From the book "More Good News" by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel
GETTING IT ALL EXACTLY RIGHT
"Growing Power is probably the leading urban agricultural project
in the United States. [It's] not just talking about what needs to
be changed; it's accomplishing it."
Jerry Kaufman, professor emeritus. University of
Wisconsin-Madison
There are now so many exemplary revolutionary and sustainable
food systems all over the world that it's hard to pick just one
as a model, especially since most of the time they have little
connection to or knowledge of each other. The example we've
chosen below is particularly telling, because it serves a poor
community in an urban neighborhood-a fact that immediately
addresses some of the economic arguments that might occur to some
readers about the "expensive" and "pretentious" nature of organic
foods.
Growing Power is a food-producing dynamo within the city limits
of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It doesn't have the support of centuries
of tradition, like Presidia cheese producers in Italy do, and it
can't sell to tourists or wealthy neighbors because it doesn't
have either. It isn't linked to Slow Food or any well-known food
NGO. It is typical, however, in that it doesn't take up much
space and it packs a wallop. Growing Power sustains a huge social
system that in itself would be worth the effort, even if it
didn't produce goat stew with greens, grass-fed beef burgers, and
homemade bread, dripping with local honey, along the way.
Growing Power operates from fourteen greenhouses that cover only
2 acres. Besides salad greens, tomatoes, and other produce, the
greenhouses shelter goats, ducks, bees, turkeys, and even
fish-tila pia and Great Lakes perch, grown in an incredibly
well-thought-out aquaponics system that uses the planet's
precious water supply much the way Mother Nature would. A 40-acre
farm in the nearby countryside grows more vegetables, as well as
the hays, grasses, and legumes required to feed the livestock.
Growing Power gets its soil by composting more than 6 million
pounds of food waste a year, including material collected from
local breweries and coffee shops. In fact, the red wiggler
earthworms used to turn this compost into what the workers call
"Milwaukee Black Gold" are considered part of the project's
livestock.
Besides the thousands it serves in Milwaukee, Growing Power has
helped set up five similar projects in impoverished areas of
Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Mississippi. Its largest effort is a
sister program begun in the infamous, crime-ridden Chicago
housing project Cabrini-Green, which now includes a center in
Chicago's downtown Grant Park, teaching young people to grow 150
varieties of heirloom vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers. All
these projects are supported by selling the food in Farm-to-City
Market Baskets, which is another example of that famous CSA food
distribution system that links urban dwellers with their food
supply.
Food is a crucial social issue for human beings because it
remains the primary way that people meet, socialize, celebrate,
and even grieve. And of course it's also the primary way we
survive and maintain our health. Along with indicators like child
mortality rates and average income, access to good-quality food
is one of the most accurate ways to judge a country's prosperity,
as well as its level of social equality and integration. In
marginal, minority, or impoverished communities around the
world-and this very much includes native reserves in Canada and
urban ghettos in the U.S.there is nearly always less food of good
quality available.
Will Allen, the founder of Growing Power, is a recipient of a
MacArthur Foundation genius award; he's a 6-foot, 7-inch ex-pro
basketball star, today in his early sixties. Allen grew up as
part of a poor sharecropper's family in South Carolina.
Eventually they bought a farm in Maryland and proceeded to feed
the neighborhood with it. "We could handle thirty people for
dinner," he remembers. "Food racism" is one of the major reasons
Allen created Growing Power, which provides thirty-five jobs to a
very ethnically diverse staff and is the only place for many
miles in any direction that carries fresh produce, free-range
eggs, grass-fed beef, and homegrown honey. "Poor people are not
educated about nutrition and don't have access to stores that
sell nutritious food; they wind up with diabetes and heart
disease," he says, and adds, "Just as there is redlining in
lending, there is redlining by grocery stores, denying access to
[the poor] by staying out of minority communities." Every week
Growing
Power delivers around three hundred Market Baskets of food to
more than twenty agencies, community centers, and pick-up sites
around the city, introducing sustainable eating habits to
thousands of people, getting them off expensive and poisonous
industrial foods, at a price that works out to between $g and $16
a basket.
Because his clientele likes fish, and because yellow perch are a
traditional, local food that has almost disappeared owing to
pollution and overfishing in the Great Lakes, Allen decided to
farm fish. This is a tricky proposition in most cases - fish
raised in ocean cages have been a disaster, breeding diseases and
parasites that have all but wiped out their wild relatives.
Moreover, their flesh is contaminated with pesticides and
chemicals from their feed. Even when vegetarian species like
tilapia are raised on land, what the fish eat and what happens to
their wastes are often mismanaged. But Allen didn't get a genius
award for nothing. He built a farming system worth $50,000 for
just $3,000 inside his greenhouses. The perch hatchlings are
raised up for market over about nine months in 10,000-gallon
tanks filled with water that's recycled throughout the system.
The fish waste drops down to a gravel bed where it creates
nitrogen that feeds watercress growing in channels down the line.
That filters the water some more; it's then pumped overhead to
nourish tomatoes and salad greens. "The plants extract the
nutrients, while the worms in the soil consume bacteria from the
water, which emerges virtually pristine and flows back into the
fish tanks." This multiuse growing system mimics nature through
the crucial process of using waste as food and using water as
both a nutrient and a waste-disposal mechanism. It also adopts
traditional farming methods used around the world, maximizing a
wide variety of production in a very small space.
Will Allen is part of the Growing Food and Justice for All
Initiative, a network of about five hundred people working on
sustainability and food access issues. He supplements Growing
Power's offerings with products from the Rainbow Farmer's
Cooperative, which consists of three hundred multiethnic family
farms in the U.S. Midwest and south. These partners' longer
seasons allow Growing Power to provide fruits and vegetables all
year round. In all its centers Growing Power concentrates on
training: about three thousand young people from around the world
learn how to heat greenhouses with compost; use worms to create
fertilizer; build fish-farming systems and hoop houses (low-cost,
movable chicken pens); and exploit other low-tech, high-yield
techniques that are features of all the new sustainable
food-raising systems. In educational programs in Chicago and
Milwaukee, Growing Power gets people of all ages involved in
creating food wherever they live, in inner-city lots, suburban
backyards, and rural areas. "For kids to make their own soil,
grow their own food, and then get to eat it, that's a very
powerful experience," says Allen proudly.
Growing Power is a particularly fine example, but there are
literally millions now, in every city and in most large urban
areas in the industrialized world, multiplying at a bewildering
rate since the first edition of this book was written. They may
not all have an aquaponics system, but most have evolved some
unique means of producing food that is their own creative
response to local ecosystem products, as well as to local needs.
All people who care about food can name a farm, a market, or a
co-op they think is wonderful in their own area. These businesses
demonstrate that the regreening of the entire world of food is
well underway.
..........
AH YES WHEN MANKIND PUTS THEIR MIND TO IT, THERE IS NOTHING THAT
CANNOT BE DONE IN SURVIVING ON THIS WONDERFUL BLUE AND GREEN
PLANET.
..........
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