Brooks Lamb is the Director of Food Systems and Agriculture Policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. Through coordinated communications, strategic programming, thoughtful partnerships, and courageous policy development, he leads efforts to secure a better future for family-scale farms and ranches, rural communities and economies, and local and regional food systems. Before leading this new initiative at VPA, he worked for five years in various roles with American Farmland Trust.
Brooks is the author of two books, including
Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place (Yale Univ. Press, 2023), which reviewers have called “excellent,” “inspiring,” and “an invaluable resource for scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersections of agriculture, culture, and land stewardship.” He has published essays in
The New York Times,
Gravy,
Barn Raiser, and
Oxford American, among other respected outlets. He also teaches as an adjunct professor at Rhodes College, where he leads a course called “American Agriculture: Past, Present, Progress.” He earned his bachelor’s degree in history with minors in political science and environmental studies from Rhodes. While there, he was named a Truman Scholar, the nation’s premiere scholarship for students interested in public service. He received his master’s degree from Yale School of the Environment and was awarded the school’s highest academic honor for his research on small farmers’ resilience in the face of structural adversities.
Although he and his wife now live in Memphis,
Brooks grew up on a small farm in Marshall County, Tennessee. He remains active in the farm’s stewardship, returning often to tend the land alongside his family. To see
Brooks’s publications and learn more about his work, visit
www.brookslamb.com.
