Growing Power Graduation

I can't wait for next week to get here. Why? It is the graduation of the 5 month course in Commercial Urban Agriculture given by Will Allen's Growing Power (http://www.growingpower.org/) in Milwaukee. It started in January the day after a blizzard dropped 16 inches of snow and the temperature hovered around 10 degrees. I walked into an almost tropical Growing Power 'hoop house' heated solely by 4 compost piles in the corners and more around the sides. I felt I had walked into the Garden of Eden! Lush green plants hanging every where, the gurgling of water through fish tanks and the rich deep smell of black soil, that I later learned by produced by Will and his worms from the mountains of compost at the site. And I do mean mountains - upto 20 feet high!

Over these 5 months we have learned all about composting, vermiculture, mushrooms, aqua-ponics, laying in raised beds, hoop house construction, bee keeping, marketing and back to composting, composting, composting. This has been the most highly structured unstructured educational program I have ever encountered. Will and his staff are completley knowledgable on every subject, enthusiastic and definitely hands-on. They are constantly busy, doing what has to been done to care for the plants, to take care of the custumer accounts, and the animals on the urban farm site in the middle of Milwaukee. Will Allen has written and spoken extensively about the food crisis in this country, but most importantly, he has acted - acted in a consistent way for a long enough time that he is now getting the recognition that he so richly deserves. He has recently been featured in Jet Magazine and selected as one of America's Most Influential People by Time Magazine. But the attention is not to feed his ego, but rather to feed hungry people who are trying to survive in the middle of all these 'food deserts' as Will calls the urban blight areas across the country where there is no real food for people to eat. How can they keep healthy like that, work and be productive, how can they have creative minds and do well academically?

So as Bro John Muhammad and I prepare for our graduation, we know that this is just the beginning of the "Food Revolution". My personal goal: 100 hoop houses built all over the country in the next 2 years! Is that achievable? You bet, especially if you help. You should get involved now. Learn all about hoop house agriculture. Build a hoop house and start growing your own food. Find out all about it by clicking on the Growing Power web site. Get started now.

http://www.growingpower.org/

Will Allen Makes Time 100 Influential List

Here is Will Allen of Growing Power atop a mountain of compost which is the basis for his hoop house system of growing food in the middle of urban 'food deserts' where good food is impossible to find. Urban Agriculture as modeled by Growing Power can make the food deserts bloom, providing low cost nutritious food and jobs and economic opportunities all across America. Congratulations Will!

Will Allen on Time 100 Most Influential List - Pick
Milwaukee(April 29, 2010) – Will Allen, the founder and CEO of Growing Power Inc., has been named to the 2010 “Time 100: The World’s Most Influential People.” The list was released on Thursday, April 29, and the magazine will hit newsstands last Friday April 30th.
The much-anticipated announcement identifies 25 individuals or small working groups who are most influencing the current course of world events in four categories: Leaders, Heroes, Artists and Thinkers. Allen was named in the area of Heroes.
Allen was identified for his powerful advocacy for food security and food justice for all. Through his work promoting urban agriculture, Allen has called attention to the widespread existence of “food deserts” in cities across America, where whole communities lack access to fresh, nutritious and affordable foods.
The solutions Allen has proposed and argued for in the 18 years since his founding of Growing Power, a non-profit urban farm and training center in Milwaukee, include a return to localized food systems and teaching communities where good food is unaffordable to grow it themselves.
“We have seen the results of our reliance on the industrialized, commoditized food system we have built since the middle of the last century: A rapidly rising rate of obesity in generation after generation, leading to alarming rates of diabetes and heart disease, so that for the first time in America, despite all our advances in medicine, our life expectancy is falling,” Allen said.
“Finally, we are learning that treating illness is much less effective than preventing illness by promoting health; and that good food is the best and most fundamental preventive medicine of all.
“Polls now show that 86 percent of Americans want good food, real food; fresh, locally grown food that is safe and free of chemicals and genetic modifications. But there is simply not enough good food being grown for all those who want and need it. I am simply trying to help change that.”
Driving home the point that the Good Food Revolution, as Allen has declared it, is no longer a fad but a fact, Time also named author and food advocate Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) to its list, as well as others such as Valentin Abe, who has successfully introduced tilapia farming to a depleted lake in Haiti.
Time magazine created its first 100 list in 1999, when it named the most influential people of the 20th Century. In 2004, the magazine started the annual list, stressing that the people it names are not necessarily the most public, popular or powerful, but often are the most innovative or inspirational and the most apt to effect change.

