Will Allen is a tall drink of water. He stands 6 feet 7 inches tall. It's no great surprise that the 59-year-old was once an all-American high school basketball player, and, later, a star at the University of Miami, where he was the school's first African American athlete. Drafted by the Baltimore Bullets (now the Washington Wizards), he played professionally from 1971 to 1976 in the American Basketball Association and in Europe.

It might surprise you, though, to know what Allen does now and where he does it: He's a farmer. In inner-city Milwaukee.
Allen is the founder of Growing Power, a nonprofit that produces about half a million dollars worth of fresh, organic vegetables and meat annually, distributing it to grocery stores, restaurants, and thousands of Milwaukee and Chicago residents. Many of those residents live in neighborhoods where groceries are otherwise limited to the paltry—and sugar-laden—offerings of corner convenience stores.

Growing Power is at the forefront of a movement that has subsisted in the shadows of the "locavore" wave currently sweeping through more affluent areas. The organization has become a training ground for urban farmers from around the world and a job-skills incubator for city kids. Three dozen full-time employees work with volunteers to till the soil on five urban farms and one rural one. The organization offers training in everything from vermiculture (using worms to turn food leftovers and other waste into soil) to community supported agriculture operations, or CSAs (where consumers buy "shares" in a farming operation in return for a cut of the produce).

Allen says Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett recently told him he was "below the grassroots—you're underground."

In September, Allen, who says he prefers the "hands-on" work of farming to the business of running a nonprofit, won a $500,000 "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He says he plans to use the money to coax more sustenance from urban "food deserts." His dreams include building a five-story, glass-walled "vertical garden" that will double as an urban farming academy. "That," he says, "is what the future looks like to me."




Q How did you go from basketball star to urban farmer?

A I grew up on a farm right on the border of Bethesda and Rockville. My father was a former sharecropper from South Carolina who moved to Rockville in the late '30s. He brought all those skills with him and made me and my brothers grow a garden in the summer. That's the basis of what I'm doing today. We grew every kind of vegetable you can think of. We grew corn, cucumbers, Southern peas. We grew peanuts in Maryland; a lot of people don't know you can do that. My father actually grew some cotton just to show us how cotton grows.


Q Did you grow up dreaming of becoming a basketball star?

A Not really. I didn't play basketball until I was 13. My brother brought a basketball home one day. I put up one of those bushel baskets on an oak tree and flattened out an area of ground. I started throwing the ball at that basket. I had no skill at all. I was always bigger than everybody else, though. I could run like a deer, and I was really strong. I started playing with college players [while working at American University one summer], so I got good at it quickly. But I never played basketball [growing up]. It was all farm country. If you went there now, you wouldn't believe me. Rockville and Bethesda—it's very upscale now. It's a concrete jungle.


Q Now you're living in the concrete jungle, too—and farming.

A The home base for Growing Power is a three-acre, 19th-century farm. It's the last remaining registered farm in the city. I purchased it fifteen years ago, after my wife and I moved to Milwaukee. Her family had some land they weren't using [on the family farm outside the city], and I had gotten the farming bug again. I thought that [the city property] would be a place for me to sell my produce.

I got sucked into [urban agriculture] helping some youth grow a garden. A group of kids from the YWCA wanted to do an organic garden. They just had two little eight-by-eight plots. I said, ‘That's too small. If you guys want to sell your stuff, you have to grow enough to sell.' I had half an acre behind my greenhouse that I wasn't using at the time, and by late June, they had a healthy crop. Somebody called the Journal Sentinel, and they did a big story. I talked to them about how the garden was teaching basic life skills: how to get up in the morning, how to be responsible for growing something. People really liked the idea. We took it to the schools. Eventually it became a nonprofit. Now it's evolved into this international training center.



Q Does it really make sense to farm in the city?

A Growing food inside cities is hot right now. The idea is not new. People have been growing food in their backyards forever. It's just that people stopped. Now there's a resurgence of side-yard gardens, backyard gardens, and community gardens. It's really consumer-driven. Food scares have really moved the movement forward. There was the spinach scare last year, and the [E. coli-contaminated] lettuce where a lot of people got really sick. People are saying, ‘I want to know where my food comes from.' Urban agriculture is connecting folks to their food.

All over the world, people are moving into cities. They have this impression that life is better. It's like the migration of African Americans from the South to the North for better jobs. But we have very unhealthy folks living in cities. It's our whole food system: We're just poisoning people, putting processed soybeans and corn into everything. Different ethnic groups—Native American and African American communities where people haven't been eating this food very long—our bodies are still adjusting. We have this epidemic of obesity and diabetes that's killing people.

I know farmers that never go to the doctor unless there's something really serious, like a broken leg or something. They just eat healthy and get enough exercise. I think we could cut our health care bills in half. We're just going to have to get masses of people buying this kind of food. People say, ‘Well, that's a long-term solution [to health problems].' But I think it's short-term. You can reverse your [poor] health very quickly by eating healthy.



Q To feed all those people, you need commercial farms, not just community gardens, right?

A Going from a community garden to actual commercial production is a big jump. We're training people to do it on a larger scale. It's more intensive. Most farmers growing soybeans and corn, they're lucky if they gross $500 [worth of crops per] acre. We're growing $200,000 an acre. We grow about 159 different crops. We're growing food year-round [using greenhouses]. We're working with schools, starting CSAs, getting food to restaurants. We have a farmers' co-op that includes three hundred farmers from all over the country. We're delivering food all over the place.

My thing is make sure that everybody, regardless of economic means, has access to the same really good, healthy foods. You talk about organic. It's not just for Whole Foods and co-ops and so forth. Why can't poor people eat really good food? I also want to make sure that our youth are eating healthy. Everybody knows we have an economic crisis in this country. We also have a food crisis. The first thing families cut is good foods. They say, ‘Well, we can eat less and save this money to pay our mortgage, or pay off our credit cards.'



Q What is the biggest challenge for a farmer in the city?

A The most important piece is getting embedded in the community. You have to engage the politicos, the people in the neighborhood, the schools, and the universities. If you don't do that, you might as well not do anything.

The next thing is soil. Soil in cities is contaminated. At Growing Power, we do vermicomposting. On the carbon side, we use waste paper and cardboard and leaves, hay, and straw. On the nitrogen side, we use pre-cooked food waste from wholesalers and grocery stores. We use brewery waste. This is a big brewing town. When they squeeze out the juices to make beer, all that waste is nitrogen waste. This year, we'll compost six thousand pounds of food residue—that's not counting the carbon side.

And not only are we growing soil, we need to grow farmers. We don't have enough farmers. Those [new] farmers will come from inside these cities. We have an urban ag training program. It takes at least five years to become a beginning farmer. You have to [experience] the hot days and the injuries and the bee stings, working after dark to get greens to the market. There's no shortcut to this. But you have to get started. That's what we do.


Q But city kids dream of becoming basketball stars, not farmers.

A This idea that kids just want to be basketball players isn't true. Inner-city kids are really responding. I wish you could see the transformation when we take a group of kids and send them through our program. The first week, you have maybe 25 percent of them interested. By the fourth week, you have 100 percent bought in, and the ones that were giving you the hardest time that first week are right in there getting their hands dirty.


Q So it all comes back to the dirt, then?

A It's all about the soil. We're all connected to the soil; we just don't know it. If you can't grow healthy soil, you can't grow healthy plants. If you can't grow healthy plants, you can't grow healthy people. And if you can't grow healthy people, how are you going to grow healthy communities? We talk about sustainable communities. Without healthy food, you can't have sustainable communities.

—Greg Hanscom is Urbanite's senior editor.




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