AcresUSA: Tractor Time
83 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 34 ratingsAcresUSA: The Voice of Eco-Agriculture. Our guests are the top names in modern farming and ecology, including doctors, agronomists, authors, soil scientists and more. Hosted by Sarah Wentzel-Fisher.
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Episodes
Tractor Time Episode 29: Glen Rabenberg, Soil Expert
April 23, 2019 18:58 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBHosted by Ryan Slabaugh Good day and welcome to Tractor Time podcast brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture. I’m your host Ryan Slabaugh, and today our episode is focused on soil health, and the philosophies of Glen Rabenberg. Glen has spent a lifetime journey building a system that works across climates and soil types, and in the next hour, we’re going to ask him to walk through his journey, and how he piece together the knowledge – and wisdom – he needed to eventuall...
Tractor Time Episode 28: Dr. Paul Dettloff, V.M.D., Author, Livestock Specialist (from 2007)
April 11, 2019 16:46 - 57 minutes - 78.8 MBGood day, and welcome to Tractor Time podcast brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the voice of eco-agriculture. This is a special episode, our 28th in our series, that will feature a friend and guest to Acres U.S.A., Dr. Paul Dettloff. A special thanks to our series sponsors, BCS America and Albert Lea Seed, who make this all possible. Dr. Paul Dettloff has spent 50 years in large animal veterinary practice, working with farmers all over the world to help them think differently. He was well ahead...
Tractor Time Episode 27: Jodi Helmer, Author, Protecting Pollinators
March 27, 2019 14:20 - 55 minutes - 76 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time, brought to you by Acres USA, the Voice of Eco-Agriculture. I’m your host, Ryan Slabaugh, and it feels like a spring day here in Greeley, Colorado, where we are recording episode 27 on this 20th day of March in 2019. It’s been a very interesting week in eco-agriculture, and while I don’t want to get too much into the news, it’s worth mentioning that we have a bunch of customers lose buildings to the heavy winds and flooding in the Midwest and out near our ...
Tractor Time Episode 26: Will Winter, Matt Maier, Thousand Hills Beef Cattle in Minnesota
February 25, 2019 18:01 - 1 hour - 84.6 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time, brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture. I’m your host Ryan Slabaugh, and I’m happy to bring you the 26th episode of our podcast. Thanks again to Albert Lea seeds for making this episode possible. A few announcements — Minnesota is the theme of today’s show. Acres USA will be in Minnesota in December for our annual conference, and one of the reasons — other than the great December weather there — is the amount of trailblazing agricult...
Tractor Time Episode 25: Fred Provenza, Author & Animal Behavior Expert
January 29, 2019 18:11 - 1 hour - 93.8 MBWelcome to Tractor Time, brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco_Agriculture. I’m your host Ryan Slabaugh, and lucky enough to be the GM/Publisher of Acres U.S.A., and very lucky enough to sit down and produce our 25th episode of Tractor Time. And thanks again to BCS America for being the sponsors of today’s program. Today’s guest – I met Fred Provenza, professor emeritus in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University, at our annual conference last December. We ta...
Tractor Time Episode 25: Fred Provenza, Author & Animal Behavior Expert
January 29, 2019 18:11 - 1 hour - 93.8 MBWelcome to Tractor Time, brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco_Agriculture. I’m your host Ryan Slabaugh, and lucky enough to be the GM/Publisher of Acres U.S.A., and very lucky enough to sit down and produce our 25th episode of Tractor Time. And thanks again to BCS America for being the sponsors of today’s program. Today’s guest – I met Fred Provenza, professor emeritus in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University, at our annual conference last December. We talk...
Tractor Time Episode 24: Jeff Moyer, Rodale Institute, 2018 Eco-Ag Award Winner
January 04, 2019 17:12 - 59 minutes - 82 MBHosted by Ryan Slabaugh. Sponsored by Albert Lea Seed. Good day and welcome to Tractor Time podcast brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture. We are happy to be bringing you another episode, our 1st of season 3 starting this year, and 24th overall. On today’s program, we’re going to honor our 2018 Eco-Ag Award winner, who we celebrated in December at our 43rd annual conference. Jeff Moyer, is a longtime organic farmer, author, lecturer. His work with Rodale Institute, both...
Tractor Time Episode 23: The 2018 Eco-Ag Preview Special
November 28, 2018 15:02 - 50 minutes - 69.4 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time podcast brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture. We are happy to be bringing you another episode, our 11th this year and 23rd overall, and I think we’re going to get in at least one more before the end of the year, so stay tuned. It’s about that time. In a couple days, Acres U.S.A. is hitting the road — or getting on a plane, actually — and heading to Louisville, Kentucky, for our 43rd annual Eco-Ag Conference & Trade show. In the offi...
