Each year, the Soil & Nutrition Conference brings together leading thinkers and practitioners, each outstanding in their field, to share their insights and personal experience as we grow the movement around food quality!
Speakers
Pre-conference Advanced Seminar Speakers
Peter Bane
Peter Bane is author of The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country. For 25 years, he published Permaculture Activist, and serves on the Editorial Board of its successor, Permaculture Design magazine. Past President and now Executive Director of Permaculture Institute of North America, he has taught and designed throughout the temperate and tropical Americas from Canada to Patagonia, training thousands in his workshops, and reaching more through conferences, radio interviews, and print articles. A pioneer in natural building, renewable energy, and eco-village design, for 15 years he has championed small-scale suburban and peri-urban farming for food sovereignty, land repair, and community resilience. With his partner Keith Johnson, he nurtures 6 acres of oak woods and 4 more of annual and perennial crops in west Michigan’s Lakeshore region.
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Mark Fulford
Explains Mark very simply, “Quality of life is a health issue. Good health is food dependent, and good food depends on soil health.”
Mark Fulford is a well known, independent farm consultant and educator whose range of topics and expertise encompasses: transitioning from conventional to organic and biological agriculture; soil, crop, and forage nutrition; and preparing agriculture for peak oil, climate change and economic drift. He also teaches non-electric water technologies, hands-on skills in organic orcharding, organic no-till crop production, commercial and small scale composting, as well as fundamental rural skills and small farm food preservation.
Mark addresses audiences from a wide range of backgrounds and philosophies embracing common sense, science and cultural wisdom for the times we live in. His lifelong study of the natural world and immersion in agriculture on his own farm and abroad, grounds his practices in experience. Mark and his wife, Paula, own and operate Teltane Farm in Monroe, Maine.
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Guido Masé
Guido Masé RH(AHG) is a clinical herbalist, herbal educator, and garden steward specializing in holistic Western herbalism, though his approach is eclectic and draws upon many influences. He spent his childhood in Italy and has been living in Vermont since 1996.
He is a founder, faculty member and clinical supervisor at the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, a 501(c)(3) non-profit herbal medicine clinic and school that provides comprehensive services focused on whole plants and whole foods.
He serves as chief herbalist for Urban Moonshine, where he works on research, development and quality control for an all-organic whole-plant tincture line. He is a founding member of the Burlington Herb Clinic where he works in clinical practice. He is a teacher of herbal medicine at the University of Vermont, and is the author of The Wild Medicine Solution: Healing with Aromatic, Bitter and Tonic Plants and DIY Bitters. He is currently developing the integrative phytotherapy department at Wasso District Hospital in Loliondo, Tanzania.
Guido’s teaching style focuses on conveying the interconnections within the human organism and between the organism and its surrounding ecology. Relying on clinical experience, storytelling, and scientific research, he believes that true strength flows from nature, and that herbal medicine is key to sustainable, successful living.
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Alexander F. Beddoe
Author, educator, chronicler of RBTI
Alexander F. “Sande” Beddoe, DDS
Over five decades ago Dr. Beddoe began to realize that there had to be a better way of addressing the cause of dental disease than simply by repair—known as “drill, fill and bill.” This led him on a fascinating odyssey that resulted in an encounter with Dr. Carey A. Reams in the mid-70s. That meeting began a 10 year relationship where Dr. Beddoe not only assisted Dr. Reams in teaching some of his seminars, but Dr. Beddoe wrote the only textbooks about Reams’ Biological Theory of Ionization (RBTI) as it applied to not only soil and animal health, but also to human health. Before his death, Dr. Reams read and approved the content of Dr. Beddoe’s textbooks and formally wrote Dr. Beddoe specifically asking him to carry on the RBTI work passing on the mantel with his blessing.
Although Dr. Beddoe was trained and practiced as a dental physician, he early came to discern that the absolute key to understanding the cause of degenerative disease, as well as perfect health, was contained in Reams’ Biological Theory of Ionization principles. These principles were the foundation and exclusive tool of his clinical nutrition practice, as well as his lecturing, teaching and consulting in human nutrition and agricultural soil chemistry.
