves, you never know what people can get results with. It's another sub-segment of it's similar to biodynamics. Okay. I'll have to Google it. That's what I'll do.

16:15
at later today. It was a rough weekend around here. I had a terrible migraine all weekend. So I'm just getting my brain back today because when that happens, I have no brain. I'm just like honey, honey, honey, don't talk to me. My husband, it's not going to go well. Just I'm going to go lay down, leave me alone. So later today or tomorrow, I will look up

16:41
It's amazing to me how often Joel Salatin's name comes up with people I talked to on this podcast. I interviewed him back months ago. Fantastic guy. He's, he's so kind, but he's also a wealth of knowledge. And it's so fun to hear other people say that he's been part of whatever they're doing. Yeah. I'm, I mean, he, Acres was the first place that Joel got a start.

17:09
So he was one of our keynotes at the conference. He talked about how the pinnacle for him was, I think it was in 1988, he finally got a chance to speak at an Acres conference. And that's kind of what Acres has been for a lot of these people. They're super well known. They took different paths. Like Joel self-published all of his books, but he always has been a big part of the Acres community. And we kind of brought him back into it once we purchased it.

17:39
Because Joel has a little bit of controversy that surrounds him and, you know, it's not always the worst thing in the world. But his experience and the things that he's done for this movement, you know, it's hard to find someone who's done more. So he's an important part of this movement and he has an important history. He sure does, more important than I think he even wants to claim. He's very humble in a lot of ways.

18:09
When I talked to him, I said, did you ever expect to become this famous? And there was this very self-deprecating chuckle out of him. And he was like, well, no, no, I did not. So I don't think, I don't think any of them did, you know, no one, because we are, we are in a time, you know, for me to have this company now it's easy because these topics are the cool topics to talk about. Well, when these guys came up, they were like the back room secretive type meetings that everyone sucked their nose up at and thought they were crazy.

18:39
So they weren't exactly like the cool thing to talk about all through the 70s, 80s and 90s. Yeah, they were rabble rousers. Yeah, yeah. So we have it easy and I don't think any of these guys thought they would become what they are, but they are. They're in the centerpiece of one of the most important movements we have as civilization. Yes, absolutely. And it's always...

19:04
Like I knew about a lot of this stuff before I started this podcast. I knew a little bit about a lot of this. And as I've talked to people and learned things from them, because it's the best part about having a podcast is I learned so much from everyone who talks with me, is it's so obvious to me that this all makes sense. Because if you work with nature and not against nature, nature is going to provide for you. And

19:31
How we got away from it is just beyond me.

19:36
Well, it was in the name of industrialization and efficiency. People went into the industrial movement in the 40s and 50s. As a society, we went to more of high production driving the economy. In order for us to feed the world without having a large percentage of the people making their own food, this is kind of what came of it.

20:05
And you, you know, if you look at it from the perspective of these farmers is when someone walks up to you after farming for 25 years and they hand you this bottle of magic potion that you pour over your land and all of a sudden your corn crop turns into, you know, double what it used to produce without any information on really the effects of what that is coming from that. You know, any person probably would be easily sucked into that.

20:35
And, you know, I think that's what happened is we pushed – we pushed – well, it became science. It became, you know, chemistry type farming. And, you know, we pushed more yields, more yields, more yields. Unfortunately, the profit thing never got drug with the yields thing. And that cut out a lot of small time farmers and it drove them away from the farm. And it's drove…

21:03
you know, just higher production, lower margin. And you have these giant corporations that are part of that, that are really the ones that are making a lot of the money. Yes, and one of the things that I've been told more than once is that if you wanna be a rich farmer, you need to start rich. Yeah, I...

21:30
Yeah, it's, I mean, that kind of is the way that things are going. But you know, you have to define rich, like what is rich, having a bunch of money in a bank account or actually being, you know, because I feel pretty rich every day when I go out and move my cattle and feel pretty connected to exactly, you know, how our foods are being produced. You know, our family consumes probably about 60% of the food, definitely 90% of the protein.

