Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (26 page)

Allen also figured out that he could grow soil just by diverting compostable waste from Milwaukee's landfill. “Everybody has seen those big green trucks rumbling through their neighborhood,” said Allen, as he showed a slide of a large garbage dump truck. “That is our competition.” No matter what the weather, Allen wants Growing Power to get to that valuable green waste before the waste companies do. Allen needs as much soil as he can create if he wants to keep growing and expanding. “We picked up twenty thousand pounds of waste from just one supplier last year,” Allen proudly declared, showing a photo of a pile of unsold fruits and vegetables that never made it out of their packing crates. Cardboard and all got piled up in compost rows. “Then we feed it to livestock,” Allen cheekily offered before advancing the slide. “These are our livestock.” Allen smiled, finally showing a slide of a wriggling mass of red worms. “We have billions of employees, and they work for food only and don't talk back,” he laughed. “This makes us the largest employer in the world.”

The worms, Allen's passion, eat their weight daily in waste, he repeated over and over. Growing Power, or, more to the point, the red wigglers in Growing Power's employ, compost over one million pounds of waste in Milwaukee, creating precious nutrient-rich soil rather than greenhouse gases in the Milwaukee landfill. Allen was originally told that those worms wouldn't survive the northern Midwest winters, but he found a way around that, too, by overwintering them in huge compost hedgerows large enough so that the worms could dive toward the center of the piles where the biological activity of the decomposing compost kept them from freezing. “We started with thirty pounds of worms, now we have five thousand pounds.” It's the cornerstone to his intensive crop production. “You can drop me off anywhere in the world with a handful
of worms, and I can create a growing system.” That is the power these “employees” possess with their digestive capacities. “If you remember one thing tonight,” Allen repeated to the crowd one more time, “this is all about the soil. Without high-nutrient soil, you cannot grow healthy food. The taste of the food is due to the richness of the soil.”

Besides worms, Growing Power now produces one hundred thousand fish—tilapia, perch, blue gill, and a few blue koi—in its aquaculture tanks (the fish waste becomes fertilizer for plant crops, which clean the water in a convenient nutrient cycle). There are thirty-nine goats for the artisanal cheese production and honeybees that produce honey sold under a house label called Urban Honey. There are five hundred laying hens producing eggs. There are even some heirloom turkeys that Allen is trying out as a personal project. And lots and lots of green crops, year-round, thanks to the greenhouses and hoop houses outside of which Allen piles compost that creates heat to mitigate against the bitter Midwest winters, and that allows almost year-round production of salad crops. And no growing space is ignored. Baskets hang from the greenhouse frame, and trays of sprouts and seedlings are layered to make every cubic inch count in a space about the size of a small supermarket.

But Growing Power's ambitions far exceed even what has been accomplished in Milwaukee. Its mission statement asserts that it is “a national nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe, and affordable food for people in all communities.”
⁶

There are currently fifteen sites under the Growing Power umbrella, and spaces are constantly being absorbed into its orbit. Allen clicked to a slide of an unused greenhouse he recently took over in a cemetery in Milwaukee for growing space. “Cemeteries used to grow their own flowers. Now we keep people away from the great boardroom in the sky a little bit longer.”

For the past decade, Erika Allen, Will's daughter, has been managing
and expanding Growing Power sites in Chicago. In 2002, the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago bought an unused basketball court and partnered with Growing Power to transform it into a community garden. It is now a community farm that gives residents in this community access to organic vegetables, nutritional education, and work-skills education. In 2005, Growing Power created a 20,000-square-foot (1,858-square-meter) urban garden/space that was established as the Grant Park “Art of the Farm” Urban Agriculture Potager. This
raised-bed vegetable garden contains 150 heirloom edible flowers, herbs, and vegetables in the heart of the downtown region. Two years later, Jackson Park Urban Farm and Community Allotment Garden was set up to provide residents of Chicago's South Side with food-growing space and training with Growing Power volunteers. In 2010, Growing Power started a 2.5-acre (1-hectare) urban farm called the Altgeld Gardens Urban Farm on the city's South Side in one of the city's most disadvantaged communities. In its first year, Altgeld Gardens employed 150 adults and 40 at-risk youths, as it grew and distributed healthy fresh food to the area residents. “Growing Power is one of the only multicultural, multigenerational organizations led by a person of color in the US,” Allen said.

Growing Power, Allen explained, is now a major training center for urban agriculturists and an innovation hub for cutting-edge urban-food production, renewable-energy projects, and waste-reduction systems. In 2010, Growing Power welcomed 15,000 visitors to its sites, engaged 3,500 volunteers, graduated 32 commercial urban-agriculture farmers, and 1,000 future urban farmers got a taste of what lay ahead for them there.

