Lexington, KY - Left to its own devices, nature takes roughly a thousand years to create a few inches of fertile soil.
Milwaukee's Will Allen isn't willing to wait that long.
He's got it down to about four months, and he's spreading it in some unlikely places to grow a staggering amount of beautiful food.
Allen suggests he's sowing revolution along with tomatoes, peppers, greens and herbs, and his newest front is a hard-luck neighborhood in Louisville's inner city. Some in Lexington hope to be in his sights soon enough, too.
So maybe it's time you learned a little bit about this force of nature and his vision of a limitless future for truly local food.
In no particular order, Allen's a towering retired professional basketball player with biceps as big as heirloom watermelons. Bill Clinton invited him to his Global Initiative summit, introduced Allen as his hero and then granted his Growing Power nonprofit more than $1 million. He has huge hands, and lately he's posed for a brace of national magazines with those hands full of the mud-caked worms he raises. He's the winner of one of those MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants. He turns parking lots into gardens. And he's turned a lot of inner-city dwellers in Milwaukee and Chicago - with Louisville next in line - into produce and livestock farmers, making fresh food available and affordable to their neighbors.
I won't say he makes it all look easy, but he appears consistently upbeat, relaxed and casual, favoring sleeveless hoodies, jeans and basketball shoes whether addressing an audience of luminaries in New York or slinging worms onto a compost pile along with attendees at one of his intensive workshops.
Allen's particular genius is that impatience with fertility. Why wait around for soil when you can make perfectly usable compost? He and Growing Power make a lot of compost - about half a million pounds a year. And that's just in Milwaukee, where Allen started his urban farming project in 1993. Originally, the compost he made there helped him build a played-out greenhouse and its two-acre environs on the gritty edge of the city into a wildly productive oasis. It now generates enough fresh produce, eggs, fish, poultry and dairy products to feed about 10,000 customers year-round. And it's done by collecting and composting what's at hand in cities like Milwaukee: rejected produce from grocery stores and restaurants, spent grains from the town's famous breweries, leaves, grass clippings, cleared brush and fallen limbs.
Allen and his crew mix all these ingredients in long furrows, in boxes made from wooden pallets, and even in the corners of the many other plastic-covered greenhouses they've built in the ensuing years. The heat from the composting process warms the greenhouses enough to keep them productive even through Wisconsin winters.
Many of these greenhouses not only produce greens and vegetables, but they're also home to lake perch and tilapia. The fish swim in tanks below shelves brimming with potted watercress, which sit below shelves loaded with potted tomatoes and peppers. A pump sends water fertilized by fish waste up to feed the upper-tiered plants. The water filters through and drips to the watercress below, which filters it further. And then it returns to the fish.
It's complex without being complicated, and that's maybe why Allen's approach to urban farming is attracting so much attention. It packs a whole lot of growing "oomph" into confined places and deals with problems mostly by eluding them. For instance, heating greenhouses is often expensive, but not for Growing Power. It lets the compost piles do the heating. Urban spaces often contain contaminated or paved-over soil, so Growing Power spreads a layer of wood chips, then rows of compost about 12 inches high for instant organic farming. And produce is wonderful, but don't people need protein? As noted, Growing Power's bringing fish farming to urban neighborhoods, along with chickens for their eggs and meat, and goats for their milk and meat.
Oh, and worms. Millions of worms.
Now things aren't so dire these days that Americans will be eating worms, but Growing Power's worms may nonetheless be Will Allen's foremost stroke of genius, because of the quick and long-term soil fertility they provide when they eat compost and excrete fertilizer.
Worms are what brought Allen to Louisville.
Well, worms and Heine Brothers, the local coffee shop chain. The company had already started a side business there that raises worms in its spent coffee grounds and sells the enriched product as fertilizer. And it was already plowing profits from the effort into efforts to alleviate poverty and hunger in inner-city neighborhoods.
Those efforts weren't very well focused until Breaking New Grounds became aware of Growing Power, executive director Sarah Fritschner said. Once she and others traveled to Milwaukee and saw Allen's operation in action, they knew that's what they wanted to emulate. And they went even further than that - they convinced Allen to make BNG one of his four national training center operations.
That means Breaking New Grounds gets the added benefit of Allen's regular attention and frequent visits. He's been there twice in the past couple of months, leading full-day workshops that show participants how to build the kinds of compost heaps that worms love and guiding construction of the plastic-covered hoop houses that'll be the heart of Breaking New Grounds' plans to revitalize some of Louisville's bleakest inner-city neighborhoods via urban agriculture.
Lexington's getting a taste, too. Seedleaf, the local urban gardening project, persuaded the University of Kentucky's Gaines Center to sponsor a talk by Allen at the downtown public library last spring. And since then, two Seedleaf representatives have participated in Allen's Louisville workshops.
Have they learned enough to launch a full-scale urban farming initiative in Lexington's inner city? Seedleaf founder Ryan Koch says not just yet, but he adds that the inspiration he's drawn from seeing the impatient Allen in action means it may not be far off.