Our Team
Going to Seed is a 100% volunteer-run organization. Is there something that you’d like to help us with? We’d love to hear from you.
Leadership
Joseph Lofthouse is the author of the book Landrace Gardening, and is a popular speaker at farming conferences around the world. He has been growing landraces and selling seeds for a decade. He is dedicated to helping gardeners and farmers grow healthy plants with less stress. His book, Landrace Gardening, is what originally inspired this project and organization. Joseph is actively involved in ongoing content creation, and community mentorship through regular community meetings, as well as answering questions within the online community forums.
Julia Dakin is a farmer and seed activist in Mendocino County, California. She has been involved in agriculture for most of her life, and has devoted the past few years to growing market crops and teaching the benefits of seed saving, local adaptation, and genetic diversity. She created most of the content available in the online courses, and is working on the new course about traditional farming methods in Oaxaca and Guerrero.
Anna Bonner Mieritz is a software designer, facilitator, and long-time home gardener. After completing the master gardener program at the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners in 1999, she managed Crenshaw Community Garden in Los Angeles. She now lives in Moss Beach, California, where she volunteers in the food distribution programs at Coastside Hope, and the HEAL Project educational farm. Anna leads the seed program and online store.
Debbie Ang worked in a university molecular biology research lab for nearly 40 years, and has gardened since childhood. She currently volunteers with a local community gardening nonprofit editing its grant proposals. Debbie has been editing and writing content and grant application for Going to Seed, as well as managing our finances.
Masha Zager worked as an economist for the SEC, a nonprofit foundation and a consulting firm; became a freelance writer and editor for a variety of corporations and publications and retired last year. She is currently a board member of the local farmers market and treasurer of the local Democratic Party committee. She has been writing blog posts for Going to Seed about gardening, assists with editing other content, has created the outline for an upcoming seed saving course, and has been supporting the Landrace Gardening online community engage.
Advisors
Kay Everts is the founder and manager of the Seeds for Sharing seed libraries at the Oak Lodge and Gladstone public libraries in Oregon and she manages the community seed garden at New Urban High School. She is a graduate of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance Seed School. Kay promotes locally adapted genetically diverse gardening techniques in her personal gardens and more broadly through her “Adopt a Clackamas Crop” community-grow projects.. She teaches gardening classes, including seed saving and adaptation gardening. Before moving to Portland, Oregon, and immersing herself in the local food system, Kay lived in Santa Clara, California, where she was a Managing Director for Marsh & McLennan.
Shane Simonsen is an experimental farmer, writer and podcaster, developing locally adapted crops for subtropical Australia and working to inspire more locals to take up landrace crop development and low input agricultural techniques. He has a background in research biochemistry and worked as a high school science teacher before retiring early to his farm.
Katherine Wheeler shares a garden and orchard with her community, supports the local food bank, volunteers for Grassroots Institute in Mendocino County, and is interested in the future of seeds. She wants to help the project and always learn more.
Spencer Suffling owns and operates Tanager Farm in Corbett, Oregon, which grows diversified vegetables and pollinator flowers with a focus on sustainability, equity, and community.
Marcos Cortez Bacilio is originally from the state of Guerrero, Mexico; and has been studying and teaching local farmers the traditional and ancestral methods of selection, improvement and conservation of native seeds. He is a regular contributor to the magazines La Jornada del Campo and ADN-Cultura. He is collaborating with Going to Seed in the development of educational material based on community experiences in Mexico.
Bartolo Hernandez lives in a remote pueblo in the state of Oaxaca where he is actively involved with the local Chatino Indigenous community and is president of the local Chatino radio station. Bartolo has been interviewing and filming local farmers that use the traditional cultivation and seed saving methods of their ancestors, the original domesticators of corn, beans, squash and chilies. He is collaborating with Going to Seed on gathering content, which will also be used on his own social media channels to bring awareness to the traditional skills and methods of the Chatino people.
Jim Tarbell has researched and written about economics, ecology and politics for 40 years. He co-edited the bio-regional journal Ridge Review Magazine for 15 years. Since 2005 he has edited the thematic publication Justice Rising: Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Power, which published an issue on Local Rules for Local Food in 2015. In that same year he co-founded the Grassroots Institute (grassroots-institute.org), which over the past seven years has presented a series of popular education courses on Grassroots Solutions and Corporate Power as well as a mapping project entitled Building the Local Economy for the Our Common Good. He and his wife Judy, live in Caspar CA and own the Field of Dreams where Julia Dakin carries on her research and seed production using landrace gardening methods.
Volunteers
Document and Course Editing
Robin Stewart
Masha Zager
Christopher Weeks
Debbie Ang
Leslie Scrimshaw
Skot Colacicco
Emma Calvert
Jori Love
Nisendeh Neta
Interviews and lessons
Mark Reed
Holly Silvester
Emma Calvert
Lauren Ritz
Nancy Kost
Community Moderation
Mark Reed
Emily Sorensen
Greenie/Erin DeShong
Joseph Lofthouse
Joseph Larson
Justin .
William Schlegal
Outreach
Tanja Eskildson
Emma Calvert
Masha Zager
Wojciech Gorny - Promotional videos and content for social media
Katie, Bramblewood Hill - Brochure design
Seed Stewards
Christopher Weeks
Anphlo Dubouloz
Julia Dakin
Joseph Lofthouse
Anna Mieritz
Kim Wolf
Lowell McCampbell
Carolyn Brown
Debbie A
Joseph Zarr