A fruitful two weeks in Bandera, Texas at ‘Confluence,’ and ‘American Regeneration Conference’ with AcresUSA
by Paul Bean
It has been expressed to me by many people since taking this photo with Secretary Kennedy that the current presidential administration “is not going to do anything about geoengineering and they’re all talk.”
While it has been disappointing to see little to no progress on the issue I am not convinced the most pressing yet underreported global environmental issue is one that Secretary Kennedy has given up on. Based on my brief conversation with him it is obvious that this issue is on his mind, however it is not my place to speak for him.
Basically since spring 2025 when RFK Jr. was on Dr. Phil and a member of the audience asked him about the spraying of our skies, he’s been largely silent on the issue despite vowing to “stop this crime” back in the summer of 2024 during the campaign season.
Since my brief encounter with RFK Jr., the New York Post and other news organizations have been reporting on regurgitated information as if it was breaking news.
The New York Post wrote yesterday, “U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. believes that DARPA, a secretive military agency, is spraying dangerous ‘chemtrails’ in the sky and has vowed to put a stop to it.”
The entire article and video included no updates about anything he’s said or done since that instance on Dr. Phil despite it being reported on as if it is new information.
Nonetheless, meeting Secretary Kennedy at Sovereignty Ranch in Bandera, Texas was a real honor. It was also an honor to be amongst some of the most important voices in regenerative agriculture in the country for a two day event that included talks on how we can end America’s dependance on glyphosate, big agrochemical companies, and the multitudes of poisons in our ‘food’ supply. The event was called “American Regeneration Conference” and was organized by AcresUSA, North America’s oldest regenerative organic farming publisher.
Overall, OGA was very well received by this perceptive crowd.
I had the distinct honor of working as a volunteer for the event AND having the OGA table set up right outside restaurant.
As a volunteer I had the duty of shuttling speakers and guests back and forth from the airport which was about an hour away in San Antonio.
I was very grateful for this experience because it allowed me one-on-one time with legends within the regenerative agriculture community. I also got to know the team at Sovereignty Ranch including siblings, Mollie and Ryland Engelhart who I cannot thank enough for letting me stick around an extra week to help out. My time on the ranch was well spent getting to know Emily, Taylor, and Weston from the AcresUSA team. All three are young humans making huge waves in this space.
I learned from the Montana grain farmer, Bob Quinn, and his quest to revive ancient wheat and its ability to replace statin medication. Bob is the founder of KAMUT® International, who revived an ancient Khorasan wheat variety (legendarily traced to Egypt) into a globally trademarked, certified-organic ancient grain brand grown exclusively under strict regenerative standards, delivering superior nutrition, digestibility, and flavor while pioneering organic farming transitions, rural economic revival, and the broader ancient grains movement.
I heard from Rick Clark and his wife Carol, and what their life was like on their farm in Indiana and their goal to build soil health and achieve balance with Mother Nature, incorporating regenerative farming practices with all acres on their farm being certified organic.
I also spent time getting to know Joel Hollingsworth of Smoke River Ranch who is pioneering the restoration of American agriculture by using Ultra-High Density Grazing (UHDG) with hardy heritage-cross cattle breeds on regenerative pastures, while innovating a “Herdshare” community-ownership model that lets people directly own and steward real livestock assets to rebuild soil fertility, food sovereignty, rural economies, and resilient local food systems.
I also got to know his wife, Erin Martin Hollingsworth, who is a gerontologist, public speaker, and advocate for the “Food is Medicine” movement, promoting nutrient-dense, regenerative farm foods to prevent and reverse chronic disease, improve senior health, drive economic impact through scaled programs like FreshRx, and connect soil regeneration with human vitality at Smoke River Ranch.
What a POWERHOUSE couple…
While I did not get to know everyone or see everyone’s workshops this weekend, I am grateful for the presentations I did get to see and my experience with folks on the road from the airport.
These moments in the shuttle also allowed for me to share my work and everything we have been doing here at OGA.
I find that farmers are most aware of what’s happening in our skies and this is because they are the most connected to the land. Everyone I spoke to this weekend is aware of this issue but does not even know where to begin (which is something I am working on).
