Unprecedented Opportunity: Recap of the 2025 Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference

Almost everyone I talked to said that the 2025 Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag conference was one of the best ever.

I spent most of last week in Madison, Wisconsin at the annual Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag conference. Although I’ve been writing articles for Acres for years, this was the first time I made it to the conference. That’s because I work for Acres now and they paid for me to go so I could work the bookstore, introduce speakers, etc. But they didn’t pay me for writing this post or tell me what I should say. So here’s my honest opinion:

It was inspiring. The energy and excitement was phenomenal. Lots of old-timers told me it was the best Eco-Ag conference in recent memory. Some folks who’ve been going to this conference for a good chunk of its fifty-year history said this year was the best-ever. Lots of the credit for that goes to the new owner, Taylor Henry, who bought Acres last year and is running it as a family business just like Charles Walters did for so many years. Taylor brought in a great line-up of speakers—Joel Salatin, Rick Clark, Gabe Brown, Mark Shepard, Neal Kinsey, and lots of others.

But what inspired me most was that almost all of these speakers agreed that we’re in an exciting time of unprecedented opportunity for organic and regenerative farming. “The conversations we are having now, as a culture, as a country, I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” Joel Salatin said in his Tuesday evening keynote. And he’s been around for a while, so that’s saying something. “The MAHA movement and the conversations that are happening, I have been this ugly duckling, Cinderella in the ashes forever, and now to be invited to the ball…is a brand-new thing.”

What excites Joel is not necessarily what the official MAHA Commission is doing (as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, their most recent report got hijacked by the ag lobbies to expedite approval of new pesticides instead of evaluating their effects on human health). He’s excited about the underlying groundswell of interest in healthy food that MAHA represents—a groundswell that reaches across political party lines. “We can lead this movement from the soil up because what we are seeing is from the health perspective,” Joel challenged the audience. “They are gradually coming down to the soil, and we are going to go meet them from the soil up.”

The Acres conference draws people from all over the country and beyond—there were people from Canada, Ireland, and even South Africa. They were mostly farmers and rural people, including many people from the Plain community and lots of family farmers. There were older folks who’d been to dozens of conferences and younger folks who were there for the first time. There were workshops on biodynamics, on biblical creation stewardship, on making your farm a profitable business, on the soil-health connection, on glyphosate, and even on structured water (I’m still a little skeptical about that one). I doubt any single person there would agree 100 percent with everything every lecturer said, but a strong sense of community still prevailed.

Four days of intense lectures and networking is exhausting—I was pretty tired by the time I got home, and it took me a few days to recover. But it was worth it for the chance to be around so many likeminded people at once, to hear other people say all the things I’ve been writing about, to see that the fundamental principles of organic farming—an emphasis on soil, health, and community—are still alive and well. And growing. As Joel Salatin concluded in his keynote, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about the opportunity facing us in the ecological ag community as I am right now.”