As a recognized authority as well as an enthusiastic teacher and lecturer on Dr. Reams’ Biological Theory of Ionization principles, Dr. Beddoe has authored several books on the subject, including:
– Biologic Theory of Ionization As Applied To Human Nutrition,
– Biologic Theory of Ionization As Applied To Farming And Soil Management,
– Nourishment Home Grown,
– The Calcium Kit
– Profiles Of Living
– The Intelligent Farmer
– Biologic Theory of Ionization As Applied To Farming And Soil Management,
– Nourishment Home Grown,
– The Calcium Kit
– Profiles Of Living
– The Intelligent Farmer
Dr. Beddoe is always ready to point out how vital a proper understanding of calcium is, both in the soil as well as in the diet and chemistry of the plant, animal and especially the human. Reams proved that all the physical manifestations of disease have a root cause in mineral deficiency—beginning with calcium. Dr. Beddoe believes that calcium, as the most vital mineral in biologic life, can only be properly understood in the light of Reams’ Biologic Theory of Ionization principles. And because of the unique pioneering work of Dr. Reams, Dr. Beddoe believes that “healthy soil can have more effect on the health of the planet than all the medical institutions and practitioners in the entire world put together.”
Advanced Ideals Institute is the web organization responsible to promoting Dr. Beddoe’s RBTI work on behalf of Dr. Reams. You are personally invited to visit Advanced Ideals Institute’s website at http://advancedideals.org to experience for yourself what Dr. Beddoe’s work has to offer you in learning RBTI and how it can work for you.
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Conference Speakers
Ellen Hodgson Brown
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, with her 13th book due out soon, titled Banking on the People: Democratizing Finance in the Digital Age. In Web of Debt, she presents an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust,” showing how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves and how we the people can get it back. The Public Bank Solution traces the evolution of two banking models that have competed historically, public and private; and explores contemporary public banking systems globally. Her book Forbidden Medicine traces the suppression of natural health treatments to the same corrupting influences that have captured the money system. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.
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Cathryn Couch
Ceres Community Project
Founder/Executive Director, sustainability & food as medicine activist
Cathryn Couch
Cathryn Couch is the founder and CEO for Ceres Community Project, an innovative non-profit organization working to foster health by connecting people to one another and to a healthier food system. Ceres provides 120,000 organic medically tailored meals annually to primarily low-income people struggling because of a health challenge. Youth volunteers grow food and prepare the meals as part of a youth development and culinary education program. Ceres is one of six agencies currently implementing the first statewide food as medicine pilot for MediCal patients with congestive heart failure. Couch served as Director of Communications for The Hunger Project from 1987 to 1991, and founded the first organic home delivered meal services in the San Francisco Bay Region in 1993. She is a finalist for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Community Health Leaders Award, Leader in Sustainability Award from the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy, finalist for the James Irvine Leadership Award, Red Cross Adult Humanitarian Hero for Northern California and a CNN Hero.
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Peter Donovan
Peter Donovan is the founder of the Soil Carbon Coalition, working to advance the practice, and spread awareness of the opportunity, of turning atmospheric carbon into water-holding, fertility-enhancing soil organic matter and humus. He offers a vision for grassroots science and local action: “it’s time to show with good data what’s possible, and recognize those land managers who know how to enhance soil water capacity, production, and underground biodiversity.”
Peter has a background in livestock herding, holistic management, asset-based community development, and reporting and writing on systems/holistic thinkers and doers. He regularly facilitates workshops on the carbon cycle for scientists and nonscientists, farmers and non-farmers, climate activists and climate skeptics, which cuts across all disciplines of knowledge and is contributing to a transformation of science in the areas of leadership, trust, participation, and power. The workshops tell the fascinating story of why and how carbon cycling was discovered, why the problem-solving orientation of most individuals, organizations, and institutions camouflages the opportunity to successfully manage wholes such as carbon and water cycling, and what individuals and communities can do about it. Since 2011 he has lived and traveled in a converted school bus, establishing 300 baseline plots for soil carbon change across North America, and is now re-sampling many of them. Please join him in exploring the carbon cycle and its relationship to our local landscape and decision-making processes.
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Glen Rein, PhD
Dr. Rein received his PhD from the University of London and pursued his academic research interest in neurochemistry and psychoneuroimmunology at Harvard and Stanford Medical Schools, culminating in an Assistant Professorship at Mt. Sinai Medical School in New York where he researched Bioelectromagnetics. In the late 1980’s with a grant from the Fetzer Institute, he established the Quantum-Biology Research Lab which focused on the biological effects of non-classical electromagnetic fields, including those emitted from healers. In addition, Dr. Rein began his research studying the effects of these forms of subtle energy on water. In 1995 he joined Estée Lauder’s New Venture department to put ‘energy’ into their products. He has authored nearly 50 academic articles and scientific patents. Dr. Rein is on the board of numerous international organizations, has been on several radio and TV shows and lectures worldwide on his pioneering research. Recently, he formed Glee Biologics which is developing water based commercial products imprinted with energetic information for nutraceutical and agricultural applications.