We Built A Hoop House In Baltimore!

Brother John Muhammad of Baltimore and I have been going up to Growing Power in Milwaukee for the past 3 months to learn Commercial Urban Agriculture from Will Allen and his staff. We have been excited about the possibilities that urban gardening offers to people all over the country - in fact all over the world. Will Allen's concept of urban farming begins and ends with the soil, but the growing of plants year round is made possible by 'hoop houses'. A hoop house is a low cost greenhouse, that self-heats in the winter time allowing plants to grow safely inside no matter how cold it is outside. Properly managed hoop houses can supply unlimited amounts of food for urban families and communities that are often the worst fed segment of society. Urban hoop houses can fill the nutrition gap and offer a commercially viable business opportunity to many who right now are unemployed or under-employed in dead end jobs. In one sense, a hoop house is a survival kit that never ends. Every family, every neighborhood, every mosque, every church, every school should have a hoop house to grow their own food 12 months a year! This is the ultimate in the 'eat local' movement. It can make lots of money too.

So here's the big news -
ON APRIL 3, 2010 WE BUILT A HOOP HOUSE
WITH THE HELP OF 15 OR 20 INDIVIDUALS IN BALTIMORE!
We are on our way. We have left the theoretical and are taking care of practical real world business -moving toward food production and self-sufficiency.
Here are some photos of the day. Video footage will soon be available too.
My personal goal? 100 hoop houses constructed in the next year to 2 years.
Enjoy. Learn. Share.

Seven Reasons to Grow Your Own Food

The following article gives 7 good reasons why you should take the responsibility to grow your own food. Why should we expect others to do for us what we should do for ourselves? Self sufficiency is not only a virtue, in today's world, it is a necessity!

Hoop house agriculture is the way because it insures year round food production. The hoop house keeps the plants out of the elements and with the rich black soil that you also make for yourself you can literally grow anything you want at very little cost.

The surplus produced is extra income. This can turn into a viable business that creates jobs.

We need this knowledge now so we can begin to apply it right away.

Enjoy. Learn. Share.

Seven Reasons to Grow Your Own Food

(or Seven Reasons Why You Need a Hoop House!)
Not that being part of a trend is ever a good reason to start or learn something new, but if it helps you move forward by being part of the “in” crowd, then you really need to plant your own edible garden this year.

That’s right, having your own vegetable garden is now trendy. In fact according to the 2009 Edibles Gardening Trends Research Report conducted by the Garden Writer’s Association (GWA) Foundation, over 41 million U.S. households, or 38 percent planted a vegetable garden in 2009. And, more than 19.5 million households (18 percent) grew an herb garden and 16.5 million households (15 percent) grew fruits during the same period.
The study found that there was a growth in edible gardening from both experienced gardeners and from an influx of new gardeners: 92 percent of respondents had previous experience and 7 percent (7.7 million households) were new edible gardeners.
And one-third of the experienced gardeners grew more edibles in 2009 than in the previous year. The GWA indicates that given the strong response for plans to grow more edibles into 2010, the vegetable gardening trend will continue and there will likely be a new high level of edible gardening activity this year.
Another survey done by the American Gardening Association showed a 19 percent increase in new hobby country farms and urban edible gardens in 2009 over 2008.
So, aside from its popularity, do you need some other reasons to grown your own food?
The GWA’s survey found that the main reason given for increasing or maintaining edible gardening last year was to supplement household food supply — to help them save money on food. That alone is a very powerful reason.
There is nothing more local than food grown in your own backyard, your windowsills, or on patio containers.
Growing your own fruits and vegetables means that you know exactly what does and does not go into your food and exactly where it comes from.

You will get healthier in a number of ways. Not only will you end up eating more fruits and vegetables, but you will be getting added exercise. Did you know that you can burn as many calories in 45 minutes of gardening as you can in 30 minutes of aerobics? And, working in the garden reduces stress.
You will get a bigger variety of your favorite fruits and vegetables because you can choose from hundreds of different varieties and you can grow the things you like the best.
You can teach your children or grandchildren where their food actually comes from and that it doesn’t come from the supermarket but from the soil, the earth that we all depend on.
Judi Gerber is a University of California Master Gardener with a certificate in Horticultural Therapy. She writes about sustainable farming, local foods, and organic gardening for multiple magazines. Her book Farming in Torrance and the South Bay was released in September 2008.