Growing Power is also the economic model for other successful nonprofit social enterprises, with its diverse, multilayered revenue streams. These include revenue from educational and training programs; the sales of foods to restaurants and cafeterias through the retail store, at farmers’ markets, and via CSAs; foundation grants; and Will Allen's near-constant speaking engagements. In 2010, Growing Power had a $4.1 million operating budget and generated a $700,000 surplus.

Allen explained that his next challenge is to figure out how to incorporate renewable energy into urban agriculture. He is experimenting with solar panels. “Renewable energy must be part of the energy cost to run this high-value space.”

Lastly, Allen unveiled the architectural renderings for the next big project, a five-story vertical farm that will serve as the new growing, research and development, training, and administrative headquarters in
Milwaukee. (On December 31, 2010, Allen held a press conference in Milwaukee to announce that Growing Power's 27,000-square-foot [2,508-square meter], five-story vertical farm's building permit had been approved by the city. Construction was scheduled to start in 2011.)

The impressive financials and the high-tech vertical farm seem to prove a point about the economic viability of urban agriculture to those who can see value only in dollar signs and ambitious building projects. More impressively, Growing Power has revitalized a city's food system and created a locally controlled, sustainable, green economy that provides good, healthy food to people who otherwise don't have the opportunity to access it. It provides training to those whose options are limited. And it builds and improves communities where other social programs have failed.

“Food is a very powerful organizing tool,” concluded Allen. More to the point, Allen has proven that you can't really conceive of community-development plans anymore and leave food off the map. It has to be the central organizing element, and other issues, like literacy, crime reduction, urban revitalization, improvements in physical and mental health, will naturally follow. And even Allen admits that the tide has finally changed; people are thinking of community-based food systems as viable and important to the urban landscape when, “in the beginning, a lot of this was just talk.”

He even has interest from some surprising groups. The slide showing a group of buttoned-down, middle-aged, white Walmart executives looking intently at tilapia tanks got a raucous laugh from the leftist Vancouver crowd. “You may laugh,” Allen countered, “but one of the things about urban agriculture is that we need everybody at the Good Food Revolution table. Those days are over when we exclude people and organizations from being partners.” Allen was clearly focused on big changes, not little ones. And the challenge ahead is clear. Industrial agriculture, and the systems that exclude some people from being able to access good, nutritious foods, isn't going anywhere soon. “We
need fifty million new farmers” to make a permanent, meaningful change in how we produce, access, and recycle our food.

The success of Growing Power is undeniable. There can be no doubt that Allen is the right person at the right place at the right time. He's worldly but rooted in his community. He's a philosopher and a farmer. He's overcome many obstacles but exudes pure positivity and hope. He's equally at home talking to halls packed with people as he is on the farm. (The fact that he still operates his own farm gives him dirt-under-the-fingernails credentials in the agricultural world as well.) As a role model, Allen is a very successful African American farmer (and CEO), which is an important leap forward in a food-security movement in the United States where racial polarities seemed unbridgeable at times. Within the African American landscape, Allen is a positive example of a successful farmer in a world where the history of labor abuses of sharecropping often gnaws at the black community. But Allen acknowledges this fact head-on and encourages people to see the healing that food growing can accomplish in communities of color. He's making it a desirable and viable way for communities to find a way out of poverty and poor nutrition among families who find their options few and far between.

And though Allen seemed weary after his whirlwind visit to Vancouver, with the constant rat-a-tat questions and people merely wanting to shake hands, he graciously made time and personal connections until the last hand was grasped. And then he was off to another talk, another expert panel, in Atlantic City, because, for the time being, Will Allen's Good Food Revolution rarely affords him a rest.

W
hen Detroit was originally settled in the eighteenth century, it was an arrangement of long but narrow strip farms running like piano keys along the riverfront so that a maximum number of farmers could have access to the waterway. They were called “ribbon farms,” and many street names in the city still carry the names of the original farmers. Detroit, of course, is best known as the great industrial womb of the American automobile industry that brought jobs and prosperity to the city for the first half of the twentieth century, and that launched the car culture, whose effect we continue to see on everything from our expanding waistlines to our car-centric urban planning in every North American city. Despite the “Motor City's” legacy, the last sixty years have been disastrously unkind to Detroit. The situation at this point is beyond desperate. It is truly a city in need of a miracle.