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Jill Clapperton, Ph.D
Jill Clapperton is an internationally-recognised lecturer on how to create and manage the long-term health and productivity of soils. Jill was the Rhizosphere Ecologist at Agriculture and Agri Food Canada Lethbridge Research Centre studying the interaction between soils, plants and soil organisms; she also developed and implemented the Worm Watch program for Environment Canada. After moving to the USA with her family, Jill founded Rhizoterra Inc, a consulting company that connects nutrient density in food with healthy soil. Rhizoterra is a purveyor of information and independent research that supports food growers and consumers around the world in making informed decisions based on science.
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Mark Shepard
Mark Shepard is the CEO of Restoration Agriculture Development, Forest Agriculture Enterprises LLC, and runs New Forest Farm, a 110 acre perennial agricultural savanna, one of the first of its kind in the USA. New Forest Farm is a planned conversion of a typical row-crops grain farm into a commercial-scale, perennial agricultural ecosystem using oak savanna, successional brushland and eastern woodlands as the ecological models.
Trees, shrubs, vines, canes, perennial plants and fungi are planted in association with one another to produce food (for humans and animals) fuel, medicines, and beauty. Hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts and various fruits are the primary woody crops. The farm is solar and wind powered.
Trained in both mechanical engineering and ecology, Mark has developed and patented equipment and processes for the cultivation, harvesting and processing of forest derived agricultural products for human foods and bio fuels production. Mark was certified as a Permaculture designer in 1993 and received his Diploma of Permaculture design from Bill Mollison, the founder of the international Permaculture movement.
He is the author of the bestselling book Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers, available at http://www.acresusa.com/restoration-agriculture-in-practice-book-dvd-combo
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Jim Oschman
Jim Oschman is a biophysicist and an internationally recognized expert on the scientific basis for Energy and Informational Medicine. He has contributed scientific perspectives that clarify controversial issues such as the nature of biological energetics and energetic therapeutics. He has also written extensively on electromagnetic pollution, the mechanisms by which it can produce biological effects, and what can be done about it. Jim has written several popular books on the scientific basis of energy medicine, including Energy Medicine: the scientific basis (Churchill Livingstone, 2000), Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance (Butterworth Heinemann, 2003), and the second edition of Energy Medicine: the scientific basis (Elsevier, 2016). He has also written about 120 articles, including some of the leading peer-reviewed scientific journals and journals on alternative medicine. He has contributed chapters and forwards for many books. Jim provides diverse and multi-disciplinary perspectives based on a variety of types of scientific research and personal experiences. Jim has presented lectures and workshops in about 25 countries around the world. His current research concerns the wellness benefits of connecting with the surface of the earth.
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Judith D. Schwartz
Author, journalist
Judith D. Schwartz
Judith D. Schwartz is a journalist whose recent work looks at soil as a hub for multiple environmental, economic, and social challenges and solutions. She has reported on environmental economics and land/climate dynamics for publications including Scientific American, Yale e360, Time and The Christian Science Monitor. Her 2013 book Cows Save the Planet was awarded a Nautilus Book Award Silver Prize for Sustainability and was among Booklist’s Top 10 Books on Sustainability in 2014. Her most recent book is Water In Plain Sight: Hope for A Thirsty World, which examines how human activity has damaged global water and climate systems and what we can do to restore them. A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and Brown University, Judith lives in Vermont with her family.
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Dan Kittredge
Bionutrient Food Association
Real Food Campaign
Real Food Campaign
Farmer, founder/executive director of BFA and RFC
Dan Kittredge
Dan Kittredge has been an organic farmer for more than 30 years and is the founder and Executive Director of the Bionutrient Food Association (BFA), a non-profit whose mission is to “increase quality in the food supply.”
Dan grew up on Many Hands Organic Farm in central Massachusetts with his parents, Julie Rawson, NOFA-MA Executive Director, and Jack Kittredge, Natural Farmer publisher. After a global career in food and seed activism where he worked with farmers across India, Russia, and South America, Dan returned to the U.S. in 2010 to launch the BFA and ignite a movement around food quality.
Dan has become one of the leading proponents of “nutrient density,” and works to demonstrate the connections between soil health, plant health, and human health through workshops and speaking engagements across the country and globe, the annual Soil and Nutrition Conference, and an increased presence online through social media, a YouTube channel, and an upcoming online course.
In 2018, Dan launched the Real Food Campaign (RFC) that, with open-source science partners Our-Sci and FarmOS, are leading the effort to identify and increase nutrition in the food supply. The RFC has engineered and unveiled a prototype of a hand-held consumer spectrometer, the Bionutrient Meter, designed to test nutrient density at point of purchase and bring transparency to the marketplace. Via the Bionutrient Meter, the goal is to empower consumers to choose for nutrient quality and thereby leverage economic incentives to drive full system regeneration.