The Ultimate Survival Kit (video)

Is the hoop house the ultimate survival kit?

If survival means haveing food in production year round on a small amount of land or roof that you control then the answer is an emphatic yes. Nothing else makes sense. How are you going to store up enough food to last until somebody else grows some more and then sees to it that you get some? That's like secretly hoping that this system which is about to fall will somehow revive and come back to feed us like it always did. To me the hoop house urban farm system is how we are going to do what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us to do - get our mouth out of somebody else's kitchen! So hoop house agriculture is right on our level. Anybody can do it with very little money and very little training. In exchange you get to grow your own food and you get to eat it and sell and surplus that you may have. That is a beautiful system of doing things.

The following video short is from the bulletin board at Muhammad Mosque No. 23 in Buffalo where the Believers helped to build a hoop house and introduced it to me. I have been on fire with enthusiasm ever since.

Enjoy. Learn. Share.

Making a Living Soil

So here's the follow up. Since we hear that all the soil is depleted, making the food depleted, then what do we do? We make soil, that's what. That's how we continue to make ourselves a 'living soul' by making a 'living soil'. Get it? You ARE what you eat (and what you eat is of the soil). Got it? Here is a little video that goes into one of the key components of making rich beautiful black fertile soil that can grow anything we need in our Garden.

Will Allen's most important and valuable livestock, the worms!

They are the secret and you have to know about it in order to be able to survive. Enjoy. Learn. Share.

It's the Soil, Stupid

If Man is formed of the dust of the Earth as the Bible and the Qur'an say, then soil or humus is needed to support human life. Without soil human life vanishes. It is my view that one of the great judgements of America that signaled an end to her ability to rule over the nations was the lost productivity in food as a result of the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930's. During those years the rich top-soil of America was blown away and she lost her ability to produce good nutrition for her population. That brought on the age of chemical based agriculture to make up the difference in soil capacity. Only thing is - Man was not formed of the 'chemicals' of the Earth. It's the soil, stupid. With no soil there can be no real food. With no food the power of government to rule vanishes. That makes the science of soil making the most vital science of all for those who wish to survive. That's Growing Power's Will Allen atop a compost heap (above) and (below) Will with his favorite 'livestock' - red wriggler worms!

Enjoy. Learn. Share.
Britain facing food crisis as world's soil 'vanishes in 60 years'
British farming soil could run out within 60 years, leading to a catastrophic food crisis and drastically higher prices for consumers, scientists warn.
Last year Sydney was blanketed by thousands of tonnes of soil during its worst dust storm in 70 years. Photo: RYAN LAHIFF
Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.
Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said.

An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world's farming land "moderately or severely eroded", the Carbon Farming conference heard.
A University of Sydney study, presented to the conference, found soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes.
In Europe that figure is 17 times, in America 10 times while five times as much soil is being lost in Australia.
Soil is also a valuable store of carbon and can release the greenhouse gas if it is ploughed or dug up.
The conference heard world soil, including European and British soils, could vanish within about 60 years if drastic action was not taken.
This will lead to a global food crisis, chronic food shortages and higher prices, the conference heard.
Despite better than average farming practices, European soil might last for 100 years if no further damage occurs worldwide, scientists said.
In reality, however, increased land pressures aimed at compensating global production losses would likely mean it will run out faster, they added.
Last September the government launched new plans to protect the nation's soil which included farmers being asked to use less fertiliser.
Britain imports about 40 per cent of all its food it consumes, a figure that has steadily risen over the past few years.
Almost £32 billion of food was imported into the UK in 2008 up from more than £27.7 billion the year before.
John Crawford, professor of Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Sydney, who presented the study, said it was unknown how long soil will last.
“It could be as little as 60 years and that is a scary figure because it is not obvious that we have time to reverse decline and still meet future demands for food,” he said.
"It is not an exaggeration to say that soil is the most precious resource we have got, and... (we) are not up to the task of securing it for our children never mind our grand children."
Prof Crawford, the former chair of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Agri-Food Committee, said restoring soil required several factors.
These factors include minimum ploughing, improved management and "resting" soil by covering crops which helps replace carbon in soil.
It can however, take decades to significantly increase the amount of useful carbon in soil, which helps make it fertile.
While organic farming could be part of the answer, he said there was "no clear evidence that we can feed the current population using organic approaches, never mind meeting demands in time".
Latest forecasts predict the world's population will grow from 6.8 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, placing even further pressure on food production and farming.
The world last year faced a cereal crisis as wheat stocks dropped to a 30-year low after demand for wheat and rice outstripped supply for the past six out of the previous seven years.
This resulted in grain prices rocketing, which sparked civil unrest in many countries.
Extreme evidence of how soil is being eroded was seen in September when Sydney was blanketed by its worst dust storm in 70 years.

