The Team
Erin Silva
Dr. Silva is an Organic Production Specialist with the University of Wisconsin Department of Agronomy. She has conducted organic research both in New Mexico and Wisconsin, including projects involving no-till production, cover crop systems, and organic variety trialing. Erin currently serves as co-facilitator of the Wisconsin Organic Advisory Council. As a graduate student, Erin cultivated an organic market garden, selling the produce at a local farmers market.
Jim Munsch
Jim, a certified organic beef grazing farmer, is involved in a variety of organic and sustainable agricultural activities and is a frequent speaker at farm conferences on making data-driven decisions for pricing and profitability. He consults with many organic vegetable and beef farms, to analyze their operations so growers can make more informed financial decisions. As a result of his consulting, Jim developed a cost accounting system for diversified fresh market vegetable growers that became the basis for the Veggie Compass spreadsheet.
John Hendrickson
John is an Senior Outreach Specialist at the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on fresh market vegetable production systems and marketing and is particularly interested in farm scale as it relates to finances, labor, equipment, and management. He coordinates the Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers, the Midwest School for Beginning Apple Growers, and the Wisconsin Cut Flower Growers School. He also runs his own small-scale certified organic vegetable farm.
Paul Mitchell
Paul is an Associate Professor with the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics. His work focuses on crop production with applications in the economics of pest resistance management, crop insurance, vegetable production and incentives to encourage the adoption of alternative cropping practices. He uses an interdisciplinary focus, involving entomology, weed science, ecology and horticulture in his ongoing research grants and journal publications. In addition to cropping systems economics, he teaches in various areas of production economics and farm management at both graduate and undergraduate levels.
Rebecca Claypool
Rebecca was a Research Specialist at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She received her master’s degree in Agroecology from UW-Madison in December 2009, and her research focused on developing farm management tools and record keeping strategies to improve overall farm management. While at UW, Rebecca oversaw the development of the Veggie Compass Excel spreadsheet tool. She currently owns and operates her own vegetable farm in Wisconsin.
SSAWG Collaborator, Ellen Polishuk
Ellen is a soils and farm consultant, teacher/trainer, and farmer at Potomac Vegetable Farms in Purcellville, Virginia. She has been working with the Veggie Compass team since 2010 to help make it a more useful and valuable tool for growers. She works with the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SSAWG) to teach growers how to use Veggie Compass and other tools to increase farm profitability through their Growing Farm Profits workshop events.
SSAWG Collaborator, Jean Mills
Jean is the Family Farm Program Manager for the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. She develops and coordinates a wide variety of educational projects aimed at small and mid-scale growers in the South, including Southern SAWG’s Growing Farm Profits trainings, Natural Farming Systems in the South virtual farm tour video series, and Practical Tools and Solutions for Sustaining Family Farms annual conference. For nearly 2 decades, she ran her own CSA in Alabama.