Sharing my vision for Acres U.S.A.
Acres U.S.A. is an institution that for over fifty years has played a significant role in the transformation of American agriculture. Charles Walters’ original vision — to safeguard the economic success of American family farms by helping farmers think ecologically — continues to be a vital and timely message.
My name is Taylor Henry, and I’m the new owner of Acres U.S.A. My goal is to ensure the success of Charles Walters’ goals for another fifty years.
I purchased this company first and foremost because I believe in its mission. I believe — and am myself a practitioner of — an ecological type of farming that emphasizes a holistic understanding of life and that seeks to work in harmony with nature. And I am convinced that high-quality and practical information about the science and practice of this type of agriculture needs to be shared as widely as possible.
My Background
I live in Viroqua, Wisconsin, on a regenerative beef cattle operation. I currently manage about 200 acres of summer grazing land, with my homebase being 60 acres that are home to our 15-20 cow-calf pairs that are made to eat grass.
I have been drawn to land for as long as I can remember, initially as an avid, responsible whitetail deer and turkey hunter. Back then, I didn’t have any farming experience, but I had this intuition that there were better and worse ways to manage and interact with the land. While listening to a podcast, around the time when I was trying to buy my first property, I came across Mark Shepard. I was surprised to learn that Mark’s farm was only 20 minutes away from me.
I’d heard about regenerative agriculture, and I bought Mark’s book Restoration Agriculture and devoured it. I went on to read/listen to about a hundred more books on ecological agriculture, many of them published by Acres U.S.A. Eventually I purchased my farm, and over the next few years I began rotationally grazing beef cattle, planting trees, running pigs on pasture, dragging chicken houses around and collecting eggs from our coop. The daily interaction with the land, animals and the food they provided was the relationship with land I had been longing for. Still being a hunter, I continued developing our whole property, and this has created a mutually beneficial relationship with our livestock and the wildlife we provide habitat for. YouTube and Acres U.S.A. were the best platforms I found to educate myself on these topics.
Prior to getting into agriculture I had several other passions and business pursuits. I wrestled and played football in high school and college, and I continue to be involved with athletics today, helping coach my local high school’s football team. I’ll chat more in the coming months about how the lessons I learned from wrestling and football have been great mental training for the ups and downs of farming. Immediately after college I became a police officer and learned about “the real world” while also seeing a small piece of how government entities operated.
I eventually found that I have the bug for entrepreneurship, so I started a digital marketing company that helped clients create and sell books and online courses. I also became involved in helping farmers buy and sell land here in Wisconsin, aiding buyers and sellers of large properties. Armed with what I was learning about ecological land management, and practicing it myself in the field, our real estate company came to provide real-life advice and to have success compared to the “run of the mill” realtors that are worried about getting their shoes muddy.
While building these businesses, I found farming. Farming presents beautiful lessons about life. It requires being disciplined and caring for other things besides yourself. I’ve gotten great joy from being responsible for raising other people’s food in a way that benefits them and that simultaneously leaves the land better than the way I found it.
Our Past and Future
As I already mentioned, Acres U.S.A., being 50-plus years old, and having such authority in this space, is an incredibly important organization in agriculture today. I’m thrilled to be able to lead it — hopefully for the next 50 years. I aim to once again make Acres U.S.A. a sustainable business, as it was under Charles and Fred Walters, and my goal is that whatever profit we make would go directly into the regenerative stewardship of more land. I want to be able to impact as many acres as I can during my time on this earth. I see Acres U.S.A. as an amazing place with a wealth of information to lead the charge over the next 50 years into this new age of agriculture.
I also think it’s important to rewind the clock and remember the original purpose of this organization. I find it noble and brave that Charles Walters started a business during a time when ecological methods of farming weren’t sexy. Phrases like “regenerative” and “organic” weren’t cool in 1971; agriculture was being increasingly industrialized, and for years, advocates of a different kind of farming were mostly just laughed at.
Charles Walters developed a devoted following over the years, though — a remnant of farmers, agronomists, researchers and advocates who had “uncommon good sense” and who were open to innovation and to being early adopters of “new” ideas that were really old. In a sense, Walters won — today everyone is talking about the things he championed fifty years ago: soil health, soil biology, balancing minerals, reducing synthetic inputs and more.
And yet, as we all know, today’s farming and media environments are vastly different than they were in 1971. Specifically in regard to media, traditional forms such as magazines and books are being set aside in favor of digital-only offerings.
Which probably brings me to the main question people have been asking me: who the heck would buy a magazine company in 2024?
I don’t view Acres U.S.A. as just a magazine company or a book company or a publishing company. I consider Acres U.S.A. the leading media company when it comes to alternative and ecological agriculture. It is the leading source for helping educate and transition more and more folks from conventional agriculture into a more sustainable and resilient model of farming. The information contained in Acres U.S.A.-published materials helps us protect the land we’re working on. It enables the families who have made it their lives’ mission to provide food for our society to be rewarded over the long haul with financial success.