Growing Power Aquaponics System -video

One thing about it - no matter what - people have to eat. I am sure you agree. Since we have to eat all year round we need a system of food production - that we control - that produces for us all year round regardless of weather or climatic conditions. Will Allen the founder of Growing Power explains his aquaponics system at the recent seminar that Bro John and I attended in Milwaukee. These are things that we can do. These are things we must do. I am sure you agree.

Do you know of something more important than this?

If you do let me know what it is.

Shouldn't you have a hoop house with aquaponics

beside your house, or in your neighborhood?

Enjoy. Learn. Share.

The Ultimate Survival Kit

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to speak at Mosque No. 6 in Baltimore. My subject was a continuation of a new topic for me entitled: "A New Slant on How to Eat to Live - Back to the Garden" (an audio tape is available from the mosque) It was actually in part, a report on the recent visit to Growing Power in Milwaukee founder by Will Allen. Will Allen is launching a 'food revolution'. He is teaching an intensive series of workshops in all aspects of 'commercial urban gardening' the center piece of which is the 'hoop house'. A hoop house allows for year round gardening on a commercial scale. As Will said it, "You like to eat year round, so you have to have a source of food year round too." Makes sense. Hoop house contruction is about a $1500 investment. Once you build your compost and make some soil, you're ready to go.

Year round food of your choice in abundance makes the hoop house the ultimate survival kit. And when the economy folds up and the dollar crashes, you will have a commodity to barter and trade with. Food will be the new money - at least for a while. Read the following article to get a glimpse at what may soon be upon us. Then stay tuned for more on hoop house urban agriculture that anyone can do.

Enjoy. Learn. Share.

How Can Localities Cope if the Dollar Crashes?
A “run on the dollar,” or any currency, for that matter, takes place when the currency is losing its value. This happens when a country’s debt becomes so great that there is danger of a major default–that is, large scale or even national bankruptcy. At that point, people whose wealth is in that currency, or in relatively liquid assets denominated in the currency, try to get rid of them as fast as they can. Today, that includes foreign countries like China or Russia that are holding large quantities of U.S. government bonds.
The U.S. currently is at risk. We see it in personal and business bankruptcies and foreclosures. One result can be a high rate of inflation in certain products like food or gasoline, even while asset prices, as with homes and stocks, are going down. The question is now whether the “recovery” that is underway can be sustained or will there be another crash like there was in late 2008 to early 2009.
Forecasters are projecting this recovery to last until June 2010 but are foreseeing slippage at that point. Investors at this time are still putting money into the stock market and getting out of dollars. By June, the U.S. government had better come up with a strategy for real economic growth–which means jobs–or we will likely see the “double-dip” recession many have predicted. Personally I see no way growth can be sustained unless the national debt burden shrinks. This can only be done through an orderly process of debt forgiveness, a resurgence of economic production, or a default that could be catastrophic.
Is there any way people and localities can protect themselves? The best way, in my opinion, is to put our resources, including our time and labor, into producing something of value in the real physical economy. Since most people’s largest asset is their homes, home maintenance and repair might work. It won’t make you rich, but it could put food on the table.
Speaking of food, growing it is another option. In many locations, there is a greater demand for locally-produced food than there are producers to meet that demand. In a couple of months it will be time to start planting this year’s garden. People could get together as a community and make plans for gardens big enough to sell the surplus at local outdoor markets. Buying and selling products at the local level can also become an economic engine to fuel the creation of a local currency.
A strategy of local food production can also address the problem that the era of cheap food in the U.S. is coming to an end. This is happening partly because a large portion of food prices consists of the cost of the fossil fuels used in growing, harvesting, and transporting the food to market. Gasoline prices are on the rise again. This will take food prices upward as well.
Local farming, by contrast, places food production close to the end consumer. Personal health also benefits from higher quality food and from getting outdoors and becoming more physically active.
As the national economy gets worse, it’s time for people to roll up their sleeves and get to work doing for themselves what big finance, big oil, and big government can no longer do.

