SHELBURNE FALLS — Annie Cheatham may have retired as head of CISA, but she’s kept her hand in the soil.
Cheatham, who spent seven years as executive director of Deerfield-based Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture after running Annie’s Garden Shop in Amherst, has been planting seeds around the six-state region for the newly created New England Farmers Union, a division of the 109-year-old National Farmers Union.
It helps that at CISA she worked closely with farmers around the Pioneer Valley to understand many of the issues affecting agriculture in a region dominated by small farms. And it helps that before moving to the Pioneer Valley, Cheatham worked on Capitol Hill, first for the North Carolina representative who chaired the House Agriculture Committee and started a think tank, the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future.
But that was the past.
As of 2009 Cheatham took on the part-time job as president of the fledgling New England Farmers Union, which had been chartered in 2006 by the Washington, D.C.-based organization. It now has 1,400 members.