At its peak prosperity in 1950, Detroit was home to almost two million residents. Fifty years later, the US Census Bureau counted about 900,000. These days, the number hovers around 800,000.
¹
The current thinking is that the population will level out at 700,000.
²
It is no secret
that the Motor City is now rather empty of cars, as it is of homes, people, and food. And with the ongoing economic recession in the United States, there really isn't anything on the horizon that would suggest that Detroit has even hit the bottom of its decline. The city is now typically held up as the poster child for a shrinking postindustrial municipality on the brink of bankruptcy, with crumbling civic infrastructure and a city-wide food desert for the citizens who still live there. Where else can you find a city without one single national chain grocery or big-box outlet?
³

When Detroit makes news, it's usually due to its unemployment rates, political scandals, crime rates, and economic decline. In 2005, Detroit was the “most impoverished city in the nation,” according to the US Census Bureau.
⁴
The unemployment rate officially hovers around 30 percent,
⁵
but many think it's as high as 50 percent. Thanks to unemployment and a vanishing population base, the city's treasury has a deficit of $300 million, so it can't provide even the most basic services, such as police and firefighters.
⁶
And its education system is in shambles.

A succession of inept mayors has only made things worse. Homes are virtually worthless in Detroit. The median price of a home that a person can actually sell in Detroit is $7,500,
⁷
yet I was told repeatedly when I was there that you could easily pick up a house for less than $1,000. In fact, the usual comparison is that you can buy a home in the city of Detroit—not the tony suburbs, which, strangely enough, sit just on Detroit's periphery—for less than the yearly cost of insuring a personal vehicle.

As the saying goes about desperate times leading to desperate measures, Detroit is at the point where all ideas for urban renewal are being considered. Detroit sprawls over 139 square miles (357 square kilometers) just in the city proper.
⁸
Its footprint is equal to that of Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco combined. Interestingly, it is the urban-agriculture groups—both the social justice community gardens and co-ops and the hardcore capitalists—that have stepped up to the plate to take a swing at what might be the daunting task of stemming the exodus of residents and making Detroit a livable community once again.

Food-justice advocate Alethia Carr grew up in Detroit in the 1960s. Speaking with me over the phone—a rather enthusiastic winter snow-storm in Detroit derailed our scheduled face-to-face meeting—Carr told me that she had a peach tree, a cherry tree, and a crabapple tree right in her backyard at her childhood home on the east side of Detroit.
⁹
There were pear trees and even grapes growing in neighbors’ yards, too, she remembered. “I was told that the area was originally an orchard,” Carr recounted.

I had contacted Carr because of her work surrounding food-security issues in her hometown. She is both a fellow of the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy (an international nonprofit food-security think tank) and a longtime public health director in charge of maternal and child health programs in Michigan. With both a personal and a professional interest in food security in her community, she has had a hand in many Detroit grassroots initiatives related to nutrition, health, and issues surrounding access to healthy and affordable foods in urban areas. I was hoping that she could help me understand the food-security issues there. But for the first ten minutes or so, we ended up swapping food memories of our respective childhoods, and the similarities were surprising.

We both remember lively, productive backyard food gardens easily found behind fences. We both grew up in neighborhoods that had at least one small, independent grocery store within walking distance that actually stocked produce, vegetables, flour, sugar, butter, and other staples, and had a fresh meat counter at the very back. Fresh, seasonal foods were the stuff of homemade meals (which were the norm in both households), and life happened out on the streets, not inside the house, as it does nowadays. So what happened between then and now, I wanted to know, that we could have had such similar childhood memories despite our slight generational gap, as I looked out over a city with empty streets, derelict residential block after derelict residential block, and boarded-up commercial buildings right in the downtown core?

Carr walked me through a more personalized history between the
1960s and the Detroit of today. Carr, an African American whose father worked in the automobile industry, remembers a “pretty well-integrated” city as a child. Where Carr grew up, it was a predominantly African American part of town. And it had those corner grocery stores “for a period,” she said.

Detroit's economy started its decline as automation replaced the need for humans in manufacturing. Unemployment rose, and social tensions stretched to the breaking point, fueled by abuses of the white police power that ran unchecked against black Detroiters. (A Saturday-night police raid on a black nightclub in July 1967 finally touched off the powder keg that became the infamous five days of chaos and violence known as the Detroit Riots.) “White flight” to the suburbs, which had already begun due to jobs leaving Detroit as early as the 1950s, accelerated. Over the next few decades, Detroit suffered the slow, steady decline of a dying industrial city.

As industry and jobs left, the city's tax base shrank, making it less desirable to the businesses and residents it needed to attract. The suburbs sucked out much of the middle- and upper-wage earners, hollowing out the city. Grocery stores followed the migration to the suburbs. Those who still lived in the city gladly drove out of the city to the big-box stores to shop anyway.

“My in-laws had a grocery store,” Carr said, as we talked about the consolidation of the major chains and how they seemed to be preferentially located in new suburbs. “It was a small mom-and-pop, but they tried to carry the same brands as the big stores. But their orders were too small.” Soon grocery distributors dropped these smaller independents from their supply chains. Independents had to buy at retail or public wholesale and become resellers. Eventually the costs became too high for the customer base.

