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Green Growing Power Surges in a City
Neal Peirce / Jul 02 2009
For Release Sunday, July 5, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
Neal Peirce MILWAUKEE - Will Allen has a small but remarkable farm. In greenhouses, he grows watercress, tomatoes, nasturtium, arugula, and many more vegetables. There are massive tanks of perch and tilapia. Plus a barnyard of goats, chickens, turkeys, ducks and apiaries for bees.
And red wriggler worms. Each year, tens of thousands of them eat through millions of pounds of composting materials to create what Allen claims is "the highest quality fertilizer in the world."
But this amazing organic farm isn't out in the sticks-it occupies three acres in a scruffy North Milwaukee neighborhood. Just possibly, it heralds a century of city farming that delivers healthy natural foods year-round and reduces reliance on thousand-mile-plus food supply lines.
Small wonder that Will Allen was recently accorded one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius awards." A genial giant of a man (6?7? tall), he grew up on a Maryland farm, became the first African-American star athlete at the University of Miami, played professional basketball, worked for Proctor & Gamble.
Then, in the 1990s, Allen found himself lured back into farming- "the hidden passion I didn't know I had." He began cultivating 100 acres in rural Wisconsin, then one day saw that vacant 1920s-era greenhouses on land owned by the city of Milwaukee had been put up for sale. Outmaneuvering a church that wanted the site for a sanctuary and parking lot, Allen acquired the property and started growing produce and plants in the greenhouses.
Asked in 1995 by Milwaukee's Hunger Task Force to help a youth group with an organic garden, Allen discovered his second passion. It's to fight the phenomenon of "food deserts" that are created when commercial food chains' flee inner-city black and Latino neighborhoods, leaving minefields of fast food joints and unhealthy processed foods in their wake.
Greens
Filtration bed of greens over a greenhouse fish tank.
Allen found neighborhood youth took naturally to the soil-and "rootedness" -of active farming. More and more schools and non-profits, first locally, then nationally, asked his counsel and wanted to visit his greenhouses.
So Allen formed his own non-profit, "Growing Power." Today it hums with substantial sales of organic produce, fish and soil. Propelled by the idealism of a youthful staff and thousands of young and old volunteers, it's become a major presence in Milwaukee and has active Chicago operations (including the Cabrini Green housing project). Allen's fast becoming the national seer of the local agriculture movement.
His secret to a better food future emerges from multiple, interlocked fronts:
* Urban, year-round farming in greenhouses, as a way to overcome the short growing seasons that hamper commercial market growth opportunities by local farmers (and farmers' markets).
But wintertime productions demands affordable heat. Rather than pay high fossil fuel utility bills, Growing Power composts madly. Heat's generated by constantly layering a essentially free materials-wood chips, newspapers, coffee grinds, discarded produce, moldy hay and more.
Already, the mix is keeping greenhouses above freezing through the Milwaukee winter. That's enough to grow such hardy greens as spinach and kale.
* The worms. Night and day, these humble creatures sift through the immature compost, digesting and converting it through their "castings" -worm poo that is-into extraordinarily organic fertilizer that Growing Power sells or uses in its own operations. "The worms can live to 50 years old. I treat them as livestock-they're our employees," says Allen.
The fertilized soil produced is a natural for rooftop, backyard, sideyard, balcony gardens-the variety of "do-it-yourself" urban home farm plots that Allen (and for that matter First Lady Michelle Obama) would like to see multiply rapidly around America. His goal: to break down the monopoly of today's industrial food system by "50 million Americans growing their own food."
Green Growing Power Surges in a City
Neal Peirce / Jul 02 2009
For Release Sunday, July 5, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
Neal Peirce MILWAUKEE - Will Allen has a small but remarkable farm. In greenhouses, he grows watercress, tomatoes, nasturtium, arugula, and many more vegetables. There are massive tanks of perch and tilapia. Plus a barnyard of goats, chickens, turkeys, ducks and apiaries for bees.
And red wriggler worms. Each year, tens of thousands of them eat through millions of pounds of composting materials to create what Allen claims is "the highest quality fertilizer in the world."
