Herrick Fox

Background

About Herrick Fox

Herrick (“Rick”) Fox is a forester and policy practitioner dedicated to advancing a global bioeconomy that works for everyone. After 18 years in forestry and bioeconomy with the US Department of Agriculture and five years in the hemp industry, Rick currently consults on international bioeconomy initiatives and holds a 2026 Visiting Scholar appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is teaching a seminar on forest bioeconomy and supporting the development of the University’s global bioeconomy programming. Prior to this, until early 2025, Rick served as USDA’s Bioeconomy Coordinator, representing the Department on the White House National Bioeconomy Board Secretariat and coordinating across twelve USDA agencies and $4.6B in bioeconomy programming in agricultural and woody biomass value chains for biobased manufacturing. In Rick's earlier tenure with USDA he served in the Forest Service, first in land management on National Forests and later in forest policy with senior USDA officials and the US Senate Committee on Agriculture. Thereafter he led a division in agricultural trade capacity-building in USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service. In his early career, Rick worked in Siberia and the Russian Far East for six years in the 1990’s, in biodiversity conservation and forestry research. Rick holds a Bachelor of Science degree from U.C. Berkeley and a Master’s in Forest Science from Yale. An avid skier and hiker since early childhood, when he’s not navigating marble caverns in government and ivory towers in academia, Rick continues to hone his gravity management skills on the mountainsides of northern Vermont, striving valiantly to keep up with his teenagers.