The Growing Power Revolution

As readers of this blog know, a revolution in food production is taking place led by Will Allen of Growing Power. I just met Brother Will this past weekend at his place in Milwaukee called Growing Power. Going to Growing Power was a life changing experience for me and I intend on going back and learning all I can about sustainable low-cost urban farming from Will Allen and his dedicated staff of 39. You should plan to go there as well. Nobody can really tell you what it is like. You have to go and experience it for yourself. Chech out their website: www.growingpower.org

There is plenty of information to study, but then plan on going to Growing Power yourself in person like your life depends on it, because it does.
With crazy weather conditions, global warming or cooling, wars, sky-rocketing fuel costs, global pandemics - you name it- these are all threats to the production of food. How are we going to live if we don't have access to good nutritious foods? Can we really afford to depend upon others for our food? What if there is a breakdown in the food chain? Can we survive?

What Will Allen and Growing Power is showing us is how to survive, no matter what. I don't know about you, but I intend to survive, so in order to do that, I have to acquire a special kind of knowledge. It is the knowledge of how to grow your own food in a sustainable affordable way. All of us need to know how to plant our own Garden of Eden. Agriculture is the means of survival on this planet.

So let's get involved and learn all we can while we have the chance. We can all have a back yard garden, or pots on the balcony, or on the roof of our building, or on a vacant lot. If we learn from Growing Power how to construct a 'hoop house' then we have the possibility of year round food production since we need food all year round don't we? No matter what, we've got to keep eating in order to keep living. Let's learn how to do it for ourselves. That is true freedom and independence.

Below is another perspective about the same concept - large scale indoor farming that goes vertical in the middle of urban areas.

If we master the small scale version of this concept,

then we can move on to the really large scale.

This is the adventure of life!

What else is worth doing?

Enjoy. Learn. Think. Plan. Act. Share.

Vertical Farming - What Is It?

The Problem
By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth's population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use (sources: FAO and NASA). Historically, some 15% of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to avoid this impending disaster?

A Potential Solution: Farm Vertically
The concept of indoor farming is not new, since hothouse production of tomatoes, a wide variety of herbs, and other produce has been in vogue for some time. What is new is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people. An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world's urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.
It took humans 10,000 years to learn how to grow most of the crops we now take for granted. Along the way, we despoiled most of the land we worked, often turning verdant, natural ecozones into semi-arid deserts. Within that same time frame, we evolved into an urban species, in which 60% of the human population now lives vertically in cities. This means that, for the majority, we humans are protected against the elements, yet we subject our food-bearing plants to the rigors of the great outdoors and can do no more than hope for a good weather year. However, more often than not now, due to a rapidly changing climate regime, that is not what follows. Massive floods, protracted droughts, class 4-5 hurricanes, and severe monsoons take their toll each year, destroying millions of tons of valuable crops. Don't our harvestable plants deserve the same level of comfort and protection that we now enjoy? The time is at hand for us to learn how to safely grow our food inside environmentally controlled multistory buildings within urban centers. If we do not, then in just another 50 years, the next 3 billion people will surely go hungry, and the world will become a much more unpleasant place in which to live.

Advantages of Vertical Farming
Year-round crop production; 1 indoor acre is equivalent to 4-6 outdoor acres or more, depending upon the crop (e.g., strawberries: 1 indoor acre = 30 outdoor acres)
No weather-related crop failures due to droughts, floods, pests
All VF food is grown organically: no herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers
VF virtually eliminates agricultural runoff by recycling black water
VF returns farmland to nature, restoring ecosystem functions and services
VF greatly reduces the incidence of many infectious diseases that are acquired at the agricultural interface
VF converts black and gray water into potable water by collecting the water ofevapotranspiration
VF adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting non-edibleparts of plants and animals
VF dramatically reduces fossil fuel use (no tractors, plows, shipping.)
VF converts abandoned urban properties into food production centers
VF creates sustainable environments for urban centers
VF creates new employment opportunities
We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors onearth
VF may prove to be useful for integrating into refugee camps
VF offers the promise of measurable economic improvement for tropical and subtropicalLDCs. If this should prove to be the case, then VF may be a catalyst in helping to reduce or even reverse the population growth of LDCs as they adopt urban agriculture as a strategy for sustainable food production.
VF could reduce the incidence of armed conflict over natural resources, such as waterand land for agriculture
Copyright © 2009 The Vertical Farm Project. All Rights Reserved.

