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Photo by Tony Dornacher
More city dwellers are growing their own food. It's good business
By Peter Ladner
Vancouver Sun
March 24, 2010
Peter Ladner is a former city councillor who is a Fellow at the SFU Centre for Dialogue. He is writing a book entitled Planning Cities as if Food Matters.
Excerpt:
Will Allen, 60, is a 6-foot 7-inch former professional basketball player and sales executive for Procter and Gamble and KFC, who can't keep his hands out of the dirt.
"I'm a farmer first," he tells his weekend class of 80 people who are crammed into one of his 14 greenhouses in a working class neighbourhood of Milwaukee. They're paying $150 a day for a weekend course at the at the epicentre of the North American urban agriculture explosion. Biceps the size of tree trunks hanging out of his cut-off hoody, he strokes and pokes the moist black soil swarming with red wriggler worms as he repeats his lessons.
"Let's go over it again," he shouts. "What's the proper mix of nitrogen and carbon for healthy compost? They taught me at Procter and Gamble that you have to hear something five times before you remember it."
Will Allen is not easily forgettable. His 17-year-old Growing Power Community Food Center employs 39 people, engages 2,000 volunteers, and cranks out 2,000 trays of sprouts a week. He figures he's getting $30 for every square foot of sprouts. The centre has a 33,000-square-foot warehouse down the road that helps feed low-income people, with production boosted by a nearby farm and community gardens in Chicago. Between the low-income food boxes and the sales to local chefs, Growing Power produces enough food for 10,000 people a year.
His success in mixing local food production, low-income-job creation and business skills earned him a $500,000 MacArthur Genius award in 2008 and a $400,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation. In our January class, huddled around warm water in the tilapia fish tanks while the frigid Wisconsin winds chills the composting class outside, an executive from JP Morgan Chase watches over the fruits of his company's $150,000 donation to Growing Power.
Will Allen is the pivot for what he calls the "Good Food Revolution"– getting a reliable source of fresh local organic affordable fruits and vegetables to ill-fed low income people. He's determined to work from the ground up to reverse the way our current diet is, literally, killing us. In February he stood alongside First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House to kick off her campaign to end childhood obesity. The next week he was in Seattle launching the city's Year of Urban Agriculture.
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