As 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 from an archival Eco-Ag Conference presentation, Charles spoke to this point with the help of Lee Fryer, and a few farmers in the audience. He will tell you that even today, the effort to, as he put it, “to liberate the organic farmers,” goes on. With truth on our side. That the challenge now is to return the burden of proof to the conventional agriculture systems, to those who want to coat our foods with poison, to prove that it is as safe as organic farming, and not the other way around.