Planting God's Garden

In Genesis 2:8-9, we read: "The LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food."

As modern sophisticated people we are a long way from the Garden that God planted eastward of Eden. We have been reared in such a way that if we witnessed God planting a garden we would have a tendency to disrespect and disregard the meaning and importance of that act. We would perhaps have a hard time believeing that that actually could be God. On His hands and knees! In the dirt! After all, we all know, don't we, that God is not on the Earth, He's in Heaven.

And we doubt very seriously that there are Gardens in Heaven.

Certainly, most of us would feel not the least bit attracted to the hard dirty sweaty work of the Garden. We might even feel that such work is beneath us, as in:

That's what the illegal aliens are for - to replace the negro slaves and sharecroppers!

We certainly have better things to do, and besides, I just got my nails done!

On the other hand, if it just occurred to you that we who are in 'the image and after the likeness' of God, should actually be doing exactly what God has done, then you are immediately confronted with this question:

What seeds did God use to plant His garden?

Well, we don't think He bought them from Monsanto, that's for sure. Therefore, we need to find seeds that are directly descendant from the original seeds used to plant the original garden. That way we are sure that we are getting what God intended for us to get from His Garden. After all, the Garden was to have been the source of the food for Adam, so that Adam could do the Will of God. That was the plan, but you know what happened. The devil's first trick deceived the Man and got him to eat the wrong food. Eating the wrong food made Adam and Eve incapable of doing the Work God to fulfill God's Will.

That is called the fall of Adam and they had to leave the Garden and God's Food behind. So now we want to know: Is it possible, after so many years, for us to re-plant the Garden? Can we duplicate from where we are in 2010 what God did eastward of Eden so long ago? In other words, have we had enough of the wrong food and the sickness and death that it has brought to us?

The answer is yes! The solution for many of us is something called The Hoop House. It is a way to plant a garden anywhere at any time of the year to grow our own food just like God intended. The hoop house concept is being promoted by Will Allen of Milwaukee. Later this week, I and Bro John from Baltimore will be visiting with Bro Will to learn all about how to start a hoop house garden. We intend to share everything we learn with you so that hoop house gardens start to sprout up everywhere.

Where to get your seeds? Click the link at the bottom. It is still not too late to get good seeds that might not be too far off from the original ones used by God in the beginning.

Want to know more about hoop house gardening? Go to: http://www.growingpower.org/

Enjoy. Learn. Think. Act. Share

http://www.non-hybrid-seeds.com/sp/seeds.com/sp/

A Good Food Manifesto

Recent government reports point to deep hunger in America in this time of economic depression. About 50% of American children will be on food stamps this year. Many millions of families in America go hungry, at least part of the month. Food prices are increasing at a hyper-inflationary rate. Unemployment in general is over 17% once you take out the government fudge factors. Black unemployment may be over twice the national rate. Therefore, food, right now in America is a problem. Famine is at the door step of many. What is the solution to that problem? What are we going to do? What can be done? What should be done about it? Did you know that when money gets tight, the first thing people cut back on is food? Over this holiday weekend, read Will Allen's Manifesto below. Think about what he is saying and take a stand, one way or the other. Then let us see what we can do as 2010 comes in. Enjoy. Learn. Share.