But this amazing organic farm isn't out in the sticks-it occupies three acres in a scruffy North Milwaukee neighborhood. Just possibly, it heralds a century of city farming that delivers healthy natural foods year-round and reduces reliance on thousand-mile-plus food supply lines.
Small wonder that Will Allen was recently accorded one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius awards." A genial giant of a man (6?7? tall), he grew up on a Maryland farm, became the first African-American star athlete at the University of Miami, played professional basketball, worked for Proctor & Gamble.
Then, in the 1990s, Allen found himself lured back into farming- "the hidden passion I didn't know I had." He began cultivating 100 acres in rural Wisconsin, then one day saw that vacant 1920s-era greenhouses on land owned by the city of Milwaukee had been put up for sale. Outmaneuvering a church that wanted the site for a sanctuary and parking lot, Allen acquired the property and started growing produce and plants in the greenhouses.
Asked in 1995 by Milwaukee's Hunger Task Force to help a youth group with an organic garden, Allen discovered his second passion. It's to fight the phenomenon of "food deserts" that are created when commercial food chains' flee inner-city black and Latino neighborhoods, leaving minefields of fast food joints and unhealthy processed foods in their wake.
Greens
Filtration bed of greens over a greenhouse fish tank.
Allen found neighborhood youth took naturally to the soil-and "rootedness" -of active farming. More and more schools and non-profits, first locally, then nationally, asked his counsel and wanted to visit his greenhouses.
So Allen formed his own non-profit, "Growing Power." Today it hums with substantial sales of organic produce, fish and soil. Propelled by the idealism of a youthful staff and thousands of young and old volunteers, it's become a major presence in Milwaukee and has active Chicago operations (including the Cabrini Green housing project). Allen's fast becoming the national seer of the local agriculture movement.
His secret to a better food future emerges from multiple, interlocked fronts:
* Urban, year-round farming in greenhouses, as a way to overcome the short growing seasons that hamper commercial market growth opportunities by local farmers (and farmers' markets).
But wintertime productions demands affordable heat. Rather than pay high fossil fuel utility bills, Growing Power composts madly. Heat's generated by constantly layering a essentially free materials-wood chips, newspapers, coffee grinds, discarded produce, moldy hay and more.
Already, the mix is keeping greenhouses above freezing through the Milwaukee winter. That's enough to grow such hardy greens as spinach and kale.
* The worms. Night and day, these humble creatures sift through the immature compost, digesting and converting it through their "castings" -worm poo that is-into extraordinarily organic fertilizer that Growing Power sells or uses in its own operations. "The worms can live to 50 years old. I treat them as livestock-they're our employees," says Allen.
The fertilized soil produced is a natural for rooftop, backyard, sideyard, balcony gardens-the variety of "do-it-yourself" urban home farm plots that Allen (and for that matter First Lady Michelle Obama) would like to see multiply rapidly around America. His goal: to break down the monopoly of today's industrial food system by "50 million Americans growing their own food."
* Health. Physically, Allen says, "growing food with hand tools is the most taxing thing you can do." Thus it's a great tool-combined with healthy natural foods-to address America's obesity epidemic, to start cutting radically into national health care costs.
But what's to eat beyond vegetables? Allen's top answer:
* Fish. Thousands of perch and tilapia occupy the bottom tanks of multi-level greenhouse tiers. Their waste-bearing water is pumped up into filtering gravel beds of watercress and other micro-greens, then to a growing bed of produce such as tomatoes, before returning, purified, into the fish tank. "We mimic," says Allen, "the biodiversity of a river."
* Community food. To combat the food deserts, Allen designed a system to distribute market baskets of healthy produce. Consumers in low-income neighborhoods pick them up at key drop sites, paying (with food stamp assistance) only $16 for about $25 worth of vegetables. Allen has also partnered with Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee to mount a system of subsidized weekly deliveries of fresh produce to corner stores that usually (and notoriously) focus on tobacco, alcohol and processed foods.
Allen says he had no advance grand plan. Instead, it's emerged organically. How fitting!
Neal Peirce's e-mail is npeirce@....
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