Remembering Charles Walters1926-2009

T he world lost one of its true ori-ginals January 14, 2009, when Charles Walters passed from the

scene. If you knew him for a little while or for decades, it’s not likely you’ll ever forget him. As the father of four children and a recognized national leader in the fields of raw materials-based economic research and sustainable food and farm-ing systems, he exhibited strength and insight, love and humor his entire life.

A confirmed maverick, Charles Wal-ters was shaped by the havoc unleashed by higher authorities and historical forces. Born on a farm in western Kansas, his childhood was marked first by the Dust Bowl, then by the Great Depression. As a teenager, he worked a plot of land to feed his family, and he arranged to get paid for viewing Hollywood’s Golden Age by holding a job at Iola’s Pick Theater (his oldest son, a movie buff, is still envious). He was an Eagle Scout with multiple palms and earned trips to Philmont Scout Ranch during the country’s worst economic times.

His parents, Carl and Dorothea, were descendants of the original Volga Ger-mans, devout Catholics who emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1876. He was one of 14 children.

He came of age doing military service in the waning days of World War II and served again during the Korean War. He earned a master’s degree in economics on the G.I. Bill. Early seeds of his strong ethics are seen in his master’s thesis on moral and ethical issues in economics. Along with other jobs, he spent college summers as a dynamite monkey in the Rocky Mountains while editing trade journals and later reported on the rodeo circuit and helped run a print shop. He settled in Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife, Ann, a Michigan girl he met

in Denver while working as a journalist (she was a schoolteacher).

Charles Walters never lost his con-nection to the world of farming. It was not lost on him when a flood of corpor-ate money pushed the American farmer into an expensive new dependence on

supercharged fertilizers and powerful new pesticides — about which little was known.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a dev-astating attack on DDT and other ag-ricultural chemicals that shocked the world, became a cornerstone of the

In the early days of Acres U.S.A., Ann and Charles Walters stumped the meeting circuit to spread the word.

The nerve center: Charles Walters at work in the 1990s.

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unique point of view Walters would bring to Acres U.S.A. Equally crucial was his experience as editor for the National Farmer’s Organization (NFO), a group dedicated to the idea of using collective bargaining to obtain a better deal for the family farmer. He agitated for collective bargaining in agriculture as staff editor for that organization. He played a major role in the milk and pork producers’ strikes of the late 1960s, and parlayed his experiences into two books, Holding Ac-tion and Angry Testament.

Assembling NFO’s house journal ev-ery month and working in his spare time on Unforgiven, a book about visionary farm economist Carl Wilken, Walters made a breakthrough. He realized how the methodical cheating of small farmers and the enforced swing toward chemical agriculture were gears in the same ma-chine, working in tandem to transform the countryside. And not for the better. Corporate power and public policy were colluding in the destruction of the fam-ily farm, and the process of annihilation was gathering speed.

After faltering leadership hobbled the NFO, he knew he had to fight the good fight on his own terms. “I didn’t have the money to buy a paper, so I started one,” he says in the interview that follows, remembering the origins of Acres U.S.A. “I wanted the freedom that went with making my own decisions without the blessings of higher approved authority.”

Acres U.S.A. was his base camp, and while he struggled to keep it afloat in the early years, the journal immediately attracted a throng of fascinating figures. It seemed there were other mavericks out there who needed a forum, and they came out of the woodwork. Soil scientists, farm policy experts, economic thinkers, insect researchers, philosophers of the land — Walters met many of them through Acres U.S.A., interviewing them, commissioning articles by them, and inviting them to speak at the annual conference he began in 1975, long before the organic movement took hold.

He saw part of the mission of the pub-lishing company as rescuing lost knowl-edge. Perhaps the most important was Dr. William A. Albrecht, a University of Missouri professor whose low profile obscured decades of brilliant work in soil

science. Albrecht’s papers, which Walters rescued from the historical dustbin and published in four volumes, provided a rock-solid foundation for this new, sci-entific approach to organic farming that Acres U.S.A. liked to call eco-agriculture.

A dynamo who packed a lot of pro-ductive effort into a day, Walters com-

pleted more than two dozen books while he edited Acres U.S.A., writing most of them himself and co-authoring several others. He wrote a good chunk of every issue as well, seldom attaching his byline to many of the pieces. Loyal readers recognized his voice anyway. In fact, the first time his own photo appeared in the

A Charles Walters BibliographyIt would take a substantial amount of time to determine with certainty

how many reports and stories Charles Walters wrote during his lifetime. His editorial pencil handled every word in Acres U.S.A. between its conception in 1971 and July 1994, and he contributed heavily to every issue until his death.Except for one farce, Old Airmen Never Fly (1961), all his book titles have been serious studies. These are the titles he either authored or coauthored.