Acres U.S.A. magazine will continue to be the foundation of this institution. A ton of thought and energy goes into the production of the magazine. Who can we find to share the best, most useful information? How the heck do we make a living on the land? How can we take information from our past and make it usable today?? Who can we introduce to the Acres U.S.A. community that will benefit our current subscriber base? How can we serve our subscribers right now, while you are out in the field? How can we make sure that our information is available in whatever form you want to consume it in? This will be a key initiative in the coming weeks and months; if you want to listen to articles, if you want to read them in a physical form or digitally, we’re going to make sure we supply that to you.
Our book publishing efforts will continue in 2024, albeit with a slight pause here at the beginning of the year as we work to make slight changes to our production processes so we can successfully publish even more titles in the future. Our bookstore will of course continue to offer our carefully cultivated list of the books on ecological farming that we think are most important to you.
The big event of 2024 will of course be our Eco Ag conference in December in St. Louis. We definitely hope to see you there. We also plan to continue on-farm events in 2024, although we are going to pause in 2024 from our West Coast event, the Healthy Soil Summit, with the hope that we come back to that in 2025. We’re going to focus our efforts on on-farm, intensive, smaller gatherings, providing attendees more access to our authors, coaches and consultants — the people who write our magazine articles and our books. We want to be able to do these events on a more regular basis, in a regional way, and we’re hoping that we can accomplish that in 2024 during the growing season.
My Ask
My promise to you — readers and supporters of this company, many of you for decades — is that we will continue to provide you with valuable information on ecological growing practices. That is, I guarantee that our magazine, our books, our events, our online courses, etc., will continue to be well worth the price you pay for them.
All of you who are farmers — most of you — believe that you are creating a product for your customers that is at least equal to the price you receive. As a farmer myself, I understand the economic challenges of farming. Like you, I believe that what I charge is fairly represented in the extra steps I take to care for my animals, my land, and my neighbors downstream.
It’s the same thing with our Acres U.S.A. products. We believe that we provide high-quality materials that can easily save or help you earn more money in farming. Our goal is to provide resources to you that pay for themselves in both time saved and money earned. And it’s our obligation to make sure that this business, just like my farm, is operated in a profitable way so that it can endure for many years to come.
I had a great conversation with Fred Walters the other day — Charles’ son and the owner of the business himself for a number of years. He’s amazed that the family business that supported him as he grew up, and then as an adult, is still going strong. It was a modest but profitable business that supported the Walters family and their employees. And that’s my goal as well. We will continue to produce high-level content and to communicate it in ways that you can tangibly use, in the field, as you plan for a transition or continue in your pursuit of ecological farming. And I hope that this business will support my wife and our family, along with our employees and their families — as well as providing an avenue of income and exposure for our authors and contributors — for decades to come.
We’ll also continue to seek to be an organization that’s in your corner in terms of exposing you to companies who share your values. As with our content, we seek to support you with access to the best information and the best products. While we can’t validate every product or company we advertise, we want to serve you by providing access to trusted companies.
I plan to write for the magazine and make videos and podcasts about my farming operation here in Wisconsin. I’m in this same battle with you, and I’m looking forward to interacting with all of you. The most special part so far of being a part of Acres U.S.A. is being able to interact with the people that I received so much from as I was taking the leap into farming. The most difficult part is now having access to 50 years of amazing information that some days I lose myself in. (We have something special planned for that.)
I’d also love to ask for your help. If you appreciate what we do, the best thing you can do is to continue to subscribe to our magazine, read our books and attend our events — and then to share what you’ve learned with others and encourage them to check out what we offer.
Also, please flip over to page (page where ad) where we’ve outlined changes to magazine subscriptions and exclusive offers for our current subscribers only.
Here’s to Acres U.S.A. continuing to be a leader in ecological agriculture — over the course of some tough days, but many more good ones — for the next 50 years.
P.S. I also want to hear your feedback — whether you appreciate what we do or are frustrated about something, we want to know how we can improve. (Also, I want to know more about you and your farming operation.) Our team is always available at Info@acresusa.com or 970-392-4464, or you can reach our magazine editor, Paul Meyer, at editor@acresusa.com.
P.S.S. As I’m creating this article, there’s an impending major snowstorm here in Wisconsin, the second in the last seven or eight days. There are going to be temperatures in the negative 30s and wind chills in the minus 40s. I think that at times like this, everyone who follows Acres U.S.A. will appreciate that it’s owned by a farmer. Over the coming days I’ll be out there in the dark in the morning, cussing at the cattle and trying to make sure their water is thawed out and that they have enough feed, and identifying any of the animals having a rough time. But these tough days make the good days that much better. 
