Born, raised, and residing in the small central Maine town of Saint Albans, Heron’s plant “roots” derive from childhood chores in his family’s large back-to-the-lander gardens and high school summers spent working (or pretending to) on a local organic vegetable farm. An ongoing 19 year career at Fedco Seeds has engaged him in diverse elements of the retail seed business including various daily operations, managing trial programs, and catalog writing. His day job has run parallel to establishing a personal farm operation which focuses on seed production and plant breeding. Sharing the experiential skill sets and relevant history of seed work in the Northeast is Heron’s passion, and is proud to be a co-organizer of the Northeast Organic Seed Conference. He is honored to serve the seed community as an OSA board member, valuing the model of “alliance” as our greatest strength.

Cathleen McCluskey
Cathleen McCluskey is the outreach director at Organic Seed Alliance. Cathleen supports OSA communications, and coordination of regional and national outreach efforts, and is the chair of the biennial Organic Seed Growers Conference.