Owner and chef, is a recent New York City transplant whose experience in the food industry and culinary travels have culminated in a deep appreciation for traditional methods of cooking locally sourced ingredients. Through the school she shares the pleasures that come from sowing, growing, preserving, foraging, brewing, stewing as well as eating locally raised and farmed dishes.

Raised in Milwaukee, Annemarie Ahearn spent her childhood summers in Maine at her family’s blueberry farm on Blinn Hill in the town of Dresden, where she and her cousins spent days picking blueberries and building forts in the woods. After attending Colorado College, her interest in food developed while living in Aix-en-Provence, where she studied Provincial cuisine and visited the open-air markets.

A few years later she apprenticed in the kitchen at Le Jardin Notre Dame in Paris. While in New York, Annemarie worked in the editorial department at Saveur Magazine and wrote a biweekly food column for The L Magazine, entitled the “Downtown Chef.” After attending the Institute of Culinary Education she worked for Dan Barber at Blue Hill Restaurant, as personal assistant to Tom Colicchio of Craft Restaurants and as a personal chef in New York. She also worked at the Slow Food Headquarters, promoting the movement and helping to increase membership. More recently, she taught classes at “Cook and Taste,” a small, recreational cooking school located beside La Boqueria, in Barcelona.

Salt Water Farm is an expression of Annemarie’s travels & experiences and love of cultivating new relationships as well as sharing delicious meals.

Ladleah Dunn was born on Peace Meal Farm in Dixmont, Maine. She spent her childhood on Vinalhaven where she occupied the better part of her days foraging for food on the island, building rafts upon which she would float in coves and gardening in her backyard.

In her teens, Ladleah moved down to Pine Island off the West Coast of Florida. She calls it one of the last “real” places left, an island inhabited by mostly fisherman and wilderness. Here she discovered football-sized mangoes, fresh fish fries and pig pickins. An organic gardener named Sally and her husband Jon, a mullet fisherman and Florida cracker, taught Ladleah about what eating locally really meant. A 22-day sailing course tipped the scales and Ladleah shifted her focus to the sea. She competed in an International Seamanship Competition called the Atlantic Challenge off the coast of Ireland and then attended the Maine Martime Academy where she studied Ocean Sciences and Small Vessel Operation. She then headed to Vancouver Island to study the effects of logging on the local fish population and helped map the ancestral lands of native tribes. When Outward Bound offered her a position as the logistics coordinator of the Hurricane Island program, she zigzagged back across the country in her old Volvo to take the job.

After a few years running the department, she was called back down to Florida to help her parents operate a marina in the swamplands beside the St. John River. There she met Shane, her future husband, on a sailboat and the two of them moved onto a 30-footer together and sailed around the Bahamas for a stretch. Eventually, they drove back to Maine and started Kalliste Yacht Services, a boat reparation company.

Ladleah is a trained chef and has worked for Stacy Glassman for several years. She maintains a small farm of her own in Lincolnville with 8 chickens and a German short-haired Griffon named Buckey. She is the Farm Manager at Salt Water Farm and assistant to Annemarie in the kitchen.

Irene was born in Honolulu and spent a few years in the Philippines before her family settled down in San Diego. Her earliest memories of food were of her mother preparing various Philippine staples for the large, boisterous gatherings they often hosted. Her mother’s dishes, notably her pancit and lumpia, garnered such a following within the community that for a short time during elementary school, Irene and her twin sister, Lisa, would go to school armed with boxes of siopao to sell to classmates and teachers. After the twins learned they had been given the nickname “Siopao Yadao”, they promptly put an end to their little business. Irene's father, a retired naval officer, was also adept in the kitchen, and he ran a successful side business selling Hawaiian cakes. Despite having naturally good cooks for parents, Irene's interest in and appreciation for food came later in life.

Irene studied journalism at San Diego State University and spent her first few years out of college working as a freelance music writer and as a fact-checker and assistant editor for the Village Voice in New York. After a few years in the city, she and her boyfriend embarked on a cross-country road trip that lasted several months. Instead of returning to New York as planned, they settled down in Taos, New Mexico. In the fall of 2007, Irene moved to Camden, where she developed a deep appreciation for Maine's harvests and its strong community of farmers.

At the Farm, Irene assists Annemarie in the office, lends a hand at the Moon and Sunday Suppers, and manages the Farm's social media outlets. Before Salt Water Farm, she worked as a reporter for The Republican Journal in Belfast and as a baker at The Market Basket in Rockport. In the kitchen, she is more like her father in that she prefers to spend her time baking. One day, though, she hopes to master at least one of her mother's dishes.

Irene, who received her master’s degree in creative writing from Naropa University, is crafting a collection of short stories and essays.