Standing at 6'7" tall, Will Allen's height is obviously one of the first things people notice about the CEO and founder of Growing Power, Inc. I had the privilege of hearing Allen speak at a Yale University sponsored Sustainable Food seminar. The aspects of Allen that stuck out most to me were not his physical height, but the height of his character. Symbols of that character were his wide grin, faded blue hoodie, and cracked, rough hands. Shaking those hands, I caught a glimpse of the type and magnitude of life that Allen has lead and the service he has rendered to his community in Milwaukee, WI and throughout the world. For his work, Allen was recently awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and invited by former President Clinton to speak on a large discussion panel at the University of Texas- Austin on “The Future of Food”. With all the acclaim and fanfare, Allen simply and humbly carries on his work, working daily in the fields and greenhouses at Growing Power. Allen showed numerous images of himself working hard in the fields and greenhouses, training people, getting his hands dirty, and loving every minute of it: “I have to touch the soil everyday to feel like a human being.”

Allen started Growing Power in a rundown section of Milwaukee as a place where he could grow his dreams of healthy food for the urban poor. Allen described Growing Power’s mission as producing healthy soil and food for urban areas, developing efficient and cost-effective urban farming technologies, and most importantly, educating the world’s future urban farmers. Regarding their mission, Allen said, “We know that our food system is broken…We have to change that…We have to redo this whole system…We need 50 million new food producers to even begin to put a dent into the industrial farm system…A lot of the work that I do is around that question, ‘How do we grow farmers?’” During Allen’s presentation, he made it clear that education and community involvement were key pieces to Growing Power’s activities, “You can actually learn how to do something, so you can take it back to your community and roll it out in your community…Youth are the very key…they are a very powerful piece of what we do, in terms of how we proceed in the future, because these are the future farmers. They won’t come from rural America. They’ll come from universities like here, and other universities around the country and from our young people that live in central cities, not from rural America.” Growing Power takes in children, teenagers, and their families as interns until they graduate and go off to college. Part of Allen’s education is training the young people to work hard, study hard, and excel at their chosen profession, “When the youth come to our facility, the expectations is so very high. They can’t have radios. They can’t have stuff in their ears. They come here, it’s not a playground. It’s an adventure, an experience for them to learn. So if we set those expectations, I try to make it as hard on them as I possibly can, because many of those kids are going to have tremendous struggles in their lives. So we are really preparing them for that. Not all of them are going to make it. That’s why when I take on kids, I take on their whole family and then I am honest with them. I tell them…this will be the hardest job that you’ll ever have…It really starts with the kids.” It was apparent that Growing Power not only trains these young people to be farmers, but it trains them how to be self-sufficient, hard-working, and successful.

Another aspect that struck me about Allen was the ingenuity, wisdom, and calculating cunning with which he approaches challenges in his company. Growing Power pulls in food waste from many different sources and churns out nutritious, productive soil from the decomposing food and the help of millions of worms. They then use that soil to efficiently grow food in their fields and greenhouses or sell the soil to garner funds for the support of their programs. Allen’s years as a marketing executive with Procter and Gamble became clear as he described the competitors his company faced (Waste Management and food wholesalers), the profit that each square foot of soil needed to make, and the numerous contracts that he had setup for collecting waste, organizing the community, and distributing Growing Power products. Surrounding themselves with simple, yet brilliant, individuals, Growing Power has developed low cost and effective methods for building and maintaining greenhouses, aquaponic assemblies, and even “green” energy generators in urban areas. Aquaponic systems use recycled water to grow fish and vegetation. Growing Power uses a motor to pump the water from a fish breeding area up to the roots of plants, which clean and filter the water for reuse by the fish. It is a self-contained apparatus that allows for the production of fish, water cress, and other leafy plants. Allen also explained that by heating the water slightly, the entire greenhouse is kept warm during the cold Wisconsin winters through the ability of the water to trap and slowly release heat. The energy generators use pureed food waste and anaerobic bacteria (bacteria that live without oxygen) to generate acetic acid (diluted acetic acid is vinegar). The acetic acid can be used for fertilizer or the production of methane/natural gas. These are just some of the simple, yet efficient, devices that Growing Power has created and distributed throughout the world.

Despite increasing threats from global warming, industrial pollution, contaminated soil, and dwindling food health and supply, Will Allen’s Growing Power is thriving to grow farmers and farming supplies to meet the farming needs of large cities across the world. Through his techniques in teaching young people, hopefully we will also have many more generations of Will Allens to stave off the destructive direction humanity is heading towards.

Images: 1. Flickr/NatalieMaynor 2. Flickr/grifray 3. Flickr/mjmonty 4. Flickr/mjmonty 5. Flickr/grifray 6. Flickr/{just jennifer}

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