STEWARDS OF THE LAND

Our Team

A biodiversity island, surrounded by an ocean of Earth.

Anna Jones-Crabtree

Executive Director

Anna is a Donella Meadows Leadership Fellow and a recipient of the White House Greening Government Sustainability Hero Award. She holds a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering with a minor in sustainable systems from Georgia Institute of Technology. Anna served on the USDA Secretary’s Advisory Council on Beginning Farmers and Ranchers. She currently serves on Iroquois Valley Farmland REITs Board of Directors, and is an advisory board member for both the Biodynamic Demeter Alliance Economic Sphere, and Xerces Society Bee Better Certification. Anna and her husband, Doug Crabtree, own Vilicus Farms, a first-generation, organic, dryland crop farm in Northern Hill County, Montana. They grow a diverse array of organic heirloom and specialty grain, pulse, oilseed and broadleaf crops under five and seven-year rotations. In only nine seasons, Vilicus Farms grew from 1,280 acres to a 12,500-acre nationally-recognized farm by using the USDA’s beginning farmer programs, employing extensive conservation practices, and fostering unique risk-sharing relationships with food companies and land investment firms.

Jessica Roberts

Interim Assistant Director

Jessica fell in love with growing food for her community while working alongside her parents and grandparents in their gardens and orchard, and later through work with market farms in Northwest Pennsylvania. Her farm management experience includes vibrant Biodynamic farms, and as she continues to plant gardens and food forest on her blossoming homestead, she is embracing the impulse to learn more and apply biodynamic practices and principles. Jessica’s recent work as the Co-Director of Certification for Real Organic Project allowed her the opportunity to visit scores of farms, providing a deeper understanding of how each one is beautifully unique. She recently launched a food-systems focused consulting firm, Whole Farm Strategies, providing capacity building, project management and grant writing support to farms and nonprofits. She serves as Interim Assistant Director of Vilicus Institute.

Clare Donahue

Operations and Development Manager

Clare serves as the Operations & Development Manager at Vilicus Institute, touching all things fundraising, operations, and strategy. Clare is a recent graduate from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where she held internships at The Nest Family Office and Galway Sustainable Capital, while achieving concentrations in finance and entrepreneurship. Prior to this, she worked for four years at a healthcare startup, Aledade, that focused on helping primary care physicians treat Medicare patients with chronic conditions. While there, she wore many hats from payroll and onboarding for all new employees to forecasting revenue and supporting each fundraise from Series-C to Series-E. In her free time, she enjoys walking her new dog Rosie with her husband Charlie on Baker Beach in San Francisco.

Meet The Board

Anna Jones-Crabtree, Executive Director

Anna is a Donella Meadows Leadership Fellow and a recipient of the White House Greening Government Sustainability Hero Award. She holds a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering with a minor in sustainable systems from Georgia Institute of Technology. Anna served on the USDA Secretary’s Advisory Council on Beginning Farmers & Ranchers. She currently serves on Iroquois Valley Farmland REITs Board of Directors, and is an advisory board member for both the Biodynamic Demeter Alliance Economic Sphere, and Xerces Society Bee Better Certification. Anna and her husband, Doug Crabtree, own Vilicus Farms, a first-generation, organic, dryland crop farm in Northern Hill County, Montana. They grow a diverse array of organic heirloom and specialty grain, pulse, oilseed and broadleaf crops under five and seven-year rotations. In only nine seasons, Vilicus Farms grew from 1,280 acres to a 12,500-acre nationally-recognized farm by using the USDA’s beginning farmer programs, employing extensive conservation practices, and fostering unique risk-sharing relationships with food companies and land investment firms.

Marla Carlson, Chair

Marla Carlson has worked in the organic sector in Saskatchewan since 2006 and has been an organic consumer since the mid-1990’s. Her passion for organic food and farming has grown as her involvement in the sector has deepened. Marla has been working for SaskOrganics since 2014 and in the Executive Director role since February 2016. In her leadership role, she is always looking for innovative ways to fulfill the organization’s mission to cultivate a healthier world for the benefit of all through organic food and agriculture. Before moving back to Saskatchewan, Marla lived in England and worked for Bristol City Council as their first Democratic & Statutory Services Manager. In addition to Marla’s role with SaskOrganics, she is President of Organic Connections – the largest organic farming conference in Western Canada and is a member of the kwayēskastasowin wâhkôhtowin Steering Committee (Prairie Food System Vision Network), a Rockefeller Foundation Food Systems Top Visionary Prize winner, a thirty-year project with a vision to decolonize the food system on the Canadian Prairies. She is also a member of the Food Systems Game Changers Lab’s Elevating Indigenous Knowledge Cohort. Most recently Marla has taken on a position with the Prairie Organic Development Fund managing the Canadian Organic Ingredient Strategy project.