21:59
that we eat because we have cattle, hogs, and chickens. So I feel pretty rich when I crack open an egg from our chickens versus buying store bought eggs and seeing the difference. I mean, even the high end organic, so to speak, free range eggs, crack one of those open and then crack one that you have on your homestead and it's, you know, I feel pretty rich.

22:24
Yeah, we're feeling kind of poor right now. We got rid of our chickens a couple months ago because they were being lazy and they were getting old and the eggs were not coming in the way they should have been. And my husband was like, I don't want to feed the chickens through the winter if we're getting like three eggs from 12 birds. And I said, that's fine. It's fine. We just get more chickens in the spring. That's why you always have to plan a year ahead. So you get that new flock in the spring and then they start laying.

22:51
right about the right time when your older flock start taking vacation. Uh-huh. Yes. And we didn't do that. And I'm kind of regretting our choice, our life choice regarding the chickens because we hadn't bought store-bought eggs in forever. And I'm sure there are people who really think that store-bought eggs are fine and they're just as good as eggs from your own chickens, but they're not as good. And I'm kind of angry. Not once you get exposed to that.

23:19
Kind of angry about it. We bought four dozen brown eggs from the grocery store and I haven't eaten a single one. I'm just like, no, you guys can have them. I don't want them. I'll go without eggs for a little bit. It's okay. So yeah, eggs come up a lot. Chickens come up a lot on this podcast, clearly, obviously, because chickens are the gateway drug to everything else.

23:45
Chickens are really important. The other thing that's going on right now, as I'm sure you're well aware of, is the bird flu thing that's happening. And I can't believe how expensive eggs are at the grocery store right now too. Yeah, I think my wife had to buy some around Christmas too, just because our chickens weren't producing enough. I think she made some egg bakes. And yeah, I think what organic eggs right now are $6, $7.

24:15
or six dollars a dozen and conventional is like four. So we're not so crazy now asking the prices that the homestead type egg producers ask. Yes, and that's my other life choice regret right now is that we got rid of our chickens just when egg prices spiked. So that was kind of dumb too. But it's okay. We'll get more in the spring. Yeah.

24:44
Chickens are a tough thing to, I mean, you can see it. Chickens are the easiest thing to test out in a type of business model where then you see that you really do need scale to then get in the positive. So I, you know, we've reduced our flock as well just to make sure that we have eggs, but it is a difficult thing to actually create a profitable income from.

25:14
If you're buying all the feed. Yes. The feed was the other reason we got rid of them is because feed has gone up in price so much as well. I hadn't bought chicken food. I hadn't gone and actually bought it in over a year because my husband or my son had gotten it. And the last time I went in to get chicken feed, the guy was like, that'll be $30 for a bag. And I said, excuse me. And he looked at me like I was crazy.

25:40
And I said, the last time I bought a bag of this, it was $20. And he said, when was that? And I said, over a year ago. He said, oh, well, there's your answer. And he wasn't being smart ass. He was just like, things have really gone up in price over the last year. So yeah. Really makes sense because the people who grew that grain have not been having fun because grain prices have tanked in the last two years. So how, how those prices fluctuate.

26:08
That kind of comes back to the example that somebody is making money and unfortunately it's not the farmer. Yes, and that brings me to the dairy farmers who don't make any money compared to what milk costs either. Yeah.

26:28
Yeah, it's a... we're just talking about depressing stuff all this whole episode. That's okay because it's okay though because most people who aren't in the business don't know how all this works. So yeah, dairy is definitely an issue because you have conventional producers. And if you think about a dairy business, I have some firsthand knowledge

26:59
this thing that happens every two weeks or every month where you get paid for the milk. So you have this constant inflow of cash, which any farmer, you know, they're a little bit jealous of because most people who are, you know, if you do beef or hogs or chickens, you know, when you're in the protein world, a lot of the time you have big months of sales and then months without any income coming in. So I can see it from the dairy producer's perspective where it's difficult to give up that constant income that's coming in.

27:29
Even though every time they get paid, if they actually sat down and did the math, you probably paid yourself about $3 an hour. They have such an overhead involved with that, that it's so difficult to get out of that rat race because you've invested a ton of money into the infrastructure and it's not easy just to walk away from that.

