Bob Cannard, keynote speaker at the Acres USA Conference

Bob Cannard, keynote speaker at the Acres USA Conference

Acres U.S.A. is North America’s oldest, largest magazine covering eco-agriculture. The annual Acres U.S.A. conference brings

together farmers and consultants from every side of eco-farming to share their experience and expertise. The 2005 Acres U.S.A. Conference, Food as Medicine, Farm as Healer: Producing Crops of Superior Nutritional Density, Innovating and Adding Value on the Farm, Effectively Selling to Quality-Conscious Markets, took place in Indianapolis, Indiana on December 8-10, 2005. (AcresUSA.com)

Bob Cannard, Cannard farms grower for Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, was a keynote speaker. Bob Cannard cultivates 30 acres of his 170 acre farm in Sonoma County, California. With its unruly hedgerows of rosemary, processions of peach trees, and a musical creek meandering down the mountain, Cannard Farms in Sonoma is, by any standards, a rustic Eden. From this hard-worked land, grower Bob Cannard harvests some of the most celebrated designer vegetables in California – those adorning the world-reknowned menu of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. Alice Waters changed the way chefs think about vegetables and fresh foods. It’s a tall order to grow vegetables of high enough quality to influence the top chefs of the world – but this is exactly what Bob Cannard does, and he does so by trusting in nature and the natural process. In his keynote address Bob shared his wisdom and experience with soil remineralization along with his perception that rocks are alive, and showed how to determine what plants want and how to help them get it.