Rebecca Thistlethwaite, Director
Contact via EmailRebecca joins Gorge Grown as our Director. She was raised in Beaverton, Oregon on the suburban/farmland edge. She studied Natural Resources Management at CSU-Fort Collins in Colorado, and then worked a summer as a Forest Service backcountry ranger in Idaho. Once in Idaho, Rebecca apprenticed on an vegetable farm in Moscow, Idaho. This was the beginning of her farming career, and since she has apprenticed and worked on fruit, vegetable, grain, and livestock farms in Oregon, Washington (including the Gorge!), and California. She returned to school for a Master's Degree in International Agricultural Development from UC-Davis where she had the opportunity to study crop biodiversity and indigenous agriculture in Guatemala and Honduras. Following graduate school, Rebecca worked with the non-profit business incubator ALBA to develop and deliver programs for beginning organic farmers. She and her husband Jim operated their own farming business, raising pasture-based livestock and poultry and direct marketing meat and eggs. She served on the Steering Committee of the California Food & Justice Coalition for five years and currently serves on the Board of the Food Trade Sustainability Leadership Association. Most recently, Rebecca and her family spent a year traveling the country volunteering on innovative and ecologically-based farms, learning about their diversity of enterprises, management practices, and marketing strategies in order to produce a book with Chelsea Green Publishers, to be titled "Farms With A Future". She is extremely excited to be returning to the Northwest to work with Gorge Grown Food Network, and is looking forward to meeting the community and working together to build an increasingly resilient, sustainable, just, and economically viable regional food system. Rebecca joins the team January 2012!
