John Kempf

John Kempf is an entrepreneur, speaker, podcast host and teacher. He is passionate about the potential of well managed agriculture ecosystems to reverse ecological degradation.

John believes regenerative agriculture management systems can:

• regenerate producer profitability and create economic incentives for producers

• produce crops that are inherently resistant to possible infections by insects, bacteria, fungi, nematodes and viruses, eliminating the need for pesticides.

• produce food that can regenerate public health, with an elevated content of immune compounds that transfer plant immunity to livestock and people, providing food as medicine.

• rapidly sequester carbon, build soil organic matter much faster than commonly expected, restore hydrological cycles, cool the climate, and reduce the water requirements of a crop.

Carolyn Gahn

Carolyn Gahn is the Senior Director of Mission and Advocacy for Applegate. She started her career as a community organizer with Community Farm Alliance, has worked on several diversified farms (including her own), and spent a decade as an entrepreneur with a food manufacturing business. Her core values have always been that good food and healthy soil can heal the planet. She lives near Lexington, Kentucky with her family and animals.

Megan Westgate

After years of passionate food advocacy, Megan helped launch the Non-GMO Project in 2006. She became Executive Director in 2007 and has been hard at work to protect the future of non-GMO food ever since.

As a national thought leader on the non-GMO issue, Megan is a highly respected speaker and has been featured in numerous national publications and forums.

Dan Kittredge

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.

Stephan van Vliet

Dr. Stephan van Vliet is a nutrition scientist with metabolomics expertise in NDFS. He earned his PhD in Kinesiology as an ESPEN Fellow from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and received training at the Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine and Duke University School of Medicine.

Dr. van Vliet’s research is performed at the nexus of agricultural and human health. He routinely collaborates with farmers, ecologists, and agricultural scientists to study critical linkages between agricultural production methods, the nutrient density of food, and human health

Eric Smith

Eric Smith is CEO/Co-Founder of Edacious, a technology platform for differentiating food quality and creating linkages between soil and human health through food nutrient composition. He was most recently Director of Neglected Climate Opportunities, the Grantham Foundation's venture capital vehicle where he led investments in businesses that can remove carbon and GHG at scale. Eric was previously with SJF Ventures and worked for BlackRock on climate finance, in addition to providing advisory services to forest carbon and other natural resource management projects. He received his MBA and Master of Forestry from Duke and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Costa Rica.

Tina Owens

Tina is a systems leader, strategist and futurist within the Organic and Regenerative Agriculture movements in the United States. She is currently the Sr. Fellow of Regenerative Agriculture at the Soil & Climate Alliance of Green America and is co-leading the Nutrient Density Alliance. Tina’s background spans two decades within the world’s largest food companies and includes leading transformational shifts in food and agriculture systems via supply and operations as it relates to on-farm profitability, sustainability, carbon sequestration, consumer activism related to clean label and organics, plus unfolding food as medicine and nutrient dense systems. She walks the talk through regeneration of the land on her own family farm in Michigan where Tina and her family raise heritage, pastured animals for nutrient dense outcomes, to regenerate their land, and to provide a deeper understanding of these food systems as it relates to scaling regional, regenerative agriculture nationally.

Erwin Westers

We always like to ensure that a significant quotient of presenters at our conference are growers, and Erwin is one I am looking forward to helping more people know about. Now having taken over management of his family’s 2000 hectare farm at the edge of the sea in the Netherlands from his parents, Erwin is a beautiful example of the next generation of young growers implementing the wisdom that has been coming forth on scale and very successfully. From no till successional polycultures that are seed crops, to making ormus on scale, to sophisticated compost and other teas Erwin is exemplifying biological ag on scale. Balancing multigenerational family with cutting edge production, and, very exciting to me, high quality seed production, his is a wonderful case study.

As well, he is working with those in the Germanic speaking world who have many powerful insights not yet translated into English that many of those reading this are therefore not aware of. It continues amaze to me how many people whose first language is not English there are out there doing brilliant work that the anglophone world is not yet aware of. Think Pierre Wiell and Olivier Husson from our 2021 conference for example. Let this be a further dive into that cultural bridging.

