Letters to a Young Farmer Contributor Biographies see also: letterstoayoungfarmer.org/contributors Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns and the author of The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. He has received multiple James Beard awards, including Best Chef: New York City (2006) and the country’s Outstanding Chef (2009). In 2009 he was named one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world. Rick Bayless is the award-winning chef and co-owner of restaurants in Chicago, including Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, and Xoco. He has authored nine best-selling cookbooks and hosted PBS’s Mexico: One Plate at a Time for more than a decade. Besides winning the James Beard Foundation’s highest honors, he is the recipient of Mexico’s Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest award given to nonnatives who have done great work for the country. Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the National Humanities Medal, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For more than forty years, he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya Berry, in Kentucky. Mary Berry has lived and farmed in north-central Kentucky all of her life. She started The Berry Center in 2011 to continue her family’s work in agriculture. Mary and her husband, Steve Smith, raise beef cattle and Large Black hogs in the Little Kentucky River valley. Ben Burkett is a fourth-generation African American family farmer from Petal, Mississippi. He currently serves as president of the National Family Farm Coalition and is an active member of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives / Land Assistance Fund and the Indian Springs Farmers Cooperative Association. Amigo Bob Cantisano has farmed a wide range of small- to medium-acreage organic crops in California since 1975. He founded California’s first organic farm supply, first organic farm–advising service, and first organic farming conference, among numerous other agricultural accomplishments. He currently farms eleven acres of diversified food crops in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California and advises on more than forty-five thousand acres of organic and transitional crops throughout the Western Hemisphere. Eliot Coleman is a farmer and author of many books, including The New Organic Grower, Four-Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook. His market garden in Harborside, Maine, sells fresh vegetables grown in unheated greenhouses all winter. Nephi Craig, a White Mountain Apache/Navajo executive chef, is the founder of the Native American Culinary Association, a network of Native cooks, chefs, scholars, farmers, and community members devoted to the development and preservation of Native American foodways. Over the past eighteen years, Chef Craig has cooked throughout Indian Country on and off reservations across the United States, as well as in London, Germany, Brazil, and Japan. After serving for over eight years at Sunrise Park Resort, he is now the Nutritional Recovery Program Coordinator at the Rainbow Treatment Center and Executive Chef of Café Gozhóó on the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Whiteriver, Arizona. Barbara Damrosch is a farmer and writer. Her books include The Garden Primer and The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook, and for twelve years she has had a weekly column in the Washington Post called “A Cook’s Garden.” With her husband, Eliot Coleman, she cohosted the television series Gardening Naturally for The Learning Channel. She and Eliot raise vegetables at Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. Some of her books are Animals in Translation, Thinking in Pictures, and Improving Animal Welfare: A Practical Approach. Joan Dye Gussow, Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emerita and former chair of the Columbia University Teachers College, Nutrition Education Program, lives, writes, and grows organic vegetables on the west bank of the Hudson River. Long retired, she is still coteaching her course on nutritional ecology at Columbia every fall. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of five books, including The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, This Organic Life, and Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables. Amy Halloran lives with her family in upstate New York. She teaches writing and cooking classes and cooks for a community meals program. Her book, The New Bread Basket: How the New Crop of Grain Growers, Plant Breeders, Millers, Maltsters, Bakers, Brewers, and Local Food Activists Are Redefining Our Daily Loaf, grew out of her lifelong devotion to pancakes. Will Harris is the fourth generation of the Harris family to farm White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. He and his 120 employees pasture raise and hand butcher five red-meat species and five poultry species and produce organic vegetables and pastured eggs. Jill Isenbarger is CEO of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. She previously served as chief of staff at The Nature Conservancy and held top leadership positions with The Nature Conservancy for more than ten years. At Stone Barns Center, Jill works to forge partnerships among farmers, engineers, policy makers, chefs, conservationists, educators and others to help bring about a system of agriculture and a way of eating that reflects and values ecological health, strong communities and the integrity of place, region and season. Wes Jackson is president of The Land Institute, which he co-founded in the 1970s after he returned to his native Kansas from California, where, as a professor, he had established the Department of Environmental Studies at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of many books, including New Roots for Agriculture; Nature as Measure; Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture; Becoming Native to This Place; Altars of Unhewn Stone; and Meeting the Expectations of the Land, edited with Wendell Berry and Bruce Colman. Nicolas Jammet is cofounder and co-CEO of sweetgreen, a destination for simple, seasonal, and healthy food. Jammet has been recognized as a key innovator in food and business, named to Inc.’s “30 Under 30,” Forbes’s “30 Under 30,” and Food & Wine’s “40 Big Food Thinkers 40 and Under.” In 2015 First Lady Michelle Obama selected Jammet for the Presidential Delegation to Expo 2015, an international summit to discuss global nutrition and health and sustainable food solutions. Barbara Kingsolver’s thirteen books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include the novels The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, and The Lacuna, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Translated into more than twenty languages, her work has won a devoted worldwide readership and many awards, including the National Humanities Medal. Many of her books have been incorporated into the core English literature curriculum of colleges throughout the country. Fred Kirschenmann is president of the board of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, where he is also a professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy. Since the 1970s he has managed his family’s 1,800-acre certified-organic farm in south-central North Dakota, and he is the author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher. Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of several books, among them Making Hay, Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, and Several Short Sentences About Writing. He teaches at Yale University and lives with his wife, Alexandra Enders, in New York City and Columbia County, New York. Anna Lappé is a national best-selling author; the cofounder of the Small Planet Institute; and the director of Real Food Media, a collaborative initiative to engage the public in conversations about food, farming, and sustainability. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she and her family help organize a fish and seafood CSA and are members of a local vegetable and fruit farm. Nancy Vail and Jered Lawson are cofounders and codirectors of Pie Ranch, a food and farming education center on the San Mateo coast in California. Pie Ranch cultivates a healthy and just food system from seed to table through food education, farmer training, and regional partnerships. Nancy and Jered live on the farm with their two children, Lucas and Rosa. Mary-Howell Martens manages Lakeview Organic Grain, an organic feed and seed business in upstate New York, shipping organic dairy and small-animal feed throughout the Northeast. She also assists her husband, Klaas, and son Peter as they farm sixteen hundred acres of certified-organic grain crops. Mas Masumoto, along with his daughter, Nikiko, farms eighty acres of organic peaches, nectarines, and raisins outside of Fresno, California. He is the author of nine books, including Epitaph for a Peach and Wisdom of the Last Farmer. Their family farm is the subject of a PBS documentary film, Changing Season. Bill McKibben published the first book for a general audience about climate change, The End of Nature, in 1989. He has written many more books, including Deep Economy, in part an early account of the rise of local food, and he is the founder of the global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org. Wendy Millet is director of the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation, a cattle ranch with a mission to raise healthy food on working lands in a way that sustains the planet and inspires others to action. She has worked on ranches in Wyoming and Montana and has spent more than twenty years in conservation, including twelve years at The Nature Conservancy. She serves on the boards of the Western Landowners Alliance and the California Council of Land Trusts and is cofounder of Gallop Ventures LLC, offering equine-guided leadership programs Gary Paul Nabhan is an Ecumenical Franciscan brother, a plant explorer, and an orchard keeper of 150 varieties of heirloom fruits and nuts.