Growing Power
November 12th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Posted in Sustainability, urban agriculture
Will Allen has a vision for urban agriculture
Liz Falk, founder of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious example of urban agriculture, Common Good City Farm, recently flew off to Milwaukee to spend time with farmer/genius Will Allen and his mind-boggling chain of farm operations in Milwaukee called Growing Power. Last night Liz gave a slideshow talk on the experience that was worth every penny of my $2 donation to the cause.
Pictures of Allen’s growing methods are breathtaking. Imagine renegade farmer Joel Salatin’s holistic, earth-friendly approach applied to an urban setting. Greenhouses are crammed floor-to-ceiling with all manner of vegetable beds, seed trays, growing pots. Trenches are dug down the middle for fish ponds; the water circulates up through several levels to feed watercress. Workers scour the city for food waste and beer mash, turning it into tons of compost that then feeds endless troughs of worms to make fertilizer. A chicken coop consists of recycled plastic milk crates as nesting sites. The chickens, along with active compost piles, are strategically placed inside greenhouses to provide heat.
As Liz describes it, Growing Power functions more like an ant farm, with staff and volunteers swarming over problems, depending less on actual organization than on frequent doses of inspiration from Will Allen.
Planted in a food dessert, next door to Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, Growing Power now feeds some 10,000 people and Allen has become a rock star in the new food movement. Will Allen’s vision is messy and innovative and wonderful. But what impresses me most is that even after 16 years of operation, and a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” award, Growing Power does not support itself from what it produces. It still relies on grants and earnings from training outsiders and other income sources not directly related to selling its vegetables (even with the watercress fetching $12 a pound).
Is Growing Power the proper model for a successful urban farm? Or is it simply an incubator for ideas about how we might farm in the city if we could ever find a way to make that idea an actual possibility?
Following Liz’s talk, discussion about worm composting techniques gave way to the Big Question: We have the know-how. We have the land. Why don’t we have urban farms that can make fresh, nutritious food available to everyone at prices they can afford? The answer, of course, is that current urban agriculture efforts are still running on grants and volunteers, just like Growing Power. They don’t really compete with our conventional food system because the price of conventional food has never factored in the true costs of producing it: overuse of water and fossil fuels, extravagant carbon emissions, destruction of soil, toxic pollution of air and water. It thrives on huge subsidies of tax dollars, and a license to destroy the planet.
We’ve allowed our free-market method of producing food to spin out of control. For a good idea of how we’ve permitted faceless corporations to consolidate and wreck local food system, read this piece by Grist food editor Tom Philpott in Newsweek. He sums up the dilemma neatly. Our current food system, like much of our consumer economy, is unsustainble precisely because it is so destructive, because it has never been priced according to the damage it does.
Is there a day of reckoning coming? Dwindling resources. Overpopulation. Global heating. Overwhelming government debt. Nobel economist Milton Friedman liked to say that no true change occurs without a crisis. Perhaps visionaries like Will Allen and Liz Falk are only a few years ahead of their times.
Allen was a keynote speaker at this summer’s NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Assn.) conference. He explained that the mission of his organization was not just providing fresh food in inner city Milwaukee but also training volunteers, building gardens for other organizations and providing activities for children and others. Thus the organization as a whole is not completely supported by food sales but they do provide a big chunk of change. He is really inspiring, by the way.
Diane, I’m sure that Will Allen strikes quite a charismatic figure. I know that the mission of Common Good is largely as a demostration and education project. Still, I think it’s noteworthy that a farm of this size, producing as much as it does, still does not break even and relies on other funding sources to stay afloat. That simply puts it in the same realm as the other urban farms I know, which also depend on grant funding.
“They don’t really compete with our conventional food system because the price of conventional food has never factored in the true costs of producing it: overuse of water and fossil fuels, extravagant carbon emissions, destruction of soil, toxic pollution of air and water. It thrives on huge subsidies of tax dollars, and a license to destroy the planet.”
This, for me, is the most salient point. If conventional food’s price reflected its actual cost, it would have died out long ago. Perhaps it’s a pipe dream but, why not simply make gasoline and mileage no longer tax deductible for food producers? Why, with our incredibly long growing season, does an overwhelming percentage of the vegetables sold at Dupont Circle Whole Foods or any other supermarket come from California or further? How does draining the water tables in the Imperial Valley (which gets 2-3 weeks of rainfall per year) to bring tasteless baby lettuce to our fairly soggy East Coast make any kind of sense – financially or agriculturally?
Christiana, I think you are going to be seeing some equalizing on this issue as the problems of depleting resources (especially fossil fuels and water) as well as global warming and health concerns become more acute.