Truthfully, I think everyone at the event feels the same way that I do about the issue: It’s hard to have a conversation about Regenerative Agriculture without addressing the near-daily chemical assault taking place in our skies throughout the nation.
I have said it time and time again: other then ending the covert spraying and geoengineering projects, regenerative agriculture and getting back to nature IS the solution to basically all of the symptoms to so-called “climate change.” These symptoms include water scarcity, drought, soil health, and crop health related issues such as fungi, mold, poor growth, low sunlight, etc.
Getting the chemicals out of the sky is a MUST! However, everyone should take comfort in knowing, there is nothing wrong with our planet.
Is there something wrong with the way we have grown and harvested crops since the dawn of the industrial revolution? Yes.
Is there something wrong with the chemicals, genetic modifications, and artificial technologies we have been using to enhance yields whilst sacrificing nutrient density? Yes.
Has cloud-seeding and other forms of geoengieering played a role in the degradation of all living and breathing creatures on our entire planet? Absolutely!
The good news? WE HAVE SOLUTIONS. Every single person at this conference is part of the GRAND solution and has been working and building within their field, in some cases for decades.
A huge point I would like to make is that despite what you might hear in the mainstream news, MORE geoengineering is not a solution in the slightest.
While refusing to acknowledge the near daily chemical assault from our skies, Augustus has touted continually his cloud seeding company as the solution to all of our farmers concerns about so-called “climate change.”
It seems that his method is the classic “fight fire with fire,” but has chosen to ignore what began the blaze in the first place.
In our debate I highlighted risks of unintended consequences (butterfly effect, historical flooding/drought disputes), corporate control over weather, and the preference for regenerative agriculture and re-greening to naturally restore hydrological cycles, build soil, and create more clouds instead of artificial intervention.
In the Q/A portion of our debate, a regenerative farmer named Ed Bourgeois, (who is actually a fan of Chelsea Green Publishers and one of our founders Ian Baldwin) explained the process of ‘re-greening’ and that by working with nature we can actually make it rain more and restore the soils in the desert in the South West United States and in regions that have been over-tilled:
“I come from Regenerative Agriculture so we’re really into hydrological cycling, which is how naturally they work, both local, regional, and planetary, and of course that has a lot to do with the soil. One of the problems is we’re short on clouds. We have a limited amount, compared to what we should have for clouds. And in agriculture we look at that, especially at a planetary level, and a lot of it has to do with human stewardship. We’ve degraded and desertified, many areas of the planet by not knowing how to steward, and a lot from agriculture from over abuse of tillage, which caused obviously things like the dust bowl, but especially desertification on both sides of the equator, where often through poor understanding of grazing, we over did it and we killed off a lot of plant life, and without that plant life and that ground cover, you’re not getting respiration. When the ground’s not covered you get a more reradicance of heat… there’s a lot more hot dry air that’s going north and of course enters California as much more hot a dry air, and it reaches up higher and higher. You have heat domes over LA that become high pressure heat domes that make it hard for water to penetrate, low pressure from off the coast. So our thing is big into re-greening… A lot of our southwest was not a desert, and when we look down there’s often a lot of soil carbon actually still in the soil, so we know it was a lot greener than it used to be. One of our ranchers in the Chihuahuan Desert had 25K acres, he started ten years ago, it was pretty much scrub, I think he gets around 8 inches of rain per year. He just used cows, he didn’t do any seeding, he didn’t do any fertilizing, he just managed cows properly as nature would to spread microbes for seeds that were just waiting for an opportunity. After 5 years he had knee high diverse grasses and after 10 years he’s got chest high grass from his rotational grazing. People will joke with him, ‘so where is your ranch in that desert?’ And he says ‘we’ll put on a weather radar 4:30-5 o’clock in the afternoon and you’ll see green over where my ranch is.’ That’s how we restore cycling, cool and stabilize weather patterns more, and make it rain more. We can do that all in desertification, across the equator, across the United States where we were heavily tilling, where now were not tilling… We need to make clouds, before we seed them… But it’s actually the microbe and bacteria that eventually gets up into the atmosphere that makes it rain.
This planet is plenty abundant and there truly is enough for all of us. Our creator did not make this earth with some kind of unsolvable problems. American Regeneration is the solution.