Philip Ackerman-Leist

Philip Ackerman-Leist, author of Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems (2013) and Up Tunket Road: The Education of Modern Homesteader (2009), is a professor at Green Mountain College. There he established the farm and sustainable agriculture curriculum,  is director of the Green Mountain College Farm & Food Project and also founded and directs a Masters in Sustainable Food Systems (MSFS) — the nation’s first online graduate program in food systems, featuring applied comparative research of students’ home bioregions. His latest book is A Precautionary Tale: How One Small Town Banned Pesticides, Preserved Its Food Heritage, and Inspired a Movement 

He and his wife, Erin, farmed in the South Tirol region of the Alps and North Carolina before beginning their sixteen-year homesteading and farming venture in Pawlet, Vermont. With more than two decades of “field experience” working on farms, in the classroom, and with regional food systems collaborators, Philip’s work is focused on examining and reshaping local and regional food systems from the ground up.

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A Precautionary Tale: Excerpt

As Günther and his cows wove their way through Laatsch, a beeping horn stopped him. He turned around, spreading his arms to slow the bovine promenade behind him, and let the car slip by before he and his cows stepped back into the main thoroughfare for their jaunt from the barn to pasture. The driver had Swiss plates and a business suit. Someone in a rush to make money, he surmised, while he headed out to his fields to seal his own financial fate in several plastic bags.

November 9, 2017

Society

Ur-ganic: An Alpine Township Considers Banning Pesticides

Should agricultural pesticides be banned to protect the health of the residents, the surrounding ecosystem and the integrity of the township’s historical agricultural practices?

September 18, 2014

Society

Foodshed as New Democracy

As the local food movement, or…local food movements have taken root in the U.S. during recent years, advocates have discovered the need to express this evolving “locus focus” in new ways.

December 10, 2013

Society

Cultivating Values on the College Farm, or, Revisionist History Has No Future

So why did a small college going the extra mile to be humane and sustainable face an orchestrated avalanche of wrath when it planned to slaughter two of its admittedly iconic oxen?

September 4, 2013

Society

A Foodshed View of Resilience

“Resilience” may be a somewhat new term in the lexicon of forward-thinkers, but the concept is by no means entirely new, and it has a direct tie to another useful word: “foodshed.”

August 13, 2013

Society

So Much Wasted Energy – Rethinking food waste

Regardless of terminology, one point is writ clear: the most technologically and economically advanced cultures in the world have the highest rates of food waste on the planet

May 20, 2013

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