Our Team

The Greenhorns team is geographically widespread and volunteer-driven. Our core team consists of a few part-time staff who coordinate projects with a rotating crew of contributors and seasonal collaborators. Most of us have at least a couple hands or feet in farming, and with the others we coordinate media, events, and civic engagement.
We believe in grassroots community organizing, and in highlighting the voices of farmers in mainstream media. By bundling and broadcasting our down-to-earth messages, we hope to interpret the professional opportunities in agriculture for new entrants, welcome them to our evolving agricultural community, and build cultural solidarity for this new farmers movement.

GREENHORNS TEAM

Severine von Tscharner Fleming

Severine von Tscharner Fleming

Director

Severine is a farmer, activist, and organizer based in Downeast Maine. Along with her husband Terran, she runs Smithereen Farm, a MOFGA certified organic diverse agroforestry operation and fruit orchard that includes wild blueberries, cranberries, vegetables, mushrooms, herbs, farmed and wild seaweeds and a small oyster lease. Looking out on Cobscook Bay, Smithereen farm hosts summer campers and educational workshops as well as a shared-use commercial kitchen/ agricultural processing hub and farm-store. She is a founder and director of the Greenhorns, a 15 year old grassroots organization whose mission is to recruit, promote, and support the incoming generation of organic farmers in America. Greenhorns are best known for The New Farmer’s Almanac a literary journal heading into its sixth edition—and their documentary film, “The Greenhorns,” along with super diverse media projects: anthologies, digital maps, oral histories, exhibits, trade stunts, a large agrarian library and artist in residency program etc. Current projects include: Seaweed Commons, an international learning and advocacy network for conservation minded seaweed farmers, wild harvesters, marine biologists and researchers, and 'Maine myco-buoy project' developing ecological gear for small scale sea-farming. Earthlife.tv a digital curricula about our home landscape, Civic halls project, supporting revitalization and adaptive re-use of community architecture in Maine and the CCC project, participatory mapping in rural townships aimed at reducing climate impacts and increasing resilience through small scale ecological restorations. Greenhorns believe in lively and diverse approaches to the cultural life of ecological farming. Come visit us on our beautiful campus in seaside Maine! Severine is board president of Agrarian Trust, a land commoning organization and board secretary of Farm Hack, an online, open-source platform for appropriate and affordable farm tools and technologies. She also serves on the board of the Schumacher Center for New Economics, The Merwin Conservancy, on the advisory board of Savanna Institute, and as an Edmund Hillary Fellow. Severine attended Pomona College and the University of California at Berkeley, where she graduated with a B.S. in Conservation/ Agroecology from the College of Natural Resources.

Sue Van Hook

Sue Van Hook

MycoBuoys Project Director and Mycologist

Sue is a mycologist, naturalist, teacher and healer. She has been studying the taxonomy and ecology of fungi for the past 5 decades, having begun her coursework in the Pacific Northwest where the mushroom season lasts 9 months of the year. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees in botany and mycology at Humboldt State University under the tutelage of Dr. David L. Largent. She worked in land conservation and stewardship for Maine Coast Heritage Trust and as a Preserve Manager for The Nature Conservancy in California. For 18 years she taught biology and environmental science labs at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. While at Skidmore she served as a mycological consultant to Ecovative for the first three years before becoming the full time Mycologist at the company. In her retirement she consults and teaches about fungi. She is leading the MycoBuoys Project at Smithereen Farm with Greenhorns.

Nicole Lavelle

Nicole Lavelle

Graphics

Nicole Lavelle is an artist and designer living on Coast Miwok and Karkin Ohlone territory, in what is now known as the San Francisco Bay Area. She has never been a farmer, but she understands the critical role that small, independent farms play in feeding communities, caring for ecosystems, and mediating the damage of climate change. Some of her favorite farms include Pie Ranch, Gospel Flats, Little Wing, Wavelength, and of course, Smithereen. She’s worked with Greenhorns as a graphic designer since 2015. nicolelavelle.com