Emma Broderick, Treasurer

Emma is a graduate of the joint-degree program at the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of the Environment (MBA/MF) interested land stewardship, working landscapes and how access to capital and market structures impact what problems get prioritized.

Emma currently works as a senior associate on the investment team at Grounded Capital. Prior to joining Grounded, Emma spent a summer working on the Blue Forest Finance and Investment team, a summer as a member of the Forest Crew at Yale-Myers Forest and the summer prior serving as a research and development fellow at The Climate Service (and a farm hand on two organic vegetable farms). Before returning to graduate school Emma worked as an acquisitions and investment associate at CleanCapital (a renewable project finance company investing in commercial and industrial scale solar and storage projects) and a consultant at ThoughtWorks (a global technology firm that builds custom software solutions).

Clare Donahue, Secretary

Agatha Brinkley

Currently the Development Director for a national regenerative agriculture organization, Agatha has spent nearly as many hours moving cows to fresh pasture as sitting behind a desk. With twenty years of experience in nonprofit leadership, Agatha has spent her career working to advance regenerative agriculture as a path toward a restorative and resilient food system. As a writer, Agatha aims to amplify the work of her fellow changemakers by showcasing regenerative agriculture within the context of the greater environmental movement. As a farmer in rural Southwest Virginia, Agatha has the unique capacity to bridge both worlds and connect with people be it through soil, sun, or a shared impetus to provide the resources and share the story in order to engender support for the solutions that will affect systemic change.

Nathan Kelly

Nathan leads the Corporate Development team for CrossBoundary – an investment firm focused on underserved markets with 18 offices around the world. Nathan grew up in Northwest Pennsylvania in a farming legacy that was overshadowed by the 1980s farming crisis. Since 2016 Nathan has been committed to advancing regenerative agriculture as a tool to restore farming communities, produce better food, and restore critical ecosystems. Nathan is personally invested in regenerative agriculture through Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT and Steward Technologies. He led CrossBoundary’s investment into Mad Agriculture’s Perennial Fund and has advised NatureVest (a division of The Nature Conservancy) on their strategy for investing in regenerative agriculture. In 2021 Nathan spent four months working for FarmRaise supporting farmers in raising capital. Nathan began his career at the global investment bank Lincoln International where he advised on cross-border mergers and acquisitions and debt capital raises.

Steffen Schneider

Steffen has over three decades of experience as a biodynamic farmer and herdsman. Currently he is the Director Emeritus of Farming Operations at Hawthorne Valley Farm. He holds a masters degree in agriculture from the Justus Von Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

Steffen was part of the team that brought the farm back to economic solvency and success in the early 90’s. He has served in senior leadership capacity for the past 20 years, allowing Hawthorne Valley to experience tremendous growth and diversification of its farming operations including a more recent major infrastructure upgrade of its farmstead.

Since 2007 he has been on the Board of Directors of the Biodynamic Association of North America, having served as President, Treasurer and Vice-President. Steffen has keynoted national and international biodynamic conferences in the US, Switzerland and New Zealand. Additionally he has conducted workshops at organic and biodynamic conferences in the US, China, Switzerland, and New Zealand. He is member of the faculty at the Hawthorne Valley Farm Learning Center and serves as adjunct faculty at the Pfeiffer Center in Spring Valley, NY.

Sami Tellatin

Sami Tellatin will find almost any opportunity to put her hands in the soil. An entrepreneur, environmental engineer and educator, Sami finds inspiration and fulfillment in increasing the human connection to the environment.

Today, Sami is the co-founder of FarmRaise, an enterprise that unlocks funding for farmers and ranchers seeking to invest in their profitability and sustainability. After speaking with hundreds of farmers across the U.S., Sami and her co-founder were determined to eliminate the financial barrier farmers face in adopting soil health practices. Today, FarmRaise allows farmers to learn which public and private funding opportunities they’re eligible for and streamlines the application process, moving the industry toward one common application that unlocks funding to drive conservation practice adoption.

Sami started FarmRaise while earning an MBA and MS (Land Use and Agriculture) at Stanford University. She previously conducted research and education efforts at the USDA-Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and University of Missouri Extension, focusing on the economic and environmental impacts of cover crops in Midwestern farming communities. She has worked on farms in Missouri and Costa Rica and holds a bachelor’s degree in Biological Engineering from the University of Missouri.