Our Steering Committee Members

Darlene Adams Rowland
Executive Director
BREADA (Big River Economic and Agricultural Development Alliance)

Darlene Adams Rowland has dedicated her professional career to sustaining a vibrant local food system by supporting Louisiana’s small family farmers. Named as Executive Director beginning January 2021, Mrs. Rowland has been with BREADA since 2008, previously serving as both Development Director and Marketing Director. Prior to her nonprofit roles, Mrs. Rowland held a successful career in the private sector as an Account Executive for a financial services company.

Mrs. Rowland has been a member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals for over a decade and has served on the Board of Directors in numerous capacities including Secretary, Vice President of Communications, and Chair of Governmental Relations. She is a recent graduate of the LSU Agricultural Leadership Development Program, and in 2022, she received the John W. Barton Sr. Excellence in Nonprofit Management Rising Star Award from the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

BREADA is a founding organizational member of LSSAC since it's formation in 2022. Darlene has been a Steering Committee Member since 2022.

Angie Comeaux
Founder and Steward
Hummingbird Springs Farm

Angie Comeaux is of Mvskoke, Cherokee, Chahta, and French Creole descent, and belongs to Kvnfvske etvlwv, where she is Nokosvlke clan mother. Angie was born and raised in Bvlbancha, currently living and farming in south Alabama, in her ancestral Mvskoke homelands. She is a founding member of both Bvlbancha Collective and Okla Hina Ikhish Holo, two Indigenous Southeastern femme and non-binary collectives working in mutual aid, medicine, and food sovereignty, and rebuilding ancestral trade routes. Angie is a seed grower, was a student in the inaugural cohort of the Ira Wallace Seed School, and a part of the Gulf South Heritage Seed Project. In 2023, Angie completed Clinical Herbal Practitioner school with the Appalachian Center for Natural Health and 4th year of herbal medicine courses. Angie was recently awarded the 2024 Environmental Leader Award by the Center for Rural Affairs. Additionally, Angie was a 2022-2023 fellow with the Soul Fire Farm Braiding Seeds fellowship, and as of July 2025, became a Co-Director of the Fellowship.

Most importantly, Angie is the founder of Hvrvnrvcukwv Ueki-honecv (Hummingbird Springs) Farm, a fallow 120-year-old peanut farm that she, her partner, and community are transitioning into an Indigenous food forest. Since 2022, Angie and her community planted over 3,000 native trees at Hvrvnrvcukwv Ueki-honecv Farm. They are also stewarding ruminants, poultry, equine, leporidae, and a huge range of native and culturally significant plants. The goal at Hvrvnrvcukwv Ueki-honecv Farm is to fully reclaim and resurrect Indigenous agricultural practices that have been sleeping and to welcome those practices back to their homelands. The mission of Hvrvnrvcukwv Ueki-honecv is to show what Indigenous sovereignty truly looks like, to be a living example of what prioritizing community care and the needs of the land can achieve, to show that when we listen to the land and the land's original stewards we can not only heal our communities but thrive. Angie feels that it is necessary that we bring the songs, the language, and our lifeways back home. It is vital that we build our future in right relationship with the land and with one another.

Hummingbird Springs Farm joined LSSAC as an organizational member in 2025. Angie has been a Steering Committee Member since 2025.

Marguerite “Margee” Green
Statewide Director
Louisiana Food Policy Council

Marguerite Green is the Executive Director of Louisiana Food Policy Action Council (FPAC). Green works in education and local food systems to create change and transfer power. In 2007 Green started working in agricultural education while receiving a degree in Agriculture at Louisiana State University. In 2008 with a diverse coalition of young people, neighbors, and friends Marguerite co-founded The South Garden Project. The South Garden Project is a grassroots community organization building gardens in one of Baton Rouge’s most marginalized neighborhoods. The model for the organization was to lend material and organize support to new gardens while providing a weekly gathering space for children to learn to grow food in a food desert. The program successfully transferred all leadership to residents by 2011 and became a neighbor-run network of community gardens with access to unified resources and training.

