Watkins Glen Celebration for the Turkeys

Gene Baur has been hailed as “the conscience of the food movement” by Time magazine. Since the mid-1980s, he has traveled extensively, campaigning to raise awareness about the abuses of industrialized factory farming and our system of cheap food production.

A pioneer in the field of undercover investigations and farm animal rescue, Gene has visited hundreds of farms, stockyards, and slaughterhouses, documenting the deplorable conditions. His pictures and videos exposing factory farming cruelties have aired nationally and internationally, educating millions about the plight of modern farm animals, and his rescue work inspired an international farm sanctuary movement.

Gene has also testified in courts and before local, state, and federal legislative bodies, advocating for better conditions for farm animals. He played a key role in the first-ever cruelty conviction at a U.S. stockyard and enacting the first U.S. laws to prohibit cruel farming systems. His work has been covered by major media organizations, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, NPR and the BBC. Gene has published two bestsellers, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food (Simon and Schuster, 2008) and Living the Farm Sanctuary Life (Rodale, 2015), which he co-authored with Forks Over Knives author Gene Stone. Through his ongoing writing, activism, and speaking engagements, Gene continues working to expose the abuses of factory farming and to advocate for a just and sustainable plant based food system. Gene has a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from California State University, Northridge and a Master’s degree in Agricultural Economics from Cornell University.

Dr. Ashley Gripper is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health and Prevention and an affiliate of The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health.

Dr. Gripper’s academic work, activism, and advocacy all focus on Black people’s connections to Earth and reclamation of land-based living and organizing practices. She has been active in food and land justice movements for a decade and as a result, has built strong relationships with urban and rural growers around the country.

Her work uniquely marries her scholarship to grassroots, antiracist social justice initiatives by taking a somewhat uncommon approach to community engaged research. She demonstrates her commitment to racial equity, justice, and liberation by being deeply embedded in Black and brown food and land-based social movements, and by leading with care of these communities. This is illustrated in her work as a project team member, data analyst, and community engagement specialist for the Philadelphia Urban Agriculture Comprehensive Plan and as a member of Soil Generation, a Black & Brown coalition of women and non-binary farmers and organizers working to ensure community control of land and food. Dr. Gripper also serves as co-chair of the Membership and Governance working group for the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council to the Mayor’s Office.

She completed her PhD in the Population Health Sciences program and Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar.

Twitter: @DoctaGrip
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