AUSTIN, Texas — The 2011 Acres U.S.A. Conference and Trade Show will open Dec. 8-10 at the Hyatt Regency Downtown in Columbus; besides sponsoring the annual conference, Acres is a publisher of a monthly magazine, now in its 40th year, and books dedicated to commercial-scale ecological agriculture.

“We’ve been, for over 40 years, teaching farmers how to grow without using toxic chemicals,” said Fred Walters, editor, publisher and son of Acres founder, the late Charles Walters. “At the conference there are tracks for people that are newcomers to the discussion, as well as advanced. There are some pretty intense discussions of soil chemistry and biology and there are tracks for beginners.

“The focus of everything we do is soils – to continually, season after season, build a healthier soil which provides greater resiliency in extremes of weather against crop destroyers, and the like. We have people every year come from as far away as South Africa and Australia, Europe, so it becomes a real international discussion.”

Besides the lectures and workshops, the conference features a trade show with suppliers of nontoxic farm inputs. Farmers can learn about the philosophy at the lectures and then can see what is actually available on the market, Walters said.

“It is great to talk about why you need more humus in your soil, but here are products, inputs, services that will help you make this happen in the real world,” he said. “We try to be very ‘real world’ about everything we teach.”

Speakers at the conference are crop consultants and large-scale farmers, with a few scientists sprinkled in. Most are actual practitioners who have spent much time working in large-scale farming. This year’s three keynoters are:

•Francis Thicke, who holds a PhD in soil science. He worked for the USDA for years and for the last decade has been a successful organic dairy farmer in Iowa who also does off-farm processing, Walters said. Thicke ran for the position of Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa last year. That was in the national headlines because it was a real discussion of the future of our food systems.

•“Joel Salatin is a grass-based farmer from Virginia who has become as close to a rock star as a farmer can be,” Walters said. “He was featured in The New York Times bestselling book An Omnivore’s Dilemma and has since then been featured in the movies “Food, Inc.,” “Fresh” and other documentaries. He is farming 1,000 acres and he’s got multiple families making a good living off a single farm. He is trying to show an alternative for family-scale farming that is profitable.”

•Gray L. Graham is a nutritionist trying to make the connection between the quality and  vitality of food and human health. Graham will be pointing out studies in science that show how the body’s health and even genetics through the generations are changed by the food people eat. There are studies, he says, showing genetically engineered organisms are now found in human proteins.

For more information visit www.acresusa.com or phone 800-355-5313. There is a discount for registering before Dec. 2.