In 2011 Marguerite moved back to her home of New Orleans and began working in farming and gardening efforts across the city, running a farm, organizing with farmers on issues of land access, food sovereignty, and blight. In 2012 Green was selected to conceive and implement a half-acre state-of-the-art teaching farm for the students of The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) by the school's Non-profit partner The NOCCA Institute. In her time conceiving and running the farm, dubbed Press Street Gardens, Green created a robust space filled with community and student programming, as well as a food production hub where students could see and participate in land stewardship and farming in action. In 2017 Margee left the full-time managerial position of Press Street Gardens to focus on the classroom aspect of agriculture, food culture, and food justice for the students of NOCCA.

This shift towards the classroom allowed for Green to become a full-time Co-Coordinator and eventually director of SPROUT. The goal of SPROUT is to build a food system where fresh, nutrient-dense food is affordable and accessible to all citizens as consumers, but also as producers. Marguerite held a leadership role in the National Young Farmers Coalition New Orleans Chapter as well as being a founder of the Greater New Orleans Growers Alliance, an effort to collectivize New Orleans farmers and make the possibility of farming in our city a more realistic and viable livelihood for all people. Green also sits on the city Food Policy and Advisory Committee. Marguerite’s personal and professional passion is empowering people to grow food as a way to heal and support themselves as well as strengthen a community-based food system. Green sits on the USDA’s NAREE board and Specialty Crop Committee.

Marguerite is herself, a farmer running a one-acre diversified flower and vegetable farm since 2011 called Fat River Farms.

LA Food Policy Counsil is a founding organizational member of LSSAC since it's formation in 2022. Margee has been a Steering Committee Member since 2022.

Angelina Harrison
Executive Director
Market Umbrella

Angelina Harrison is originally from a small family dairy farm in Wisconsin. She grew up helping her mom can and preserve from the bounty of a kitchen garden and none of her food came out of a box. After graduating with honors from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in environmental science and policy, she worked in local government in the Bay Area on various climate action plan implementation projects. She’s been in New Orleans since 2011, where a search for a local CSA brought her into food systems work, where she has found her calling, helping to make sustainable food choices easy for consumers to make. Angelina has worked to support small-scale, sustainable agriculture, and the producers that comprise it in various facets, and continues to do so as the new Interim Executive Director of Market Umbrella, leading an organization that supports thriving farmers markets, numerous local and statewide nutrition incentive programs, and vendor and food systems support work. She has endless respect for the folks who can coax tomatoes out of this SE LA climate, and works to pull back the veil on the hidden humanitarian, environmental, economic and health costs of conventional food production and delivery, and illuminate the incredible, impossible and essential work that small growers are doing for our state, region, economy, climate and food system. She lives with her husband and their brood of chicks, enjoys eating food that other people make, cooking with produce their family grows, and is driven by a tenacious (some say stubborn) optimism for what is possible.

Market Umbrella is a founding organizational member of LSSAC since it's formation in 2022. Angelina has been a Steering Committee Member since 2022.

Nicole Ryane Johnson
Co-Director of Operations and Farmer Support
Fightingville Fresh

Nicole Ryane Johnson is a farmer, entrepreneur, and food systems leader based in Lafayette, Louisiana. She is the co-owner of L4S Farms, where she and her partner grow turmeric, ginger, and medicinal herbs while building a regenerative homestead rooted in sustainability and self-reliance. Nicole also founded CPR 2 Geaux, a statewide emergency training company that reflects her commitment to building stronger, safer communities.

Nicole is deeply engaged in strengthening local food systems through her leadership with Fightingville Fresh, a community farmers market and grower support hub that helps small and beginning farmers access markets, technical assistance, and opportunities to scale their businesses. Her work focuses on practical pathways for growers to move from backyard production to viable farm enterprises while increasing access to fresh, local food in underserved communities.

As a technical assistance provider and coalition member within LSSAC, Nicole supports farmer training programs and initiatives that help growers build skills, confidence, and community. She is especially passionate about programs that reconnect people to growing their own food and understanding agriculture as both a livelihood and a tool for community resilience.

Above all, Nicole considers herself a farmer, homesteader, “crunchy mom,” and legacy builder. Her work is grounded in honoring the sacrifices and wisdom of those who came before her while helping create opportunities for the next generation. She believes that growing food, building businesses, and strengthening communities are all part of the same mission: leaving the land and the people better than we found them.

