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Renew
Summer 2026—February 2027
2026 SFA Film Residency, with multi-city in-person experiences and monthly virtual workshops ⟶ October 10–11, 2026
2026 Southern Foodways Symposium ⟶

Oral Histories

The SFA oral history program documents life stories from the American South. Collecting these stories, we honor the people whose labor defines the region. If you would like to contribute to SFA’s oral history collections, please send your ideas for oral history along with your CV or Resume and a portfolio of prior oral history work to info@southernfoodways.org.

< Back to Oral History project: Post-Katrina Community Gardens

ORAL HISTORY

Marguerite Green

Louisiana Food Policy Council

Marguerite “Margee” Green experienced a transformational moment while in an Organic Gardening class her freshman year at Louisiana State University. She changed her major to agriculture and started community gardening and youth agriculture work around Baton Rouge. After moving back home to New Orleans, she managed gardening projects for nonprofits and eventually opened her own farm, Fat River Flowers, selling to farmers markets and weddings. In 2013, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, a local public high school, hired her to oversee the build out of their outdoor education space, Press Street Gardens. Four years later, she started at SPROUT, a nonprofit dedicated to building a more equitable community of farmers and gardeners in New Orleans. In 2019, her community-focused ethos led her to make a bid for state office, the Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry, running a spirited campaign that ultimately fell short. More recently, Margee has brought SPROUT’s mission statewide, as the founder and director of the Louisiana Food Policy Council.

Date of interview:
2025-07-03

Interviewer:
Rien Fertel

Photographer:
Kathleen Flynn

Download Transcript

“

“What I believe is that if we’re going to be subsidizing things, we should be subsidizing our food as well. We should have a parity in that subsidy. And then once you’ve created the ability for people to make a living growing food and feed their communities, then we can start looking at: should we be growing this much milo, should we be growing this much corn, where is our soy going?” Marguerite Green

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