27:57
Yes, exactly. And the thing that's, that just drives me baddie is without dairy farmers, without farmer farmers who grow produce without, without these people. We don't eat. And yet all these farmers are, are just getting by. I mean, if they're lucky, then yeah, they're making a profit and they're happy. But from the stories I've heard, that's not really the case all the time. And.

28:27
I suppose that my husband and I could continue growing our 100 foot by 150 foot garden and we could have 20 chickens and we could get a milk cow. I don't really want one, but we can get one and we would eat, but the variety of eating probably wouldn't be very diverse and we would be fine, but it would probably be boring. So it makes me, it makes me bothered that.

28:55
Most people don't understand what is happening behind the scenes of their food. And most people don't care. And that's part of the reason I started the podcast is because I want people to know the behind the scenes stories and how much work it is and how important farmers are. So that was part of the reason I wanted to talk to you because clearly Acres USA is very behind the scenes and very supportive of people who are trying to do this right.

29:26
Yeah, I think it comes down to this. A lot of the financial issues come from not having a say in what you're able to sell your product for. If you think about any other business in the world, it's unlikely that people are creating a business where they essentially have all of this operating type of overhead and then they are not able to name their price at the end to make sure that the business makes money.

29:54
You know, their prices are controlled by something that they have essentially no control over. And that's where Acres has always been in the position where if you do start farming more in the image of nature, then a lot of those things, a lot of that overhead cost then will be reduced. So if you can get 80% of the yield, but your overhead expenses are cut by 80%, you know, what is the actual...

30:23
main goal in the end of the day. It's actually having a profit versus having a yield without a profit. That's what we've always preached and I think that is the future. As fertilizer costs go up, as people become more aware of what that is doing, farming this way is a value-added thing. The more that consumers become educated on it and actually go out and seek and want that value.

30:52
It gives the farmers an opportunity then to start naming their prices and name them at a premium because they deserve a premium. But the cool thing about that is that they're unique in the sense that how they're raising it but they are also then able to charge more with having a little bit of less expenses if they farm within nature's image. So that at the end of the day, then they have bigger profit margins and may actually have successful farms.

31:23
Yes, exactly. Thank you for saying all that in a much better way than I ever could. So you were saying that we were kind of talking about depressing things. Tell me something fantastic about what you love, about what you do, and we'll end it on a really good note. Well, I think technology and consumer knowledge is moving in the right direction for our industry. We have people designing tools.

31:49
where I think in the next five years, people are gonna have an app on their smartphone where they can take pictures of produce and take pictures of meat and actually get a nutrient density profile sent back to them so you'd be able to tell the difference in the food before you actually eat it. And you'd be able to take that to the grocery store or take it on farm, wherever farm where you're buying stuff from, and actually see the difference. That's never been done before. I mean, that would be an enormous marketing.

32:18
tool for not only farmers, but then it's an amazing tool for consumers. So technology like that is, that gives me a lot of hope. And consumer education. So we've seen in the last year this type of agriculture and people talking about these topics actually enter the mainstream. People are talking about it in the biggest stages where that really hasn't ever happened before.

32:48
So I'm seeing it all the time. When people come out and buy meat or eggs from us, all you have to do is have a conversation with them and they're sold on it and they're willing to spend that extra money to do this. So I have to buy that food. So I think those are the positives. I think we're moving in the right direction as far as just societal information and education basis. I really hope so. And if that app comes out, I want it on my phone.

33:18
Well, I think everybody will. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that would be amazing, other than people who don't really care about what they're eating. People who don't care about what they're eating aren't going to care, but people who want to know will love it. So we're at 33 minutes and 25 seconds. Taylor, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. And I am so looking forward to seeing what happens in the future for Acres USA. All right. Thank you a lot.

33:47
Thanks a lot, Mary. You can find all of our information at acresusa.com too. Yep. I will put the links to that and your Facebook page and your Instagram page and all the things in the show notes. All right? All right. Thanks, Mary. Thank you. Have a great day. You too.