Tractor Time Episode 22: On Assignment, the Tropical Agriculture Conference in Belize
November 16, 2018 14:36 - 53 minutes - 73.7 MBHosted by Ryan Slabaugh This episode is a bit unique from the others, which are usually done in the comforts of my office back in Greeley, Colorado. For most recordings, it’s me, a microphone, an interview guest and my dog snoring in the corner. If you need the full picture, I even prop a sign up in my windowed door that says, “On Air.” But that’s really just for me – it makes me feel official. But so does this scene where I am today. Today, we are broadcasting from Belize, specifically, Belm...
Tractor Time Episode 21: Daniela Ibarra-Howell, CEO of The Savory Institute
October 03, 2018 19:16 - 59 minutes - 81.2 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time podcast. I’m your host, Ryan Slabaugh, the GM of Acres U.S.A., and we are excited to bring you another fun hour of conversation about ecology, agriculture, smart farming, human health – and more. I want to thank our listeners. We recently went over the 20,000th download as a podcast, which is exciting for us. The world of eco-growers is always larger than we anticipate, and to us, that means things are changing for the positive. We hear so much about degen...
Tractor Time Episode 20: David Montgomery & Anne Biklé, Authors & Scientists
September 13, 2018 21:42 - 1 hour - 139 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time, a podcast brought to you by Acres U.S.A. Today’s podcast features two guests. Both live together in Seattle, and are writers, advocates and change agents and, it should be noted, both are quite brilliant as well – Biologist Anne Biklé and Geologist David Montgomery. We have interviewed both separately, and will run their interviews back-to-back. Our second interview you will hear on this episode, Anne Biklé, is a biologist with an interest in environmenta...
Tractor Time Episode 20: David Montgomery & Anne Biklé, Authors & Scientists
September 13, 2018 21:42 - 1 hour - 139 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time, a podcast brought to you by Acres U.S.A. Today’s podcast features two guests. Both live together in Seattle, and are writers, advocates and change agents and, it should be noted, both are quite brilliant as well – Biologist Anne Biklé and Geologist David Montgomery. We have interviewed both separately, and will run their interviews back-to-back. Our second interview you will hear on this episode, Anne Biklé, is a biologist with an interest in environme...
Tractor Time Episode 19: Judith McGeary, Founder of Farm & Ranch Freedom Alliance
September 07, 2018 17:05 - 45 minutes - 62.2 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time podcast brought to you by Acres USA. I am your host, Ryan Slabaugh, and we are excited to bring you another episode – this one will be about advocacy, and how to get involved to make real change happen. Our guest today embodies that sentiment, Judith McGeary. Those who attend our conference every year should know her name, as she is a frequent speaker. But why we ask her to speak is most important – that she is the founder and leader of the Farm and Ranc...
Tractor Time Episode 19: Judith McGeary, Founder of Farm & Ranch Freedom Alliance
September 07, 2018 17:05 - 45 minutes - 62.2 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time podcast brought to you by Acres USA. I am your host, Ryan Slabaugh, and we are excited to bring you another episode – this one will be about advocacy, and how to get involved to make real change happen. Our guest today embodies that sentiment, Judith McGeary. Those who attend our conference every year should know her name, as she is a frequent speaker. But why we ask her to speak is most important – that she is the founder and leader of the Farm and Ranch ...
Tractor Time Episode 18: Charles Walters, Then, Today and Tomorrow (from 2006)
August 02, 2018 17:12 - 36 minutes - 49.6 MBWelcome to Tractor Time, brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture. I’m your host, Ryan Slabaugh, the GM and publisher of Acres USA. Last week, I took a trip. I spent about 36 hours in the car driving from Colorado to Illinois, down to Columbia, Missouri, back to Illinois, and back home to Colorado. For a few days while I was in Missouri, I spent time at a sacred ground to us. At the University of Missouri, hidden among the tall brick buildings, is an open space called “San...
Tractor Time Episode 17: Brendon Rockey, Potato Farmer, Speaker
July 12, 2018 16:01 - 40 minutes - 56 MBToday’s guest is Brendon Rockey, a third-generation Colorado potato farmer. He spoke last October at a soil health conference near Greeley, close to our office, and when I wandered down to hear his talk, I was a bit surprised. We are surrounded by conventional ag folks in the Greeley, Colorado, area, but instead of talks about spraying schedules and storage tanks, I heard a guy talking about a wildly diverse field, about growing at 7,000 feet above sea level, about the importance of microbial...