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Olivier Husson
Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development
Researcher, educator, agroecologist
Olivier Husson, PhD
Engineer in agronomy (ENSA Montpellier, FR) and Doctor in Agronomy (Wageningen University, NL), Olivier Husson works at CIRAD (Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development), in the AIDA Research Unit (Agroecology and Sustainable Intensification of Annual crops). For 30 years, he has been working on co-designing with farmers Conservation Agriculture systems based on Direct Seeding on permanent soil cover in tropical areas (West Africa, Viet Nam, Madagascar), alternating fundamental research, applied research, training and extension works. Since 2010, he has been developing a “bioelectronics” approach, aiming at using pH, Eh (redox potential) and EC (electrical conductivity) as indicators of soil and plant health and using these indicators as management tools for agroecological crop protection.
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Beverly Rubik
Institute for Frontier Science
Founder/Director of IFS
Faculty member, Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences, Saybrook University
Faculty member, Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences, Saybrook University
Beverly Rubik, PhD
Beverly Rubik earned her Ph.D. in Biophysics at University of California, Berkeley. She is internationally renowned for her research on the biofield, the field of energy-with-information of living systems. Beverly is president/ founder of the Institute for Frontier Science, a nonprofit laboratory in Oakland, California, and is also adjunct faculty in Integrative Health at Saybrook University.
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Mark Cohen
Independent organic inspector, farmer, ethnobotanist, educator and consultant
Mark Cohen
Mark has a background in wildlife biology, ecology, ethnobotany, permaculture, cooperative land use, and renewable energy. Mark has been an organic inspector with OEFFA for 26 years, and lives in Southern Ohio at Far Valley Farm, a 30-year old intentional community he helped co-found. Living off the grid for 37 years and growing a wide range of crops, seeds, honey, mushrooms, and medicinals. He founded the Belize Agroforestry Research Center, a permaculture research and teaching facility based in Southern Belize, and spent 25 winters in Central America practicing and teaching tropical permaculture. Mark is constantly learning, teaching, and consulting (cross-pollinating) in his travels.
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Liz Taggart
Combining her 45-year-long interest in practicing and teaching meditation, and studying the practices found in the ancient Sanskrit texts of the Vedas, Liz approaches farming with an understanding of “inner and outer sustainability.” The consciousness-based practices of the Vedas, such as Yoga and Ayurveda, and dozens of others, provide growers with the tools to culture their inner unlimited resources. In turn, farming is approached from a holistic understanding that all of nature, all aspects of a farm – the farmer, the farm, the plants, animals, seasons, and universe – all function from a common source of consciousness and intelligence. Holistic farming yields extraordinary harvests.
Established 10 years ago, Amba Farms is an award winning organic farm, focused on nutrient dense soil and carefully sourced seeds, and grows a wide variety of produce, berries, fruits and flowers for restaurants, markets and CSA members in Northern Westchester, NY.
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Greg Austic
Greg is an open technology advocate, principal developer at Our Sci, as well as co-organizer of the Gathering of Open Science Hardware (GOSH) and the Gathering for Open Ag Tech (GOAT). He’s a jack of all trades capable of getting an idea off the ground quickly and inexpensively. Prior to Our Sci, Greg co-founded PhotosynQ, a platform for collecting, sharing, and analyzing plant health data, and the MultispeQ, a low-cost device to measure photosynthesis.
With this background in successful open source technologies, Greg and his team at Our Sci have partnered with the BFA and Real Food Campaign, and will lead the development of the platform and sensors for the Bionutrient Meter.
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Dorn Cox
Dorn Cox is a farmer working his 250-acre multigenerational family farm in New Hampshire, and works with numerous organizations as an advocate for regenerative eco-agriculture, including Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment and GreenStart, of which he is Executive Director. His participatory research focuses on collaborative open source research and development for regenerative agricultural systems.
Toward that end, Dorn is a founding member of the Farm Hack community and co-founded the FarmOS software platform. He has developed and shared systems for small-scale grain and oil seeds processing, biofuel production, and no-till and low-till equipment and cover crop systems to increase carbon capture and soil health.
Dorn is also a founding member of the New England Farmers Union, the Great Bay Grain Cooperative, and the Oyster River Biofuel Initiative, as well as an active member of Soil Renaissance as a member of the Measurement Committee. He has a PhD from the University of New Hampshire in Natural Resources and Earth Systems Science.
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Doug DeCandia
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Note: We are still in the process of determining schedules and finalizing details with more exciting speakers, and will add them above as their engagement is confirmed!