Dietmar Näser

I introduced the term regenerative agriculture to German-speaking agriculture together with Friedrich Wenz. It is an open term, without patent protection. That’s a good thing, because regenerative agriculture has been created by many farmers around the world and should be developed further. There is also a claim: you should be able to say for yourself what you want to regenerate: I am working to restore microbial soil life, humus and the highest concentration of vital substances in the harvest. You should also be able to say how you do this: I promote the degree of soil cover and the vitality of the plant population and create the environment for soil microbiology at the roots. Both - plants and soil microbes - work so closely together that they form a functional unit, a metabolic system, a holobiont. Growing crops regeneratively therefore means managing a holobiont, creating the best metabolic conditions for plants and the soil microbiome together.

Growing up with gardener parents, my childhood was characterized by growing beds and the work around them. The impulse of soil fertility has always been with me.

I wanted to become an artisan and became an agronomist. Initially in a large cooperative in the GDR, where I absorbed all the details of large-scale agriculture - it was hard, but it was my dream. I got to know everything from staking out beet plots to keeping material records, but my most frequent work was checking the crop stands and instructing fertilization and plant protection work. I was always interested in why weeds and diseases occur, not just how to control them. Slowly, my understanding of the secrets of soil fertility and yield formation grew. In recent years I have worked there on the introduction of computerized management systems.

After the political change, I wanted to set up a tree nursery. An accident prevented that. So I worked temporarily for the state plant protection service. That wasn’t my goal, but it was necessary.

I’ve been self-employed for two decades now. I finally had my dream! Initially, my services consisted of coordinating cultivation work to prevent plant diseases and weeds. Later, I started to offer my agronomic knowledge in courses. This brought me to farmers in many European countries. It was an exciting time and I got to know many farmers who were open- minded about soil fertility.

I have since co-founded a company for regional climate protection projects. We bring tradespeople and farmers together. The voluntary climate protection services of the entrepreneurs are paid to the humus farmers for binding CO2 by building up humus. This project brings us into contact with universities that are working on basic research into regenerative cultivation methods.

I am now involved in international projects on humus formation, the implementation of regenerative agriculture and climate adaptation in agriculture. However, my most important activity is always working with farmers to further develop regenerative cultivation methods. That’s why I also know Erwin Westers in the Netherlands and Adrian Rubi in Switzerland.

Dr. Minha Rajput-Ray

Dr Minha trained in Conventional-Allopathic Medicine @ The University of Dundee (2005), Scotland; being awarded the first UK NIHR (Walport) Academic Clinical Fellowship (2008) in Rheumatology and Pain @ The University of Manchester and @ The University of Cambridge which was then followed by further post graduate experience in Occupational and Disability Medicine in London with experience in complex case management for Primary Care Services, NHS workers, Public Services (Teachers, Higher and Further Education staff, Law Enforcement Agencies: Police, Armed Forces Veterans, Probation Service), the Safety Critical Sector, Logistics (Road, Rail and Offshore), Heavy industry manufacturing, and Charitable Sector (including SMEs and Social Enterprises) and liaison with Human Resources within the Corporate and Finance Sector. Her team spirit and contributions have been recognized globally, being awarded the Golden Jubilee Travelling Fellowship (2016), Mobbs Corporate Fellowship (2016) and European Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ESPEN) MNI Award (2017) at The Hague. In addition to being a Fully Registered and Licensed Medical Doctor, Dr Minha also has over 20 years post-graduate experience as a Registered Osteopathic and Naturopathic Physician (1st Class Honours, London 2001). 

