Acres USA conference
Mark and I thoroughly enjoyed
attending the Organic
Grower's School in Asheville this spring, but we hadn't
planned to seek out any similar experiences. When a flyer for the
Acres USA Conference showed up in our mailbox, I
was all set to shred it for mulch, but Mark noticed that the conference
was being held just an hour away from his Mom's house (and she is
overdue for a visit.)
I was still dubious
until I noticed that Harvey Ussery would be presenting. Even
though Harvey Ussery isn't very well known, I consider him the best
homesteading author writing today. I've just about given up on
magazines, but every now and then I'll open Mother Earth News or
Backyard Poultry Magazine and flip through the table of contents.
My eye zips past repeats of the same old information and then
invariably lands on one article worth reading. Every single time
this has happened for the last two years, the author of the article has
been Harvey Ussery.
"That's nice," said Mark
politely when I enthused about the possibility of hearing Harvey Ussery
speak. "Wait, what does that say?" I'd turned the page to
the preconferences, and Mark was suddenly riveted.
"Radionics?! That's the first time I've ever seen a course about
radionics at a mainstream conference!" Suddenly interested, Mark
reminded me that the accountant we visited this spring chastised us for
not writing as much as we should off on our taxes --- this conference
would definitely count as a tax deduction.
So who else will be
attending? For those of you with more mainstream tastes, the
conference has Joel Salatin, Francis Thicke, and Gray Graham as keynote
speakers and a huge array of lecturers and workshop leaders.
They'll be showing the films Farmageddon, American Meat, and Queen of
the Sun, and attendees will get a chance to pick the brains of
"world-class teachers/consultants/farmers" at consulting halls.
Maybe we'll see you there?
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
They are peddling way to much quackery on their site for that, IMO. If you browse through their book section you'll find texts on bogus sciences like homeopathy, biodynamics, dowsing and "subtle energies" (whatever those may be?!).
The human health section alone contains "gems" that advocate e.g. chelation therapy (commonly used to remove heavy metals from the body) for a host of other ailments, or the regular ingestion of hydrogen peroxide.
It does make me wonder about the quality of their total portfolio.
Is biodynamics mainstream? Or, more importantly, do biodynamic farms get better results? The principles of a farm as closed system seem reasonably sound to my untrained mind...I don't know much about the potions that farmers apparently use.
Whenever I hear old farming traditions doubted, I think of places in Asia that have been feeding lots of people on not alot of land, for hundreds of years -- without anything that didn't exist the immediate environment. I'm sure there were droughts, floods, years when bugs prevailed, but in general...biodynamics works, non?
Daddy --- That's fascinating! I guess that does make dowsing relatively mainstream. I have to admit, I'm still pretty dubious...
J --- Biodynamics is one of the topics I mean to research one of these days. I honestly don't know enough about it to say whether it makes scientific (if counterculture) sense or whether it's New Age woo woo.
I'm also not sure if the techniques recorded in books like Farmers of Forty Centuries would count as biodynamics, or whether it's just traditional organic gardening. So...I don't know? 