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.