Tractor Time Episode 16: Douglass DeCandia, Farmer and Advocate Against Food Apartheid
June 21, 2018 15:24 - 54 minutes - 74.6 MBWelcome to our 16th episode of Tractor Time podcast, brought to you by Acres U.S.A., the voice of eco-agriculture. My name is Ryan Slabaugh, and we are fired up to bring you another hour of conversation about ecology, agriculture, and this hour, we’re even talking about saving the world. We have two guests on our show today. One is Mary Battjes, and I have the pleasure of working every day with Mary. She’s our project manager, and recently wrapped up a survey of young farmers around the count...
Tractor Time Episode 15: Dr. Nasha Winters, Author and Health Consultant
June 08, 2018 19:57 - 55 minutes - 76.9 MBGood day and welcome to Tractor Time Podcast by Acres USA. I’m your host, Ryan Slabaugh, and today’s guest is Dr. Nasha Winters. I met Dr. Nasha Winters last year at our conference in Columbus, Ohio. I had heard about her talk from the large number of people who walked out inspired. After meeting her, I can understand why. She was unassuming, funny and presented a message about human health that made a lot of sense. About how we create environments in our own body – similar to how we create e...
Tractor Time Episode 14: Neal Kinsey, Hands-On Agronomy
May 21, 2018 18:14 - 51 minutes - 70.3 MBIt’s that sound again – tractors, the voice of Charles Walters, and that happy little strum. It all means we are launching into a second season of Tractor Time Podcast by Acres U.S.A., the podcast for farmers who care about the Earth. My name is Ryan Slabaugh, and I’m lucky enough to be your host for a second season. We have a lot in store this year. We are going to talk about a lot of eco-farming tactics and methods. We’re going to go back in time and listen to age-old talks that still apply...
Tractor Time Episode 13: 2017 Conference Highlights — Dr. Vandana Shiva, André Leu and Ronnie Cummings
December 21, 2017 19:36 - 40 minutes - 55.9 MBWelcome to another great episode of Tractor Time. We’re coming off a high from our 42nd annual Eco-Ag Conference & Trade Show in Columbus, Ohio, and wanted to use this podcast to help us celebrate the highlights. There were many. They included the 1,100 people who attended from 15 different countries, who gathered to hear diverse and interesting viewpoints on ecology and agriculture. Not only did we learn about the finer points of soil nutrition, micronutrients, microbiology, micro fungi, but...
Tractor Time Episode 12: Edwin Blosser, Farmer & Founder of Midwest Bio-Systems
November 03, 2017 15:30 - 41 minutes - 56.5 MBIt’s Tractor Time podcast, brought to you by Acres USA, the Voice of Eco Agriculture. This was recorded on Nov. 2, 2017, in Greeley, Colorado. We’re going deep into eco-agriculture this hour. This episode's guest is Edwin Blosser, a longtime instructor in the art of crafting and utilizing high-quality compost in production-scale agriculture. He’ll talk about specific compounds in compost to build, advise about cover crops, and help us connect the dots between profitability and soil structure....
Tractor Time Episode 12: Edwin Blosser, Farmer & Founder of Midwest Bio-Systems
November 03, 2017 15:30 - 41 minutes - 56.5 MBIt’s Tractor Time podcast, brought to you by Acres USA, the Voice of Eco Agriculture. This was recorded on Nov. 2, 2017, in Greeley, Colorado. We’re going deep into eco-agriculture this hour. This episode's guest is Edwin Blosser, a longtime instructor in the art of crafting and utilizing high-quality compost in production-scale agriculture. He’ll talk about specific compounds in compost to build, advise about cover crops, and help us connect the dots between profitability and soil structur...
Tractor Time Episode 11: John Kempf, Founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture
October 25, 2017 21:06 - 45 minutes - 62.6 MBTractor Time is back, after harvest, to get back into the swing of recording and broadcasting interviews with your favorite people in sustainable agriculture. And we’re coming back with some thunder. Our guest today is a good friend of Acres USA. John Kempf is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, a crop consulting company, and is an expert in the field of biological and regenerative farming. A resident of Middlefield, Ohio, Kempf is a farmer who grew up in and remains a part of the Amish...
Tractor Time Episode 10: Mark Shepard, Water Control on the Farm
August 24, 2017 21:18 - 1 hour - 86 MBIn this week’s podcast, we are featuring Mark Shepard's talk from the 2016 Eco-Ag annual conference in Omaha, Nebraska, where he spoke to a very full hall on his sustainable water practices he uses on his farms. It’s also the subject of his new book that we will be releasing later this fall, so stay tuned for that. It’s under production as we speak. What follows this is Mark’s speech, which lasts just a little more than an hour. We hope you enjoy his talk, and the discussion that occurred bet...
