Agriculture
Ross Conrad learned his craft from the late Charles Mraz, world-renowned beekeeper and founder of Champlain Valley Apiaries in Vermont. Former president of the Vermont Beekeepers Association, Conrad is a regular contributor to Bee Culture—The Magazine of American Beekeeping. He has led bee-related presentations and taught organic beekeeping workshops and classes throughout North America for many years. His small beekeeping business, Dancing Bee Gardens, supplies friends, neighbors, and local stores with honey and candles, among other bee related products, and provides bees for Vermont apple-pollination in spring.
Will Allen is an organic farming visionary. He grew up on a small farm in southern California and served in the US Marine Corps. After receiving a PhD in Anthropology (focusing on Peruvian tropical forest agriculture) he taught at the University of Illinois and UC Santa Barbara before being fired and jailed for civil rights and antiwar activism. In 1972 he returned to farming full-time, and has been farming organically ever since, in Oregon, California, and Vermont, where he now co-manages Cedar Circle Farm. He founded the Sustainable Cotton Project and is a board member of the Organic Consumers Association, Rural Vermont, and co-chair of Farms Not Arms.
