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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.

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.
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

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.

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.