Those neighborhood grocery stores either vanished or changed their inventory. “Grocery stores went from carrying a wide variety of groceries, to carrying a wide variety of beer and liquor,” Carr lamented.
It is a commonly repeated fact that there are no national chain grocery stores left in the city.

Carr's professional career gave her another unique perspective on food security in Detroit, above and beyond a lifetime of living there. She has been involved in public health for more than twenty years, after completing her postsecondary studies as a registered dietician and her master's of business administration. Not only is Carr the maternal and child health director of Community Health for Michigan's Department of Community Health, she served as the director of Michigan's Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program for nine years. Michigan's WIC program is the eighth-largest in the country and serves 230,000 clients each year.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children is a nationwide program to “safeguard the health of low-income women, infants, and children up to age five who are at nutritional risk by providing nutritious foods to supplement diets, information on healthy eating, and referrals to health care.”
¹⁰
Women and children are usually the most affected by food insecurity, so in 1974, the US government established the WIC program for those individuals and families whose low income affects their food choices. There are currently 9.17 million women, infants, and children who benefit from the WIC program every month in the United States.
¹¹
“Michigan's program has a debit card loaded with specific food choices,” explained Carr. Those choices are healthy, nutritionally intact, whole foods.

“The challenge we see in many young families is how to cook, or how to cook with whole foods, not those boxes filled with things that are high in sodium and high in sugar.” Young families, says Carr, simply lack the knowledge of basic cooking skills and how to properly balance their meals. But access to good, fresh food is still a big concern.

Urban gardening became an effective tool to combat this “food-literacy gap” as well as the lack of access to fresh, healthy food, especially in low-income areas. The lack of equal access in Detroit's black community is of particular concern because this community suffers the most
food insecurity in relation to other cultural and ethnic groups. Urban agriculture has been looked at more seriously in the last couple years as a way to remedy this discrepancy. “Our local health department has been concerned with poor access to food here in the city and what can be done. The planning commission in the city has had urban agriculture on their mind for the past eighteen months.”

As a result of both a grassroots push and encouragement from social and civic programs, urban agriculture has taken off in Detroit. Unlike in many cities, vacant land is one thing that Detroit has in abundance. With over 30,000 acres (12,140 hectares), or 40 square miles (103 square kilometers), of vacant land in the city, the potentially available land is larger than the entire footprint of Miami.

One international nonprofit organization, Urban Farming, founded by musician Taja Sevelle, claims to have created five hundred urban gardens so far in Detroit where all the produce grown is free for the community.
¹²
The Greening of Detroit, another nonprofit founded in 1989 primarily as an urban-reforestation project, now supports over two hundred school, family, and community gardens, and is seeing a 20 percent growth in urban-agriculture projects year after year.
¹³
The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network expanded its two-acre D-Town Farm to five acres in 2011.
¹⁴
By 2010, Detroit had 1,300 urban food gardens scattered among different groups.
¹⁵
These projects are making important inroads to addressing the accessibility of good food and to empowering Detroiters.

But Detroit would need tens of thousands of these smaller initiatives to start to tip the scales away from urban blight and to start to address Detroit's unemployment crisis. I finally told Carr that the main reason I had come to Detroit was the headline-grabbing announcement in 2009 that got not only my attention but that of the major news media in the United States. And I wanted Carr's opinion on a controversial, ambitious initiative that has been proposed in Detroit: the world's largest private urban farm.

H
ANTZ
F
ARMS

John Hantz is not a farmer in search of land. He's a Harvard-educated, self-made stockbroker, financier, and businessman—his personal fortune is estimated at $100 million—in search of a solution to a crisis in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. Hantz moved to Detroit over twenty years ago to turn around the then-floundering Detroit office of American Express financial services, which he did, making it one of the top performers in the country. In 1998, Hantz left American Express and has since built nothing short of his own empire. The Hantz Group is a diversified business empire of five hundred employees that includes a private-jet-charter company (Hantz Air), a money-management company with over $2 billion under management (Hantz Financial Services), a beverage company (United Beverage Group), and a lumber liquidator.

Until 2009, however, most Detroit residents hadn't even heard about John Hantz when newspapers and magazines picked up the press release announcing the planned Hantz Farms project. The initial press release issued by the Hantz Group on March 23, 2009, stated that “preliminary plans for a newly developed urban farm within the City of Detroit will utilize vacant lands and abandoned property to create Hantz Farms, the world's largest urban farm.”
¹⁶
The first phase, the press release continued, would “utilize more than 70 acres of underutilized vacant lands and abandoned properties on Detroit's lower east side.” Once the city approved the plan, “the farm would be operating within six months.” The bold plan was not well received.