Staff

Erin Meier is Director of Green Lands Blue Waters. Previously, Erin served for 14 years as Executive Director of the University of Minnesota Southeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnership. She has over 20 years of experience and training in sustainable agriculture, local food systems, food access, natural resource conservation, clean energy, community engagement and development, and facilitating cross-sector work groups and networks. Erin holds an MS in Sustainable Agriculture from Iowa State University with an emphasis on external costs and behavioral economics and is a geographer at heart with a BS in Geography from the University of Illinois and past experience as a cartographer and geographic information systems analyst.

Aaron Reser is the Associate Director for Green Lands Blue Waters (GLBW). Based at the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, GLBW works with a wide network of partners across the Upper Midwest to increase continuous living cover on the agricultural landscape. In the past, Aaron led GLBW’s Watershed Initiative work and was the lead staff on early supply chain development work with Kernza™ perennial grain. Her expertise is in building and strengthening collaborative networks, linking key elements and individuals along the path from farm to market and illuminating all of the systems-support pieces that underlay that path. She brings 15 years experience in a whole-systems approach to building regional food systems. Aaron has an MPA from the UMN Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Marjorie Hegstrom is the Community Based Education & Outreach Lead for Green Lands Blue Waters. She works across multiple GLBW projects to coordinate partners, develop educational materials and build outreach strategies to a wide variety of GLBW stakeholders.  Along with NRCS outreach and education and policy partner engagement, Marjorie led GLBW’s work to educate conservation professionals about virtual fencing as a tool for managed grazing.  She has a BA in Sustainable Agriculture from Kenyon College and a MS from the University of Minnesota in Applied Plant Science.  She has over 25 years of experience in sustainable agriculture across many fields including farmers markets, retail food cooperatives, education and applied research.  In her free time, Marjorie enjoys paddling and camping in the Boundary Waters with her family, gardening, cooking and managing a small herd of goats.

Jane Grimsbo Jewett is with University of Minnesota Extension, based in the Grand Rapids, MN regional office. She has been the coordinator of GLBW’s Midwest Perennial Forage Working Group most of the time since 2011. That group includes farm educators of all stripes from GLBW’s 5-state area, and focuses on an array of topics related to grazing and crop and livestock integration. Jane has a B.S. in Agronomy and M.S. in Plant Breeding from the University of Minnesota, and previously was Associate Director of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. She owns and operates a small, diversified livestock farm near Palisade, MN and is involved with farmers’ markets and local food systems work regionally in northeastern Minnesota and at the state level.

Steering Committee Members

We are in the process of rebuilding our steering committee and will update this page as we recruit additional members.