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
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.
Alli Maloney
Managing Editor, The New Farmer's Almanac
Alli Maloney is an editor, photographer and writer growing food in Appalachia. She has collaborated with Greenhorns as an editor and contributor on two editions of The New Farmer’s Almanac and currently serves as managing editor for the sixth, expected in 2023. She has previously worked with organizations such as UNICEF, Greenpeace and Agrarian Trust, as a United Nations Foundation Press Fellow, and written for outlets like Pacific Standard and Quartz on issues including plastic pollution, the climate refugee crisis, and racism within police departments. She launched and managed Teen Vogue’s news and politics vertical, producing award-winning columns and editorial packages as senior politics editor. Her most recent published work can be found in No Planet B: A Teen Vogue Guide to the Climate Crisis.
Renee Rhodes
Outreach/Commissioning Editor of the New Farmer's Almanac
Renée is an artist, writer, gardener, and cultural worker living in San Francisco, California — 2 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Her past work has seen her developing and supporting creative programming for arts-based organizations like San Francisco Art Institute, Root Division, and Creativity Explored; while also engaging in land-based work at community farms and ecological restoration sites like Alemany Farm and Literacy for Environmental Justice. She holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as hands-on certifications in ecological restoration, farming, and gardening from various Bay Area environmental organizations. She is passionate about the intersection of art, writing, and ecology and believes that artists are important thought partners in the development of our collective ecological literacy. Currently, she is planting a successional grassland on an old sand dune with native California grasses she grew at home from seed.
Alex Plowden
Administrative Coordinator & Smithereen Farm Liaison
Alex has transitioned to a new role as COO of Smithereen Farm, but still provides administrative support for Greenhorns’ many programs. He approaches this work with a passion for strengthening local food systems, building resilience in rural areas, and reducing our reliance on economies of extraction. He holds a BA in Informed Regional Planning and a Masters of Public Policy from UMass Amherst. He previously worked to raise funds to support cooperatives and healthy food outlets in underserved areas at the Local Enterprise Assistance Fund in Boston. When not on the farm, you can find Alex at Lubec Brewing Co., hiking the Bold Coast, or around the campfire on the shores of Cobscook Bay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wilder Nicholson
Digital Media Coordinator and Producer
Wilder is a documentary filmmaker and farmer working from Maine and unceded Wabanaki land. He began telling stories with nonprofits in 2014 with a Community Matters Grant with Bowdoin College, and earned a BA in Environmental Studies and Economics. As a director he has produced documentaries and educational media around land rights, sustainable tourism, natural history, and local food movements locally and abroad. In 2016 he worked as a Conservation Media Group Film Fellow with Hurricane Island Foundation, and in 2019 directed Local Foods in Cooperation, a documentary profiling eight cooperative businesses in the local food system of Maine. Wilder is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and is currently studying at the Neohumanist College of Asheville. When there’s a chance to put the camera away, he is at home tending a garden, looking after his three goats, and enjoying yoga and meditation. At Greenhorns, Wilder coordinates and produces for social media and the EarthLife episodes.
Nicole Lavelle
Graphics
Nicole Lavelle is an artist and designer living on 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 climate change. Some of her favorite farmers tend the earth at Pie Ranch, Gospel Flats, Little Wing, Wavelength, Shao Shan, and of course, Smithereen. She’s worked with Greenhorns as a graphic designer since 2015.
CURRENT & FORMER COLLABORATORS
Molly Danielsson • Amy Franceschini • Taylor 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