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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. View Philip's CV Request an interview Request as a speaker

A Precautionary Tale: Excerpt

By Philip Ackerman-Leist, Resilience.org

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

Ur-ganic: An Alpine Township Considers Banning Pesticides

By Philip Ackerman-Leist, Resilience.org

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

Foodshed as New Democracy

By Philip Ackerman-Leist, Fair Observer

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

A Foodshed View of Resilience

By Philip Ackerman-Leist, Landscapes for People, Food, and Nature blog

“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

So Much Wasted Energy – Rethinking food waste

By Philip Ackerman-Leist, Post Carbon Institute

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

Counting the Calories and calories

By Philip Ackerman-Leist, Post Carbon Institute

 As soon as we step out of our homes in pursuit of food, we cross an energy threshold that is worth considering.

  • May 16, 2013
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