With Gratitude: Dr. Ron Weiss, MD
🌿 People Who Shaped the Journey 🌿
🩺 Physician. 🌿 Botanist. 🚜 Farmer. 📚 Teacher.
Thank you, Dr. Weiss.
Garden illustration created with artificial intelligence assistance
🌱 Remembering Ethos Farm Days 2022
New dedicated page: Farm Days — the Garden of Eden reflection, gratitude for Dr. Ron Weiss, the 2022 trailer, and ways to keep learning →
Nathanael’s new photo tribute celebrates Dr. Ron Weiss and the mentors, colleagues, farmers, and students who helped shape his journey: Asha Gala, Nora Pugliese, T. Colin Campbell, Joel Fuhrman, Michael Klaper, Pragya Thakur, and Denise Bitz.
🤝 Companion story · Read alongside
🌙 When the Chiropractor Needs a Nurse Practitioner
A companion to Dr. Ron Weiss’s story: Nathanael’s firsthand account of helping change a phone routine that needlessly disturbed a night-call nurse around shift change, and why caring for caregivers helped shape Flourishing Nursing™.
▶️ Watch Dr. Ron Weiss
🚜 Fresh Local Food as Medicine: Connecting the Soil & Human Health, with Ron Weiss, MD. Tap the video to play it right here with sound.
🌱 Latest from Ethos Primary Care
📡 Newest video first, then older ones play automatically. Tap to play with sound.
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🎬 Honoring Three Years of Mentorship
🌾 For three years, Dr. Ron Weiss was Nathanael’s mentor at Ethos Primary Care, a primary care practice on a working farm in Long Valley, New Jersey, which Forks Over Knives has called the first working farm-based medical practice in the country. 🙏 With gratitude, enjoy the latest videos from Ethos Primary Care above.
🎥 Videos from Dr. Weiss’s Website
These public videos appear on Ethos Primary Care’s website. They play from their original YouTube channels and belong to their owners; sharing them here does not imply endorsement.
▶️ Tap play to watch with sound. Each video plays on to the next automatically.
Dr. Ron Weiss built a primary care practice on a working farm, and a training program that sends new physicians out into the world knowing that food, soil, and listening belong in medicine. We are deeply grateful.
ℹ️ This is a tribute, not a partnership. Dr. Weiss, Ethos Primary Care, and Ethos Farm to Health have no role in and do not endorse Flourishing Nursing or Kitchen Monk™.
👁️ At a glance
- 🏅 Dual board-certified · Diplomate, American Board of Internal Medicine · Diplomate, American Board of Lifestyle Medicine
- 🎓 Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine · Rutgers New Jersey Medical School
- 🏥 Founder and Executive Director · Ethos Primary Care, a farm-based primary care practice in Long Valley, New Jersey
- 🚜 Founder and Board President · Ethos Farm Project, the nonprofit now presented as Ethos Farm to Health
- 🩺 MD · Rutgers New Jersey Medical School
- 🏛️ Internship and residency in internal medicine · George Washington University Medical Center
- 🌿🎵 Bachelor’s degrees in botany and music · Rutgers University, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
🛤️ A physician’s path
Before founding Ethos, Dr. Weiss spent about two decades in medicine across very different settings. He worked as an internist at The World Bank in Washington, D.C., and at The Medical Group of Beverly Hills. He served as an attending emergency physician at UCLA Olive View Medical Center and The General Hospital Center of Passaic. He then founded a busy community medical center in West New York, New Jersey.
By his own public account, caring for his father through pancreatic cancer in the early 1990s turned his attention to nutrition, and to the link between plant science and human health that his botany training had already opened for him. He has taught at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School since 2009.
🚜 A doctor’s office on a farm
Dr. Weiss practices on Ethos Farm, a historic property of roughly 340 acres in Long Valley, New Jersey, farmed with chemical-free, regenerative methods. When Ethos Health launched there in 2014, Rutgers described it as what Dr. Weiss believed to be the only farm-based primary care practice in the country. The farm’s produce reaches patients and neighbors through the Doctor’s Farm Market, which also teaches shoppers about the foods it sells.