Jessica Muise

Jessica Muise

Grants

An artist, nonprofit leader, and educator, Jessica Muise is passionate about helping people make the world they imagine through transformative experiences in creative community. Born and raised outside of Boston, MA, USA, she is the product of generations of laborers and craftspeople - people who build things. She has dedicated her professional career to supporting shared infrastructure for artists, creatives, and engineers working for a better world. She brings a wealth of experience in outreach, fundraising, marketing, program management, and strategic planning at the intersection of arts, environment, and creative placemaking. Now the Interim Executive Director at TEMPOart, she has worked for the New England Foundation for the Arts, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Engine, National Choreography Month, The Umbrella Arts Center, and Artisan’s Asylum. As a multidisciplinary artist and educator, Jessica has been teaching and creating art throughout New England for the past 15 years. Her choreography integrating dance into public spaces has been showcased internationally. Aspiring to have hands more often in the earth, certificates in permaculture design and master gardening guide the transformation of her Biddeford, ME backyard. www.jessicabmuise.com

Nadine Biss

Nadine Biss

Civic Halls Initiative Intern

Nadine Biss is a native Eastporter who grew up playing classical and fiddle music around Washington County. She left the area to attend Wheaton College (MA), studying Sociology and Art History, and then worked at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since 2017, she has lived in and traveled around Australia and New Zealand, pivoting her focus toward community development and permaculture. She is currently on a break from travel and has returned to Eastport for lots of family time, outdoor activities and more fiddling.

Liz Baumhoff

Liz Baumhoff

Farm Hack Fellow

Liz grew up in Maine with a family and community excited about homegrown and local organic food, which laid a foundation for her interest in healthy food systems and resilient communities. She believes in accessible information and technology, and the self-determination and involvement of individuals in their communities. Liz has been leading harvest and field work crews on a 150-acre vegetable farm for the past three years. Before the pandemic she worked as an engineer in experimental and computational fluid dynamics. She enjoys making her own hard- and soft-bound notebooks, textiles, and clothes. She has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a second major in Applied Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko

Artist & Engineer in Residence

Natalie Jeremijenko (b. 1966, Australia) is an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia awarded in 2018 by the governor-general on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II for “distinguished service to the arts, and to higher education as an academic, through pioneering contributions to architecture, technology, the sciences, and engineering, and to rural and urban design.” Jeremijenko is an artist and engineer whose work has been included in two Whitney Biennials, MOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Reina Sofia museum, MACBA, and CCCB among many others.

Her public art installations include “Tree Logic” at MASSMoCA; “OneTrees” in the San Francisco Bay Area; “TREExOFFICEs” in London and Berlin; Amphibious Architecture in East River, NYC, and Derwent River Tasmania; and “Urban Space Station (USS)” at Emscherkunst in Dortmund. Solo retrospectives have been produced by the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Cummings Center for the Arts at Connecticut College and she is represented by Postmasters Gallery in NY. Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic (xCLINIC) !international: a network of co-laboratories addressing the external determinants of health, measurably improving local human and environmental health. She is founding Director of Design Engineering at the Museum of Natural Futures (MoNF), a new initiative to exhibit and develop shared infrastructures that improve rather than degrade human and environmental health.

Jeremijenko is associate professor in the Visual Art Department at NYU where she is also affiliated with the Computer Science Dept and Environmental Studies program. Previously she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD, the Faculty of Engineering at Yale University directing Yale’s Engineering Design Studio, a visiting professor at Royal College of Art in London, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Michigan State University, and Visiting Global Distinguished Professor at the NYU College of Arts and Sciences. Her awards and honors include the VIDA Art and Artificial Life International Awards Pioneer Prize; the Advance Commercial Creatives Award (2019); the Most Innovative People (2013); most influential women in technology (2011); one of the inaugural top young innovators by MIT Technology Review and included in the 40 most influential designers internationally by I.D. Magazine.

