Keynote Speakers
We are proud to announce our 2011 Winter Conference Keynote Speakers...
Ben Hewitt, Vermont farmer and author
Jack Lazor, Butterworks Farm, Westfield, Vermont
- speaking on -
Cultivating an Organic Future for New Hampshire:
Connecting Food, Farms, and Communities
Ben Hewitt writes and farms in Northern Vermont. His work has appeared in numerous national periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Gourmet, Discover, Skiing, Eating Well, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Bicycling, Yankee, and many others. He and his family live in a self-built, solar-powered house in Cabot, Vermont, and operate a 40-acre livestock, vegetable, and berry farm.
His book, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food (2009), published by Rodale, tells the story of a rural, working-class Vermont community that is attempting to blueprint and implement a localized food system. Ben’s forthcoming book on food safety, Making Supper Safe: Why We've Lost Trust in Our Food and How We Can Get It Back, is due out in June, 2011. Making Supper Safe explains why we should worry, but it is also a quest to understand how we can learn to trust our food again.
Jack Lazor is co-owner of Butterworks Farm in Westfield, VT, with his wife Anne.
Butterworks Farm is located in the mountains of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Jack and Anne are unique among New England organic dairies for a number of reasons. They’ve been farming organically since 1975 and are totally self-sufficient. They grow all the food their cows eat, including corn, oats, barley, soybeans, and alfalfa and produce organic Jersey milk yogurt, buttermilk, sweet Jersey cream, cheddar cheese, and grain products. Butterworks Farms doesn't use antibiotics, hormones, herbicides or pesticides. Instead, they promote life and health at all levels and want to remain a small one-farm operation.
Being encouraged by the growing interest in eating more locally, Jack and Anne have become mentors to beginning farmers who want to succeed as stewards of the earth and producers of food.
