A Vacation Postcard, Part 2: Growing Power in Milwaukee

On Monday, I wrote about visiting the wood-fired kiln at Saint John’s University on a sustainability-oriented Midwest tour last week. After some time in Collegeville, Minn., I and my two traveling companions headed into Wisconsin and Iowa, where we hunted down sustainable-agriculture sites. First stop, Milwaukee.

There we visited Growing Power, the base of operations for one of the gurus of the local-food movement: Will Allen, a former professional basketball player who started a small farm on a city plot in Milwaukee. His intensively cultivated farm, set in an old greenhouse, has been an inspiration for young people who are interested in urban farming and even a source of research for some university food programs. A couple of years ago he won a MacArthur “genius grant” for his work.

From the press surrounding Growing Power, one might get the impression that Mr. Allen started his farm in an “urban food desert” (a place underserved by vendors selling cheap and healthy food) to provide an alternative for the poor people who live there. One might think that his venture started with a sustainability mission firmly in place. Both of those impressions might be inspiring, but the reality is more complicated.

The farm actually started as a for-profit venture, our tour guide told us, and the sustainable practices at Growing Power evolved over time. Although Growing Power does indeed provide a fresh-food outlet in the neighborhood (in part through food that is trucked in from regional farms), we were surprised to see what takes up a good deal of the growing space and provides a big chunk of the farm’s income: sprouts of various kinds, wheatgrass, watercress, and microgreens. Those are the kinds of things that pricey restaurants put on their salads or wealthy people put in their juicers. Nothing wrong with that, really; it was just a surprise.

The most positive and interesting aspects of the visit were things that student farmers could learn from: The ways that Growing Power used low-tech and recycled materials to grow a lot of food in a small space. The “aquaponics” projects, which have been developed in a partnership with the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, might be one example. Using two-by-fours lined with rubber, Growing Power’s workers built fish tanks for tilapia and perch. The water from the tanks is pumped up to platforms where it runs through pea gravel and various plants, like tomatoes in pots or watercress planted directly in the water. The microbes lodged in the gravel, along with plants, clean the water before it runs back down to the fish.

Now Growing Power staff members have started hanging logs inoculated with mushrooms above the water. They can dunk the logs now and then to force them to fruit. In the space of one garden bed, Growing Power can produce three or four crops, including a lot of fish. (They can stock one fish per gallon, and some of the tanks are 10,000 gallons.)

There are other homegrown projects like this: An old clothes dryer that has been modified to become a compost sifter. Soil is produced through big bins of worm “livestock.” Homemade hoop houses are heated in the winter with composting manure. And so on. Ag-oriented students could learn from a simple tour of this place.

I’ll post a final installment — about our trip to Decorah, Iowa, to see Luther College and Seed Savers Exchange — in the near future.