Lou Marie Judge

Lou Marie Judge

Librarian in Residence

Lou has spent years working as a reference librarian at public libraries in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. She has also been a research assistant at Harvard, an info specialist at American Farmland Trust, and a resident archivist at The Open Society Archives. Lou has worked on several organic vegetable production farms in the New England region and has volunteered over the years on non-profit committees and municipal councils. In her varied roles, Lou has built a wide skill set in agricultural knowledge preservation and dissemination, working closely with farmers, activists, municipalities, and research institutions. Lou holds a Master of Library and Information Science from Valdosta State University as well as a Master of Arts in Film Studies from Eötvös Loránd University.

Christine Ruth Handte

Christine Ruth Handte

Visiting Teacher

Expedition Chief of the Research Vessel Heraclitus and a Director of the Institute of Ecotechnics (UK/USA) and of Ecotechnics Maritime (UK). Onboard the R/V Heraclitus for over 30 years she has overseen the training program for aspiring seapeople, carrying out cetacean and coral reef studies and most recently documenting ‘Lives and legends of the Mediterranean Sea’. She is currently co-directing the complete rebuild of the Heraclitus in Spain and is heading up the team developing expedition projects for the next 5 year & 30,000 nm voyage in the North & South Atlantic. Christine is also an artist and has directed and performed for the Blue Planet Ensemble in ports around the world.

Milo Vella

Milo Vella

Grants

Milo Vella is an Almanac illustration contributor and part-time grant writer for Greenhorns. Otherwise, he serves full-time as Garden, Farmers Market, and Sustainable Foods Program Manager for the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley, in California’s Eastern Sierra. He also teaches gardening and nature study to kindergarteners and first graders in the county schools. Milo is a graduate of Deep Springs College (a two-year scholarship program on a high-desert cattle ranch) and Cornell University. At the latter, he worked for the Small Farms Program, Sustainable Cropping Systems Lab, Dilmun Hill Student Farm, Blue Heron Farm, and participated in the Agroecology Working Group. His interdisciplinary honors thesis focused on the political ecology of Paiute agricultural traditions. Born and grazed in San Francisco, Milo is grateful for foundational experiences with the Futurefarmers artist collective, Live Power Community Farm, Green Gulch Organic Farm, and Pie Ranch.

Elena Bird

Elena Bird

Seaweed Commons Program Manager & Greenhorns Project Manager

Elena is a temporarily retired farmer, a student of corvids, and a generally awe-struck individual in the world. People, their creativity, and their capacity for finding joy are a source of inspiration. With that as a guide, Elena dedicates much of their time to creating space for the genius and joy of humans to come together and manifest more equitable and life-centered visions for the world. Sometimes that means hosting too many potlucks and other times, scheduling Zoom calls. Elena is currently living on land known as Dejope to the Ho-Chunk Nation. They are working towards their M.S. in Agroecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noodling their way into the lives and work of local food growers and land stewards, and coordinating the Seaweed Commons and other Greenhorns’ projects.

CURRENT & FORMER COLLABORATORS

Hannah Aitken • Devin Balkind • Audrey Berman • Ethan Bien • Zoe Ida Bradbury Chandler Briggs • Brooke Budner • Holli Cedarholm • Claire Cekander • Inés Chapela Hallie Chen • Tyler Christie • Laura Fong Cline • Anne Dailey 
Molly Danielsson • Amy FranceschiniTaylor Gentry • Faith Gilbert • Eliza Greenman • Jen Griffith • Daniel Grover Laura Hanna • Will Harron • Louella Hill • Anya Kamenskaya • Christopher Lee Kennedy • Tianna Kennedy 
Rosy Keyser • Patrick Kiley • Jordan Kinley • Eva King •Nicole Lavelle • Kristen Loria • Charlie Macquarie • Ginny Maki Paula Manalo • Lulu McClellan • Elise McMahon • Derrick Mead • James Most • Dan Paluska • Eric Phillips-Horst • Nanette Phillips 
Bonnie Powell • Megan Shaw Prelinger • Rick Prelinger • Michelle Rehme • Alanna Rose 
Laura Schoorl • Cara Sipprelle • Naomi Starkman • Connor Stedman • Jessica Suda • Henry Tarmy • Sarah Tautin 
Cleo Ulatowski  • Brooke Werley • Tusha Yakovleva