Philip Ackerman-Leist

Professor of Sustainable Food Systems at Green Mountain College, Philip Ackerman-Leist is the author of Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader (2010) and Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems (2013). He is currently working on a collaborative book project with multimedia artist and co-founder of the Lexicon of Sustainability, Douglas Gayeton, about the first municipality in the world to pass a binding referendum banning all pesticides. He and his family raise grassfed American Milking Devon cattle on their off-grid homestead and farm in Pawlet, Vermont. In addition to establishing Green Mountain College’s 25 acre organic farm, he also founded the nation’s first online graduate program in food systems. At home and as a professor, he tries to combine a farmer’s pragmatism with a teacher’s collaborative quest for the future. Sometimes it works.