Michael Dimock

Michael Reid Dimock is an organizer and thought leader on food and farming systems and heads Roots of Change, a project of the Public Health Institute. He is currently developing and campaigning for smart, incentive-based food and farm policies that position agriculture and food enterprises as solutions to critical challenges of the 21st century. His opinion editorials have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle and he is a contributor to the blog site Civil Eats. Michael serves on the advisory boards of the UC Davis Agriculture Sustainability Institute and the UCLA Law School’s Resnick Food Law and Policy Program as well as the nonprofit boards of the Food Craft Institute, the Wild Farm Alliance and Sonoma Academy. Author, Katrina Fried, and Photographer, Paul Mobley, feature Michael in their book, Everyday Heroes: 50 Americans Changing The World. He began his career in 1989 as a sales executive in Europe for agribusiness and in 1992 founded Ag Innovations Network to provide strategic planning for companies and governments seeking healthier food and agriculture. In 1996, he founded Slow Food Russian River and, from 2002 to 2007, he was Chairman of Slow Food USA and a member of Slow Food International’s board of directors. Michael’s love for agriculture and food systems grew from experiences on a 13,000-acre cattle ranch in Santa Clara County in his youth and a development project with Himalayan subsistence farmers in Nepal in 1979. In the 1980s, he was a campaign worker for California Governor Jerry Brown. Michael earned a BA in History with Honors at UCLA and a Masters in International Affairs at Columbia University.

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