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.
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?
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.
Cultivating Values on the College Farm, or, Revisionist History Has No Future
By Philip Ackerman-Leist, Pacific Standard
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?
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.”
COMMUNITY RESILIENCE CHATS: “Rebuilding the Foodshed” with Philip Ackerman-Leist and Asher Miller
By Asher Miller, Philip Ackerman-Leist, Transition US, Post-Carbon Institute, and Chelsea Green Publishing
Want to start a community-owned café, solar array, or investment fund but don’t know where to start? Join our Community Resilience Webinars.
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
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.