Following major injury, trauma and illness in 2019/2020, Dr Minha was able to incorporate Integrative-Lifestyle-Functional-Ecological Medicine pathways of care to heal herself. The combination of her Lived Experience, Clinical and Research Practice paved the way to establish The @ Curaidh Clinic Collaborative Care Model in 2021, www.curaidh.com (a tertiary referral centre based in Scotland, pioneering Innovative Approaches to Pain, Chronic Disease and Work Health). A key focus is guiding patients and their families through the maze of unexplained medical conditions, persistent pain and fatigue syndromes (including Long-Covid and Lyme and co-infections). This has led to the successful implementation of integrated care pathways, with a virtual network of clinicians globally (the Integrated Health-Healing Harmony Matrix) alongside standard medical care. Outcomes include increased productivity, reduced sickness absence, sustainable wellness via a healthy ageing approach in tackling pain, fatigue, associated mental health issues, effects of chronic disease and health-related disability.
Leadership positions have included Medical Director and Head of Wellbeing at Work @ NNEDPRO Global Centre for Nutrition and Health, Cambridge. Founding Trustee of OSH Africa and Chair of the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH) Scientific Committee on UJIH (Unemployment, Job Insecurity and Health), enabling sustainable healthcare from a Local to Global perspective. Dr Minha continues to give back; via Medical Advisory positions, to 3 UK based charities FPOD (Forgotten Patients, Overlooked Diseases), Scottish Ballet Social Prescribing - Well-being Advisory Group and the Lyme Resource Centre (LRC).

Recent Publications as follows:
- Book Chapter: Nutrition in Musculoskeletal and Disability Medicine. Rajput-Ray M , Armstrong D. 2024 Essentials of Nutrition in Medicine and Healthcare, 1st Edition. A Practical Guide, Elsevier Press, ISBN:978-0702080401
- Garg K, Thoma A, Avramovic G, Gilbert L, Shawky M, Rajput-Ray MR, Lambert JS. Biomarker-Based Analysis of Pain in Patients with Tick-Borne Infections before and after Antibiotic Treatment Antibiotics 2024, 13-639.
- Xi D, Garg K, Lambert, JS, Rajput-Ray M, Madigan A, Avramovic G, Gilbert L. Scrutinizing Clinical Biomarkers in a Large Cohort of Patients with Lyme Disease and Other Tick-Borne Infections. Microorganisms 2024,12, 380.
-Xi D, Thoma A, Rajput-Ray M, Madigan A, Avramovic G, Garg K, Gilbert L, Lambert JS. A Longitudinal Study of a Large Clinical Cohort of Patients with Lyme Disease and Tick-Borne Co-Infections Treated with Combination Antibiotics. Microorganisms 2023,11, 2152.

Tim LaSalle

Tim LaSalle has served as the first CEO of Rodale Institute, Executive Director of the Allan Savory Center for Holistic Management, consultant, advisor, and research coordinator for the Howard Buffett Foundation in Africa on soils and food security for smallholder farmers. He is Professor Emeritus of California Polytechnic State University, and former President/CEO, of the California Agriculture Leadership Program where he arranged educational leadership programs in more than 80 countries with heads of state, ministers, and community leaders.

Ken Hamilton

https://biomineralstechnologies.com/

Mark Frederiks

My name is Mark Frederiks. I’m founder of innovation agency amped.nl and short food chain enterprise local2local.nl. We are active in The Netherlands, Europe and the Middle East. I’m partner of Climate KIC, the H2020 Smartchain consortium and active in the EU4advice project. I believe that by working together and looking at systems differently, models emerge that can solve challenges in social, economic and environmental areas.

We work on the transition of food systems empowering chains of trust using gamification, data and blockchain technology building on nature based principles through our GAIN transition model. Currently we are working on a robust, regional, regenerative foodsystem in the metropoleregion of Amsterdam as a part of the realization of a learning ecosystem of regional food networks. Inspiration videos of our GAIN transition model and our latest presentation in Dubai of our ambitions building an eco system of regional food networks. You want to know more about our nature based principles see this Dutch video with English subtitles.

Adrian Rubi

The technician and agricultural expert.
Growing up on a farm, Adrian knew early on the importance of fertile soil.
BSc in Environmental Engineering, specialising in Organic Agriculture and Horticulture.