Ethical Foundations for Economic Theory (1953)

The Greatest Farm Story of the Decade (1966)

Confidential Alert (1968)

Holding Action (1968)

A Farmer’s Guide to Homestead Rights (1968)

Angry Testament (1969)

Unforgiven (1971)

The Case for Eco-Agriculture (1975)

The Albrecht Papers, editor, four volumes (1975, 1975, 1989, 1992)

Parity, the Key to Prosperity Unlimited (1978)

An Acres U.S.A. Primer (1979); revised as Eco-Farm (1996; revised and expanded 3rd edition, 2003)

A Life in the Day of an Editor (1986)

The Carbon Connection (1990)

Raw Materials Economics (1991)

Weeds, Control without Poisons (1991)

Mainline Farming for Century 21 (1991)

The Economics of Convulsion (1992)

Fletcher Sims’ Compost (1993)

Neal Kinsey’s Hands-On Agronomy (1993)

The Carbon Cycle (1994)

Socrates, the Lost Dialogues (1994)

Reflections on Economic Theory, serialized in Acres U.S.A. (1995)

The Secret Life of Compost (1997)

A Farmer’s Guide to the Bottom Line (2002)

Reproduction & Animal Health (2003)

Fertility from the Ocean Deep (2005)

Grass: The Forgiveness of Nature (2006)

Minerals for the Genetic Code (2006)

Dung Beetles (2008)

A Beast of Muddy Brain (2008)

Ask the Plant (forthcoming, 2009)

He also contributed substantially to other books published by Acres U.S.A.

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magazine was on its 25th anniversary, concurrent with his retirement from day-to-day management of the business.

He reported from all over the United States and the occasional foreign coun-try, making hundreds of friends and authoring millions of words. Along with thousands of articles, he wrote more than 30 books on economics and agronomy as well as two novels. He visited dozens countries, usually with Ann, and always returned with insightful reports. He trav-eled to China in the 1970s, long before the People’s Republic was open to tour-ists, writing extensively on his observa-tions of this mysterious society. Multiple organic farming, natural food, and eco-nomic organizations honored him with lifetime achievement awards for his de-cades of writing, public speaking, insight and leadership.

By the time his health forced him to cede the day-to-day job of editor-pub-lisher to his son, Charles Walters could look back on a quarter century in which he helped change the world. The other national journals devoted to organic

farming were no longer around, while national demand for wholesome food now supported thriving supermarket chains. Demand for produce free of toxic residues was leaping upward every year. As a small army of brave souls, deemed “statistically insignificant” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, began the decades of work it will take to rescue the family farm from oblivion, many of them cited Acres U.S.A. as the operating manual they could not do without. He continued to serve as executive editor of the magazine and continued to report, write essays, and research and pen books, even after he lost his sight and could no longer read print.

His last major work, a novel, was pub-lished shortly before his death. A Beast of Muddy Brain is a semi-autobiographic recitation of the importance of faith and family and the very real human conse-quences of an unjust, unsound national economic system.

To his children, he seemed to have been everywhere and done everything. His energy made him resemble a force of nature. He delighted in carpentry, hated plumbing, and could fix almost anything. He read shelves of books on history, as evidenced by the thousands of volumes in his personal library, and knew several classic musicals by heart. He loved to recite narrative poems from memory or sing an old cowboy ballad, especially “Streets of Laredo,” which he sang to rock his daughter and grand-daughters to sleep. He was always a good sport about posing for an offbeat art project, helping a neighbor or relative, or taking in houseguests from afar. He dabbled in local politics, even holding elected office, and coached little league softball. In later years he tried his hand at winemaking. He kept on writing ar-ticles and books even after illness made him legally blind. Speaking at the an-nual Acres U.S.A. Conference in early December of last year, he brought down the house.

He leaves behind a completed book manuscript on the agricultural systems of noted agronomist Esper K. Chandler, Ask the Plant, as well as 12 additional edited volumes of the Albrecht Papers, all yet to be published.

In January 1976 Charles Walters spent a brutally cold few weeks in China, then closed to tourists, to report on its agricul-tural practices.

Egypt beckoned and Phil Callahan led the way. A group of Acres U.S.A. readers discov-ered that land’s ancient mysteries; Charles Walters test-drove a camel.

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