Tractor Time Episode 9: Ben Hartman, How to Make a Living on One Acre
August 03, 2017 18:31 - 1 hour - 102 MBIn this week's podcast, we’re going all the way back to last year’s Acres USA Eco-Ag Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. There, an author-farmer named Ben Hartman spoke for more than an hour about a little miracle he and his wife, Rachel Hershberger, created in southern Michigan. On The Lean Farm, also the title of his book, Ben and his family connected with local restaurants in Chicago and the southern Michigan area to create a sustainable, profitable farming venture on less than one acre of land...
Tractor Time Episode 8: Andre Leu, Author of The Myths of Safe Pesticides
July 21, 2017 16:31 - 39 minutes - 54.7 MBIn the Acres USA world, Andre Leu is becoming much more than a household name. Leu, who has written for our magazine for years, published The Myth of Safe Pesticides in 2014. He has spoken on the dangers of pesticides for years several times at our annual conference, and will join us again this year. Leu is currently the president of IFOAM – Organics International, and has more than 40 yeas of international experience in all areas of organic agriculture. He has been one of those human advocat...
Tractor Time Episode 7: John Slack and Soils from a Geological Perspective
June 08, 2017 17:56 - 55 minutes - 54.5 MBThis week, we’re dipping into the archives back to 2005. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and YouTube was founded, and in 2005, John Slack also took the stage at our Eco-Ag conference and spoke about rocks. But we are not really talking about rocks. We are talking about geology. And even more so, geology-micro biology, or as Slack puts it, “Bugs eating rocks.” The basis of all this, and why it’s interesting to us and other eco-farmers: the industrial chemical revolution that occu...
Tractor Time Episode 6: Joel Salatin, the Most Famous Farmer in the World
May 25, 2017 17:22 - 32 minutes - 34.1 MBWe know how busy farmers are this time of year, so we feel especially lucky to have our guest on today’s show. He really needs no introduction, but we’ll give it a shot anyway. Joel Salatin is known around most agricultural circles as the most famous farmer in the world. He calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer, which is a mouthful, both in words and in meaning. More practically, he’s a successful author and speaker, has written dozens of pieces for ...
Tractor Time Episode 5: Jerry Brunetti, Soil as a Super-Organism
May 18, 2017 20:08 - 1 hour - 77.8 MBOn this week's podcast,we thought it’d be good to turn back the clock to a talk from 2009 at our Eco-Ag conference. Jerry Brunetti, rest in peace, was a fearless advocate for soil management and gave a presentation then called “Soil as a SuperOrganism.” In other words, a super computer built to process everything efficiently and create answers for us that are accurate. “There is life in rock. There is life that comes out of everything,” he says in this talk. We like that so much, we want to ...
Tractor Time Episode 4: Susan Sink and the American Farmland Trust
May 08, 2017 22:17 - 38 minutes - 42.5 MBIn this week's episode, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Susan Sink, vice president of development and external relations at American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit organization who collaborates with farmers around the world to help save farmland from development, among many other things. Susan and the team are based in Washington D.C., and work with policymakers as well to craft major legislation like the Farm Bill, which affects almost every farmer in the country. She and her cohorts ...
Tractor Time Episode 3: Charles Walters and A Return to Intellectualism
May 04, 2017 20:20 - 1 hour - 60.8 MBAs Charles Walters, founder of Acres U.S.A., said in his talk in this week's podcast, if he had asked his father in 1945: “Are you an organic farmer, he would have said 'What’s that?'" In less than a century, we’ve come far enough to forget how we have farmed for centuries. And how new the introduction of industrial pesticides and herbicides is for farming, and how little we truly know about the massive effect it’s had on our health, on our environment and on our food supply. In this talk fro...
Tractor Time Episode 2: Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, The Story of the Green Man
April 27, 2017 17:35 - 42 minutes - 15.9 MBOn this week’s Tractor Time podcast, we interviewed author and regenerative agriculture guru Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin. His story is not only inspirational, but transcends genres.His book, “In the Shadow of Green Man,” documents this. It speaks to growing up in poverty, through civil war, learning from his father, moving to Minnesota, graduating from school and leading an organization focused on regenerative models of agriculture. “Knowledge without wisdom is a more dangerous weapon than th...
Tractor Time Episode 1: Abbey Smith and Charles Walters
April 20, 2017 17:24 - 1 hour - 46.1 MBIn our inaugural episode, we interview Abbey Smith with the Savory Institute about her travels, sustainable grazing methods, and how she manages her own ranch in Northern California. Then, we finish with an archived speech from Charles Walters, the founder of Acres U.S.A., who challenged his audience about the differences between eco-agriculture and conventional agriculture.