WHO WE ARE
Thanks to 2023 funding from the North Central Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Center and our friends at the University of Illinois, we've been able to assemble a QFN national board and begin to build organizational capacity in other exciting ways. You can learn more about the wonderful folks powering our work for the 2024 fiscal year below!
Ari Dolcine (she/her)
Steering Committee
I am a seed spreader, storyteller and story keeper. Everything I do, I do with love and passion. My focuses right now are growing Caribbean crops and other culturally relevant vegetables, herbs, and fruits; as well as bringing community together around these culturally important foods and building various earthen projects on the land. As a Haitian woman raised in south Florida, eating local food is deeply rooted within me. My culture is a big reason for my ambition to grow the foods, herbs and medicine that natured and loved me. I'm currently farming with my partner in south Texas and organizing the first ever BIPOC QFC in the South this fall!
Contact: ariana.dolcine@gmail.com
Bee Lutz (they/them)
Steering Committee
Bee is a goatherd and silvopastoralist tending to ecological resilience in and around Decorah, Iowa, the ancestral lands of the Meskwaki, Ioway, and Dakota peoples. When they aren’t in the field with their herd and the big dogs that protect them, Bee is making food for their two-legged loves, trying to maintain a non-monetized hobby, arranging flowers, doing their darnedest to reconnect with their own ancestral peoples, taking walks with their cats and dog, and dreaming of collective reverent relationship with place. Bee is honored to serve on the board of the Queer Farmer Network as well as those of the Farmer’s Land Investment Cooperative and their local food co-op and to champion their grassroots work.
Contact: baileydlutz@gmail.com // hollyhocklandlivestock.com
chalchiuhkoatl (they/them, elle en español)
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Steering Committee
chalchi is a transqueer two-spirit nepantleru of maaya, german and danish ascendance. they tend space at the inbetween as a healer, traditional bearthworker, parent and learner of el solar, le kool, y la huerta. they make home at minowakiing :: ancestral homelands of ho-chungra, bodewadmi, mamaceqtaw, and black liberator lands, colonially known as “milwaukee, wisconsin” :: and ma’ya’ab :: maaya ancestral homelands at what is often referred to as the yucatán peninsula. they are visionary steward of we have always been related (whabr), a kinship webwork of beloved intergenerational two-spirit, queer, trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive BIPoC earthworKIN' regenerating healing and connection as we reclaim and embody our sacred traditional roles in our communities once again.
Contact: kinshipwebwork@gmail.com // @whabr_kin
Cyd (they/them)
Steering Committee
Cyd is a Black, queer, trans land steward born and raised on Chickasaw/Quapaw territory, also known as Memphis, TN. Their curiosity and guidance from ancestors has led them down many paths, including urban farming, herbalism and birthwork. Forever a student of the Earth, their knowledge deepens with every growing season. Cyd finds enthusiasm in cooking meals for friends, making medicine, devouring books, spending time in their local state parks, and co-conspiring towards collective liberation. When not tending the land, they can be found dabbling in various hobbies and artforms, snuggling with their cat and wrangling their rambunctious kiddo.
Contact: cydnimoonflower@gmail.com // @justcallmecyd
Elle (she/her)
Steering Committee
Elle is a land steward, storyteller, kitchen witch, and flower fairy, living on ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples. Her human and more-than-human community spans across the St. Croix River. Elle is a member of the Wild Path Collective, stewarding Lily Springs Farm in western Wisconsin. Musings on generative disturbance, cycles of rest, emergent collaboration, and the medicine of play find their way into all of her pursuits and passions. Her land work looks a little different every year, but is always very goaty, very flowery, and very queer.
Contact: elle@walkthewildpath.org
Gavi Welbel
Steering Committee
Gavi is a land steward, dancer, and community organizer based at Zumwalt Acres on unceded homelands of indigenous nations including Kickapoo, Peoria, Potawatomi, Kaskaskia, Miami, and Ochethi Sakowin peoples (so called Sheldon, IL). Gavi is excited about ways that we can be in loving relationship with our bodies, the land and waterways, one another, and our ancestors. They are often found dancing in the fields, wandering the woods, baking bread, contemplating climate science, and striving to live into Jewish time. Contact: gavizw@zumwaltacres.org // @zumwaltacres // zumwaltacres.org.
