My Story 

Having grown up in a city, I first became a secretary for foreign languages and worked for a forwarding agency. But not for long and I followed my dream and did an agricultural apprenticeship in Schleswig Holstein, Germany. The fascination with agriculture led me to enroll for a BSc at the University of Cassel to study under Prof. Dr. Hartmut Vogtmann, who had strong ties to the US and Canada. He held the first chair for organic agriculture worldwide in this small town, Witzenhausen. As a group of students, we demanded the development of a major program in organic agriculture; by the time that was implemented, my family had moved to the US. 

There we raised our two children, worked as organic consultants, and one abandoned consulting project inspired and started the development of an international, inclusive, fair trade program, the Fair Trade Sustainability Alliance. I helped develop the program, served on the board for seven years and performed all types of work for this organization. Majoring in international agriculture I studied development projects and rural development in general and I greatly enjoyed the creation of this innovative program. 

Within Organic Insights, I worked as an organic and non-GMO inspector of processing facilities for 10 years, at the end of which I participated in the discussion about how inspections can be used as a better means of fraud prevention. I created a well attended certifier training for this issue, and was invited to speak at an expert panel at the NOP meeting in April 2018. 

In my consulting business I have worked with several companies that were about to loose their certification status or needed to be reinstated, and I helped companies create organic systems from scratch to get certified.

My approach is system oriented and I give Rarely will I point out a noncompliance without trying to identify the root cause with you. My audits, inspections and consulting are always cooperative, exploratory, and informative.