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.

Nicole Lavelle

Graphic Design

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 (literally and spiritually!), caring for ecosystems, and mediating the impacts of climate change. Some of her favorite farms include Pie Ranch, Gospel Flat, Little Wing, 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

Jed Beach

Accounting

Jed has been operating FarmSmart since 2014. In that time, he has worked with over 100 small farms and food producers, helping them to establish and reach their business goals. Jed and his wife own and operate 3 Bug Farm, a diversified organic vegetable farm in Lincolnville, Maine. They raise four sons on their farm as well; Jed knows how important it is to balance family and farming life, and he takes this lens to every one of his client meetings. He also has an M.B.A in organizational and environmental sustainability, as well as years of bookkeeping and financial experience.

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.

Anna Grimshaw

Anna Grimshaw is an anthropologist and filmmaker. Over the last fifteen years, she has been making films in Machiasport, Maine and at Smithereen Farm, Pembroke. Drawing on an observational approach, she films over extended periods of time to explore the rhythms and dynamics of working life in coastal Maine. Her films include: "Mr Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine Woods"; "At Low Tide"; and "George’s Place". She is a founding member of the Friends of Liberty Hall, a non-profit organization dedicated to the restoration of historic Liberty Hall in Machiasport. A national monument and one of Maine’s most important civic buildings, Liberty Hall is part of the Maine Civic Halls Initiative launched in conjunction with Greenhorns and Maine Preservation. Anna lives in Machiasport, Maine.

Amy Franceschini

Board Member

Amy Franceschini grew up amidst the divergent agricultural projects of her father as an industrial farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California and her mother who operated a small-scale bio-dynamic farm and was involved in the ongoing struggle to transition conventional farms to organic farms. Amy is interested in the notion of “farming” as a relational practice, involving a complex ecology of the material, social and the immaterial where dailyness and seasonality, orality, ritual, myth and an acute awareness of one’s bioregion organize our collective imaginaries and how we live together.

In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, a collaborative platform made up of artists, architects, computer programmers, farmers, writers and anthropologists entangled in their overlapping interests in the commons, hi/low tech horizons and a critical view on the tools we create.

Futurefarmers have been the lead artists of Flatbread Society (2010-2018), a permanent public farm and community baking house in Oslo, they have been artist/researchers in residence at the University of California in Santa Cruz (2018-2020) and the lead artists on the sea-faring Seed Journey (2016- 2018+).

Amy received her Master in Fine Art from Stanford University (2002) and her Bachelor in Fine Art in Photography from San Francisco State University (1992). She is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Herb Alpert Award, 2018 American Academy of Rome Fellow. She has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute California College of the Arts and is currently visiting faculty in the Master of Eco-Social Design at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy.

Collectively, Futurefarmers have published A Variation on Powers of Ten, Sternberg Press, 2012, For Want of a Nail, MIT Press, 2018. Exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim, 2010 (solo), New York Museum of Modern Art 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial 2000, Sharjah Biennale 2017 and the Taipei Biennale 2018.