As in the ground, so in the body.
A guiding idea of Ethos Primary Care
🌎 Caring for the land, too
- 🏆 The Ethos Farm Project was a semifinalist in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2050 Food System Vision Prize.
- 🦋 Ethos Farm worked with New Jersey Audubon and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to restore native species on the land (reported 2015).
- 🌾 Its Young Farmers Incubator program mentors new farmers (Business News Daily, 2019).
- 🌱 The farm’s conservation work was featured by the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service in “Healing Patients on the Farm” (2019).
🎓 Teaching the next generation of physicians
Through the Ethos Next Generation Physicians Internship, offered with Ethos Farm to Health, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School students can complete a four-week rotation in lifestyle medicine at Ethos Primary Care. Students see patients alongside Dr. Weiss, use whole plant foods and lifestyle change as tools in care, and learn how a regenerative food system connects to the health of people and the planet. Dr. Weiss places special weight on patient support as the key to lasting change.
🌱 Nathanael’s reflection: from next-generation physicians to flourishing nurses everywhere
Ethos’s NextGen Physicians model planted a question in me: what would it look like to form the next generation of nurses this way? Close to the soil, close to the patient, close to the community, and supported so that they can flourish too. That question is part of what grew into Flourishing Nursing and its hope of reaching nurses around the world.
This is Nathanael’s personal reflection on an inspiration. Ethos has no program for nurses connected to Flourishing Nursing, and no collaboration exists.
📺 Teaching the public: “The Doctor Is In” with Chef AJ
Dr. Weiss appears monthly on Chef AJ’s live show to answer viewers’ medical questions. Two of those conversations anchor our first Flourishing Nursing Story.
✍️ Writing by Dr. Weiss
- 📰 “I helped treat the 1st COVID-19 patient in New Jersey. It provided a teachable moment.” The Star-Ledger / NJ.com, April 2020.
- 📰 “Doctor shares the health advice he gives to every COVID-19 patient,” with A. Pawlowski. TODAY.com, April 30, 2020.
🎬 In the media
Dr. Weiss and Ethos have been featured widely, including:
- 🎬 the feature-length documentary Eating You Alive
- 🗞️ The New York Times, on the preservation of the historic farm (2012)
- 📺 The Today Show / TODAY.com, New York Post, and New Jersey Monthly
- 🎓 Rutgers University news, “Physician Grows Primary Care Practice on His Farm” (2015)
- 🩺 Healthline, “This Doctor Is Also a Farmer” (2015); Daily Record and Edible Jersey (2015)
- 🍴 Forks Over Knives, “Meet the Physician-Farmer Who Grows the Plants He Prescribes to His Patients” (2016)
- 💼 Business News Daily (2017 and 2019)
- 🎧 Health Science magazine interview (2019) and the National Health Association podcast (2023)
- 🥬 Organic Produce Network, VegWorld (2020); Observer-Tribune and eco18 (2021); The Black River Journal (2022)
- 🎤 Speaker at national plant-based gatherings including Plantstock and VegFest
🙏 Thank you
We gratefully recognize the educational influence and mentorship of Dr. Ron Weiss. Someone believed in the nurse. Now the nurse is trying to build systems that believe in other nurses.
🧭 Where to next?
📚 Sources
Facts on this page come from public sources, checked September 26, 2026. Summaries are our own.
ℹ️ Kitchen Monk™ and Flourishing Nursing are independent initiatives. Recognition of individuals or organizations on this website does not imply sponsorship, partnership, or endorsement unless explicitly stated. Nothing on this page is medical advice.
Written by Flourishing Nurse Ninja Nathanael Elijah Smith, FNP-C, DipACLM, with artificial intelligence–assisted drafting. Last updated: October 9, 2026.
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” 
