I was fortunate last night to be at a Sustainability Symposium at the Milwaukee School of Engineering where Will Allen spoke. I hadn’t heard of Will or his organization, Growing Power, before last night, but when I woke up this chilly fall morning at 6am, his talk and his story were still on my mind. Will is a brilliant, passionate farmer, whose particular interest is in urban agriculture and the local food movement. As he noted last night, more than half of the world’s people will be living in cities by the year 2030. What that means is that for food systems to be local in a world where most of us are urban dwellers, we need to have farms in our cities. Will and his organization have been working on precisely that for the better part of the last 20 years.
Growing Power is a vibrant blend of:
1) Farming innovations - Growing food in three vertical levels in greenhouses (or as Growing Power calls them, hoophouses) so that in essence, you’re growing 3x the food in the same SF of land, including fish pond systems on the first level. And this, in the middle of a CITY.
2) Productivity – Maximizing production per SF of land; Will readily quoted his yields and ROI during his presentation and the returns are impressive. Dude knows his numbers.
3) Multicultural, multigenerationl community-building - Of course! It’s neighborhood-based in central cities which are multiethnic, with everyone from seniors to teenagers to elementary school kids rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty.
And, last, but not least,
4) Capacity-building -Workshops, camps, slide shows, a Youth Corps… all to to get the conversation started and then to shift The Larger Conversation about our food systems.
Both community and capacity building are gonna get us something different than what we’ve got. What was particularly moving and provocative to me was the project Growing Power completed with a juvenile detention center in Milwaukee, where young men planted and tended gardens and crops at the facility, therapeutically for themselves and also to create beauty. It’s all good stuff.
Stay strong idealism junkie!! I was looking at some greenhouses that I could put over the whole southern side of the house. All the best to you muchacha!