Fightingville Fresh joined LSSAC as an organizational member in 2025. Nicole has been a Steering Committee Member since 2022.

Lauren “LJ” Jones
CEO and Executive Director
Shreveport Green (North)

Lauren Jones serves as the Executive Director of Shreveport Green, offering a decade of experience in community-based farming and environmental initiatives across Shreveport, Louisiana. In 2019, she spearheaded the creation of the Shreveport Green Urban Farm on historic Sprague Street, aiming to tackle food system disparities from a perspective of justice and sustainability.

Lauren's work focuses on promoting equity in environmental & food systems that have been systemically marginalized. She strives to build resilience in communities by fostering local collaboration and inspiring a profound respect for the environment. Her comprehensive expertise spans program development, volunteer management, regenerative farming, grant writing, public speaking, environmental activism, and therapeutic horticulture.

Shreveport Green is a founding organizational member of LSSAC since it's formation in 2022. LJ has been a Steering Committee Member since 2022.

Bahia Nightengale
Chief Operating Officer
Shreveport Green (Central)

Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Iowa, Texas, and Louisiana. If you can’t think of anything to talk about… ask me how many times I’ve moved. Be prepared to hear me talk about why after more than 30 moves in 29 years I’ve finally bought a house and settled down in rural Central Louisiana.

Bahia has worked as an outdoor guide, a resource management technician, community organizing and outreach specialist, federal law enforcement officer, a small-business consultant, community development manager, grant manager, and most importantly, as a farmer.

Ms. Nightengale has presented on rural issues at The White House, participated in national policy work to address issues related to homelessness, and successfully grown a winter tomato in Iowa. Bahia enjoys cooking, crocheting, hiking, kayaking, shooting, supporting the American Arts & Crafts movement, and bonfires. She really wants to take you kayaking.

Shreveport Green is a founding organizational member of LSSAC since it's formation in 2022. Bahia has been a Steering Committee Member since 2022.

Devin Wright
Deputy Director of Producers & Sustainability
Sprout

Devin began studying, working in, and organizing around food systems over 15 years ago. She got her Bachelors in Society & Environment from the Johnston Center for Integrated Studies at the University of Redlands. She is currently a PhD candidate in the City, Culture, and Community program at Tulane University where she studies how growers interact with and understand their surrounding environments with a focus on the conditions here in the metropolitan New Orleans area. What does food justice look like for growers here? How does our environment play a role?

She has worked within agricultural systems as a nursery stock and specialty crop field hand, farmers markets salesperson, educator, community gardener, grassroots member/organizer with the Greater New Orleans Growers Alliance, and most recently as farm owner/operator of Rude Becky Farm. She believes that food is an integral vehicle through which we will achieve a sustainable and just future for New Orleans, the Gulf South, and the planet. She is excited to work continue her work on systems-level change using every tool we’ve got—including research and policy!

Sprout is a founding organizational member of LSSAC since LSSAC's formation in 2022. Devin has acted as a service provider in the LSSAC network since it's formation and joined the Steering Committee as Sprout's representative in 2025.

Our Staff 

Hannah Lopez
Admin & Project Manager
LSSAC

Hannah is a South Louisianan born and raised. She graduated from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Science in Linguistics and Spanish Literature. Hannah grew up learning agricultural practices from her grandparents, who were peanut farmers in the 60s and 70s.

Hannah has spent her career working towards building a stronger and healthier Louisiana. Through immigration advocacy and legal aid with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and project management in federal class action lawsuits, she has learned that the closer you are to your food and your community the better off we all are. Hannah’s work is driven by the belief that we are always stronger together and small wins can build toward a brighter collective future.

Hannah’s expertise includes creating systems of collaboration in intersectional advocacy spaces. In her role with Sprout, Hannah serves as the Project Manager for the Louisiana Small Scale Agriculture Coalition (LSSAC) - a coalition of organizations statewide that seek to cultivate a more robust and sustainable food system. She is excited to continue the mission of LSSAC and Sprout for a stronger local food system.

When she’s not organizing and logisticizing, Hannah can be found in her home garden, reading a book, cooking with her chosen family, caring for her tuxedo cats, or color-coding a spreadsheet.