By Elizabeth Royte
This essay is excerpted from the Living Book Beyond Dr. King: More Stories of African-American Achievement.
Will Allen ascends a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probes the aromatic mass with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he says, pleased with the writhing mass of red worms that dangles from his tines. The farmer rakes another section with his fingers and palms a few beauties. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he says. “Anyone can grow food.”
Like others in the so-called “good food” movement, Allen, 61, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. He advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local is not a rural field or a suburban garden: it is 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres [.8 hectare] in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, not far from the city’s largest public-housing project.
And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings, Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants and at farmers markets. He couldn’t train farmers in intensive polyculture — growing an array of crops in a small space — or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.
With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural super-city of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Greens shoot from 25,000 pots hung in five tiers; the farm produces a thousand trays of sprouts weekly. Out back, chickens, ducks, turkeys and goats roam. Greenhouses shelter in-ground fish tanks teeming with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics.
If Growing Power is Eden, the surrounding neighborhood is a food desert. “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the supermarket,” Allen tells me. “That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff.” Fast-food joints, liquor stores and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, are abundant. Allen says, “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”
Propelled by alarming rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity, and by food-safety scares and rising awareness of industrial agriculture’s environmental footprint, the good food movement is timely. Backyard and rooftop farms are sprouting across the United States; community gardens have waiting lists; seed houses and canning suppliers are oversold.
Allen, too, is on a roll, winning accolades, awards and sizable grants from foundations. Today, he’s the go-to expert on urban farming, regularly conducting two-day workshops to teach worm composting, aquaponics construction and other farm skills. “We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen tells his students, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: rising oil prices will make food transport and oil-based fertilizers more expensive; as cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space closer to population centers will become ever more important.
Allen and his five siblings grew up outside Bethesda, Maryland. “My father was a sharecropper in South Carolina,” he tells me as we drive toward a suburb where Growing Power leases a 30-acre [12.14-hectare] plot. “He was the eldest boy of 13 children, and he never learned to read.” After moving north in the 1930s, “my mother did domestic work, and my father worked as a construction laborer,” he explains, “but he rented a small plot to farm.”
A talented athlete, Allen wasn’t allowed to practice sports until he finished his farm chores. “I thought, there’s got to be something better than this.” For a while, there was. He accepted a basketball scholarship from the University of Miami. After graduating, he played professionally, briefly in the American Basketball Association in Florida and then for a few seasons in Belgium. In his free time, Allen drove around the countryside, where he couldn’t help noticing the compost piles.
“I started hanging out with Belgian farmers,” Allen says. Eventually he moved to a house with a garden. Soon, he had 25 chickens and was growing the familiar foods of his youth — peas, beans, peanuts. “I just had to do it,” he tells me. “It made me happy to touch the soil.” On holidays, he cooked feasts for his teammates. He gave away a lot of eggs.
After retiring from basketball in 1977, Allen settled with his wife, Cyndy Bussler, and their three children in Oak Creek, just south of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Cyndy’s family owned farmland. At first, Allen grew vegetables for his family and sold the excess at Milwaukee’s farmer’s markets and in stores. Meanwhile, he worked as a district manager for Kentucky Fried Chicken, where he won sales awards. “It was just a job,” he said. “I was aware it wasn’t the greatest food, but I also knew that people didn’t have a lot of choice about where to eat: There were no sit-down restaurants in that part of the city.”
In 1987, Allen took a job with Procter & Gamble, where he won a marketing award for selling paper goods to supermarkets. “The job was so easy I could do it in half a day,” he says. That left more time to grow vegetables. By now, Allen was donating food to a local food pantry. “I didn’t like the idea of people eating all that canned food, that salty stuff.” When he brought in his greens, he said, “it was the number one item selected off that carousel.”
When Allen tells me, with a modest grin, about winning six more sales awards in a single year, I suddenly understand: This soil-loving farmer is a genius at selling — whether fried chicken, disposable diapers, arugula, or red wrigglers. He can push his greens into corporate cafeterias, persuade the governor to help finance the construction of an anaerobic digester, wheedle new composting sites from urban landlords, persuade Milwaukee’s school board to buy his produce for its public schools and charm the blind into growing sprouts. (“I was cutting sprouts in the dark one night,” Allen says, “and I realized you don’t need sight to do this.”)
Farm work is hard, nature can be cruel, and the pay is low; most small farmers work off-farm to make ends meet. The appeal of such labor to low-income urban dwellers — the demographic Allen most wants to reach — is not immediately apparent. And there is something almost fanciful in exhorting a person to grow food when he lives in an apartment or is not permitted to garden on the roof.
“Not everyone can grow food,” Allen acknowledges. But he offers other ways of engaging with the soil, by involving people in community gardening. If that doesn’t attract his Milwaukee neighbors, they can order a market basket or shop at his retail store, which sells fried pork skin and collard greens. “Culturally appropriate foods,” Allen says.
This flexible approach may be one of Allen’s most appealing qualities. His essential view is that people do the best they can: If they don’t have any better food choices than high-fat fast food, that’s okay, but let’s work on changing that. If they don’t know what to do with okra, Growing Power stands ready to help. And if their great-grandparents were sharecroppers and they have some bad feelings about farming, Allen has something to offer there too: His personal example and workshops geared toward empowering minorities, many of whom have had negative experiences. “I can break through a lot of that very quickly because a lot of people of color are so proud, so happy to see me leading this kind of movement,” he says.
When Allen bought the Growing Power property, a derelict plant nursery that was in foreclosure, in 1993, he had no master plan. “I told the city I’d hire kids and teach them about food systems,” he says. Soon community and school groups were asking for his help starting gardens. He rarely said no. In 1995, he partnered with Heifer International, the sustainable-agriculture charity. “They were looking for youth to do urban ag. When they learned I had kids and that I had land, their eyes lit up.”
Today, Growing Power is working in other cities, including Detroit, Chicago, Denver and Louisville, Kentucky. The Milwaukee farm hopes to expand vertically, with a five-story farm, and horizontally, with more compost piles. Allen, who’s writing a book called The Good Food Revolution, travels the world, an ambassador for strengthening community food systems. But he still manages, he says, to touch the soil every day.
Based on an article first published by the New York Times Magazine on July 5, 2009.
Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water (2009); Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (2005) and The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest (2002). Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper's, National Geographic, Outside, and other publications.
For more information, see Growing Power.
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