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.
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
Civic Halls / Local Food
Nadine Biss is a native Eastporter who, after many years of global wandering, is back in Washington County and excited to be a part of the local food ecosystem at Greenhorns. She grew up very musically-involved at the Eastport Arts Center and ended up working on community projects and fundraising for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 2017, she flew across the world for a year of exploration in Australia, which turned into five years between Oz and New Zealand. While there, she developed interests in cookery, permaculture, and intentional communities—which she put to use in Christchurch to co-create a warehouse community based on principles of inclusion, resourcefulness and a good bit of scavenging. In 2022, she returned to Eastport and, in between travels in Europe and North Africa, she worked remotely managing the Maine Civic Halls Initiative, a project of Greenhorns, Maine Preservation and the Friends of Liberty Hall. This research on Washington and Hancock counties' local community infrastructure was published in July 2023 and will be extended to include a statewide map and survey. This year, she has plans to cook up a storm at Smithereen’s own commercial kitchen, the Minke, play fiddle music, sew and quilt and go for lots of swims at Nash Lake with family, both human and canine.
Nicole Lavelle
Graphics / Communications
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 impacts 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, on and off, since 2015, and in earnest once more since 2022. You can learn more about her at nicolelavelle.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
GREENHORNS BOARD
Sarah Wenzel Fisher
President
Sarah has worked in food and agriculture planning for over a decade with a focus on supporting young and beginning farmers and ranchers. She was the editor of Edible Santa Fe from 2011 to 2017. From 2013 to 2015 she worked for the National Young Farmers Coalition as an organizer and is currently on the board of the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance and the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. She is a committed champion of the local food movement and of resilient and regenerative agriculture. In her free time, you can find her feeding pigs, turkeys and cows, checking the compost pile, or possibly weeding a patch of beans at Polk’s Folly Farm where she lives.
Amber Reed
Secretary
Amber’s love of farming started in West Virginia where food was a major part of her family's Italian culture. Everyone enjoyed gardening, chickens, cooking, foraging… and giving each other lots of advice. She grew up on a homestead in Central Maine and spent much of her early 20s as a canoe guide in Northern Maine and the wilds of Canada. She studied Art, Biology, and Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College, and then went on to teach science and math in public schools. Later she spent two years apprenticing on an arid cattle ranch and then a grass-based dairy in Colorado with the Quivira Coalition. Quivira is non-profit that brings together ranchers, environmentalists and scientists to find innovative solutions – and to make progress for the sake of the land, the animals and the people on the land. This is the work that Amber is dedicated to. After Quivira, Amber worked for interesting farmers and managed innovative farms from Colorado to Vermont. She feels lucky to have worked with a wide variety of animals, landscapes, and people. Currently, she owns and operates a sheep farm in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with her husband Chris, and their kids. Amber also works for UVM Extension and the Center for Sustainable Agriculture as a Grazing Specialist. She visits farmers statewide and gets the opportunity to help them solve challenges on their land. The work consists of supporting farmers to keep farming, grant writing, collaboration with other organizations, water quality projects, wildlife and pollinator conservation, animal welfare education, infrastructure improvement, and of course grazing planning.
Nicole Vitello
Board Member
Nicole Vitello is the Vice President of Equal Exchange, a worker owned cooperative fairly trading organic coffee, tea, chocolate, nuts and fresh and dried fruits directly with thousands of small scale organized farmers. Nicole started in 2008 as a sales representative selling fair trade coffee, tea and chocolate. After studying International Development at American University, Nicole founded her own organic farm business, Manic Organic, which she operated successfully for 10 years. Nicole came to Equal Exchange inspired by their economic model of trading directly with small farmers internationally. She is proud to be part of that model in fresh produce by promoting the connection between small farmers in Latin America and consumers in the United States.
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