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Payge Solidago (any pronouns)
Steering Committee
Payge is a land steward, fermenter and medicine maker, writer, and dog dad. They have farmed and educated all around their home state of Mishigamaw (“great water” in Ojibwa, also known as Michigan). They now reside on the Black liberator lands and unceded lands of Anishinaabe peoples at Waawiyatanong (also known as Detroit). Here, she spends time stewarding vacant lots, shaking it out on the dancefloor, playing dress up, cleaning animal skulls, and bringing people together over good food. They believe in the power of nurturance, and love nothing more than co-creating spaces that foster collective magic. She is also an organizer who does policy advocacy work for the National Young Farmers Coalition, and treasury work for the West Michigan Farmers of Color Land Fund.
Contact: paygeann@gmail.com // @only__farms
Sam Hsieh (he/they)
Steering Committee
Sam works to cultivate care, liberation, curiosity, sustainable/sustaining food systems, and a world where everyone has what they need and where we can gather over delicious food. Residing in Teejop (so called Madison, WI), Sam loves sharing vegetables, taking carpentry classes, walks with loves, trying new things, strategizing, and having weird/fun/introspective conversations with you while tending and growing. Sam has been an educator and co-operator of Jumping Spider Farm (currently on rest), a small organic vegetable operation on Ho-Chunk land that has supported him to grow veggies important to his Taiwanese ancestry, learn from grower communities, and connect with other queer / trans / BIPOC farmers and earth tenders. Sam has recently started at FairShare CSA Coalition, where they manage the organic vegetable farm manager apprenticeship program.
Contact: jumpingspiderfarm@gmail.com
Taylor (Tig) Hartson (they/them)
Steering Committee
Tig is a Sociology PhD student, a goat-wrangling farmer, and a fiber and fermentation geek whose learning, teaching, and making happens primarily on the traditional homelands of the Haudenosaunee, Miami, Peoria, and the Pokagon Potawatomi (what is now known as South Bend, Indiana). Their dissertation work explores the ways that queer identity and queer orientations to the world help farmers, growers, agriculturalists, and land stewards rethink their relationships with more-than-human entities. They have almost a decade's experience conducting collaborative and independent academic research, several seasons growing vegetables and raising livestock, and a few years of organizing in community with the Hoosier Young Farmers Coalition and the Queer Farmer Network.
Contact: taylorhartson.com // taylorhartson@gmail.com // @taylorhartson
Y (they/ he)
Steering Committee
Y is a Two- Spirit ehakihet (Land protector), Land ‘steward’, farmer, and a dreamer born and raised on their ancestral homelands. Being raised close to their roots + family made for a strong connection to Grandmother Earth. Being with Earth over the last several years has provided ease and strength as Y has continued to navigate his own personal journey of healing and transforming the generational wounds of assimilation. Their current curiosities, intellectual pursuits, and passion projects are primarily dedicated to cultural reclamation, land justice, food sovereignty, and building & sharing skills necessary for collective survival and liberation. In his free time, you can find Y flirting in nature, catching the sunset or moon gazing. You can connect with Y at any of the upcoming QFC’s.
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Anni Zylstra (they/them)
Coordinator
Anni is an organizer, convener, traditional folk artist, teacher, gremlin matchmaker, and smallscale agroforester living next to the fish and beavers of the the Kickapoo River, unceded homeland of the Ho-Chunk and Oceti Sakowin peoples (southwest 'Wisconsin'). A former rodeo kween from an intergenerational family of farmers, they love to reimagine the rural midwestern landscapes that shaped them, weave people and plants, and support fellow queer farmers via their 6 years of coordinating work for the QFN. They co-founded the QFN in 2018 in part as a response to their upbringing in hyper-homophobic rural farming culture as a closeted queer, and in part to try and find Hannah (below) a farm wife.
Contact: anniezylstra@gmail.com // @zestinferna
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Hannah Breckbill (she/they)
Treasurer
Hannah is a farmer, writer, dreamer-schemer, and lover of gathering people for meaningful and generative conversation, making a life in Decorah, Iowa. Humble Hands Harvest, the worker-owned cooperative, no-till organic vegetable farm that Hannah founded, is the origin place for Queer Farmer Convergences, and by extension, for the Queer Farmer Network. Hannah currently acts as the treasurer of the QFN.
Contact: humblehandsharvest.com // humblehandsharvest@gmail.com
