Texas Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association |
2023 TOFGA Board of Directors If you would like to be a part of our board, let's move forward by messaging us at admin@tofga.org. To learn board member roles and responsibilities click here. President, Vacant James Fairchild, Vice President James grew up in Houston, Texas. He attended Baylor University and graduated in 2009 with a B.A. in Speech Communication. He began his agricultural career coordinating recreational horse activities at a local Leslie Provence, Secretary Greg Mast, Treasurer
Susie Marshall, Region 4 Director Susie Marshall is founder and Executive Director of GROW North Texas, a Dallas-based nonprofit that cultivates healthy food communities by strengthening local food production and improving access to fresh, nutritious food. She has 17 years of experience working with food systems, food producers, and food assistance programs distributing surplus fruits and vegetables. Susie is a past president of Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and has been involved since 2010. Susie has degrees from Texas Wesleyan University, Texas A&M – Commerce, and Perkins School of Theology at SMU. Glen Miracle, Region 5 Director Glen Miracle grew up in Kentucky with a gardening mother and farming grandparents. After college, studying theatrical set design he moved to Houston, primarily due to the success of the Houston Grand Opera. During the years as a designer and artist he used a small (I mean tiny) front yard garden as a place to take a break.
Carolina Mueller, Board Member
Former TOFGA Board Members Lacey Proffitt Theron Beadreau |
children’s home, where he saw the beneficial effects youth experienced working with animals. James went to graduate school at Texas A&M University studying Agricultural (youth) Development. He graduated in 2013 with M. Ag in Agricultural Development. James was an ag teacher at a residential children’s home, Farm Manager at World Hunger Relief in Waco, Texas and is currently a part representative at United Ag and Turf. In his free time he enjoys gardening, bee-keeping, and caring for his chickens.
and the home sales of cottage foods and produce from residential market gardens, and to streamline the process for starting an urban farm. She also led changes to the local livestock code to increase the number of chickens allowed from three to eight, and she has organized coop tours as an educational and community-building event. Leslie earned the Master of Public Administration degree from UTSA in 2007, with a thesis titled “Community Gardening on Public Housing Properties: Where, Who, How, Why and Why Not?” She remains active in community food policy work at the local, state, and national levels. As a gardener, she has the most luck with herbs, greens, and native pollinator plants, including propagation of native milkweed.
Greg Mast is a farmer, educat
Aime Sommerfeld Lillard, Region 1 Director
He has given presentations at hundreds of workshops and conferences about production and marketing of agricultural products in Texas, other states and Mexico.
During slow times he would plant the garden and hope it would find some way of surviving when the 16 hour days at the job returned. In 2001 he and his wife Kenan decided to move and create a farm 45 miles northwest of Houston in Hempstead, where he would continue to do art projects part time, but could find time to plant a large garden. They named it Laughing Frog Farm in honor of the thousands of tree frogs on the pond. That grew into an obsession that since 2009 has been a full time job where Laughing Frog Farm grows about two acres of vegetables, runs a small flock of sheep and raises both meat and egg laying chickens. Almost every Saturday (50 weeks last year) he was at the Urban Harvest Farmers Market in Houston selling meat and produce. Glen studied permaculture and uses those principles as guidelines for production and land development. The farm hosts farm to table dinners in the spring and the fall, has farm tours and teaches gardening/farming classes. His first TOFGA conference was 2010. 
Carolina is a food systems practitioner, part-time farmer and full-time graduate student in her last semester at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She also is currently the volunteer president of the Central Texas YoungFarmers Coalition. Over the past decade, Carolina has worked in a number of positions all along the food chain. Her work in food spans from the big-picture national policies down to the personal experiences of individuals and communities. Carolina is excited about the opportunity to serve on the board of TOFGA to support producers all over Texas.