Meet The Team: Stephen Ely

Seven years ago Evan Marks launched an eco-education center for Southern California. He had wanted to use his agroecology degree from UC Santa Cruz and his experience designing and managing large-scale organic farms in Latin America and West Africa to help people directly impact the environment in a positive way through individual change. Today, The Ecology Center is a thriving “biodiverse learning garden and community gathering space” where numerous workshops, commu

The maverick is Watson, the IBM-developed artificial intelligence software that famously beat computer-like human Ken Jennings in Jeopardy! back in 2011. Since the game show, the supercomputer and its impressive cognitive abilities have been tasked with helping doctors diagnose patients and companies improve productivity. In its free time, it’s been moonlighting as a chef. Watson can’t cook — not yet, anyway. But it has been developing recipes for everythi

The new online platform aims to make pasture leasing as simple as possible. Such arrangements are already pretty clear cut — a land owner agrees to let a rancher graze a plot for a set amount of time at a certain cost. It allows the rancher to feed cattle when she lacks land herself or if the weather drys up the grass for a few seasons. Livsey knows all too well how a drought can force livestock operators to scramble. Not only does she sell drought insurance to cattle

As a young girl in the early 1980s, Anya Fernald hit the Eugene, Oregon, farmers market every Saturday morning. Not to buy produce, or even hawk it. Instead, this enterprising second grader busked with her violin, collecting change from the growers, purveyors, and free spirits who strolled through the stalls. “You always want to think you’re your own creation,” she says. “But looking back, I realize that growing up in a hippie hotbed exposes