Visit Will's website here:

http://www.growingpower.org/

A Good Food Manifesto for America

By Will Allen

I am a farmer.
While I find that this has come to mean many other things to other people – that I have become also a trainer and teacher, and to some a sort of food philosopher – I do like nothing better than to get my hands into good rich soil and sow the seeds of hope.
So, spring always enlivens me and gives me the energy to make haste, to feel confidence, to take full advantage of another all-too-short Wisconsin summer.
This spring, however, much more so than in past springs, I feel my hope and confidence mixed with a sense of greater urgency. This spring, I know that my work will be all the more important, for the simple but profound reason that more people are hungry.
For years I have argued that our food system is broken, and I have tried to teach what I believe must be done to fix it. This year, and last, we have begun seeing the unfortunate results of systemic breakdown. We have seen it in higher prices for those who can less afford to pay, in lines at local food pantries, churches and missions, and in the anxious eyes of people who have suddenly become unemployed. We have seen it, too, in nationwide outbreaks of food-borne illness in products as unlikely as spinach and peanuts.
Severe economic recession certainly has not helped matters, but the current economy is not alone to blame. This situation has been spinning toward this day for decades. And while many of my acquaintances tend to point the finger at the big agro-chemical conglomerates as villains, the fault really is with all of us who casually, willingly, even happily surrendered our rights to safe, wholesome, affordable and plentiful food in exchange for over-processed and pre-packaged convenience.
Over the past century, we allowed our agriculture to become more and more industrialized, more and more reliant on unsustainable practices, and much more distant from the source to the consumer. We have allowed corn and soybeans, grown on the finest farmland in the world, to become industrial commodities rather than foodstuffs. We have encouraged a system by which most of the green vegetables we eat come from a few hundred square miles of irrigated semi-desert in California.
When fuel prices skyrocket, as they did last year, things go awry. When a bubble like ethanol builds and then bursts, things go haywire. When drought strikes that valley in California, as is happening right now, things start to topple. And when the whole economy shatters, the security of a nation’s food supply teeters on the brink of failure.
To many people, this might sound a bit hysterical. There is still food in the suburban supermarket aisles, yes. The shelves are not empty; there are no bread lines. We haven’t read of any number of Americans actually starving to death.
No, and were any of those things to happen, you can rest assured that there would be swift and vigorous action. What is happening is that many vulnerable people, especially in the large cities where most of us live, in vast urban tracts where there are in fact no supermarkets, are being forced to buy cheaper and lower-quality foods, to forgo fresh fruits and vegetables, or are relying on food programs – including our children’s school food programs – that by necessity are obliged to distribute any kind of food they can afford, good for you or not. And this is coming to haunt us in health care and social costs. No, we are not suddenly starving to death; we are slowly but surely malnourishing ourselves to death. And this fate is falling ever more heavily on those who were already stressed: the poor. Yet there is little action.
Many astute and well-informed people beside myself, most notably Michael Pollan, in a highly persuasive treatise last fall in the New York Times, have issued these same warnings and laid out the case for reform of our national food policy. I need not go on repeating what Pollan and others have already said so well, and I do not wish merely to add my voice to a chorus.
I am writing to demand action.
It is time and past time for this nation, this government, to react to the dangers inherent in its flawed farm and food policies and to reverse course from subsidizing wealth to subsidizing health.
We have to stop paying the largest farm subsidies to large growers of unsustainable and inedible crops like cotton. We have to stop paying huge subsidies to Big Corn, Big Soy and Big Chem to use prime farmland to grow fuel, plastics and fructose. We have to stop using federal and state agencies and institutions as taxpayer-funded research arms for the very practices that got us into this mess.
We have to start subsidizing health and well-being by rewarding sustainable practices in agriculture and assuring a safe, adequate and wholesome food supply to all our citizens. And we need to start this reform process now, as part of the national stimulus toward economic recovery.
In my organization, Growing Power Inc. of Milwaukee, we have always before tried to be as self-sustaining as possible and to rely on the market for our success. Typically, I would not want to lean on government support, because part of the lesson we teach is to be self-reliant.
But these are not typical times, as we are now all too well aware.
As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the National Recovery Act, I and members of my staff brainstormed ideas for a meaningful stimulus package aimed at creating green jobs, shoring up the security of our urban food systems, and promoting sound food policies of national scope. The outcome needed to be both “shovel-ready” for immediate impact and sustainable for future growth.
Centers for Urban Argriculture
We produced a proposal for the creation of a public-private enabling institution called the Centers for Urban Agriculture. It would incorporate a national training and outreach center, a large working urban farmstead, a research and development center, a policy institute, and a state-of-the-future urban agriculture demonstration center into which all of these elements would be combined in a functioning community food system scaled to the needs of a large city.
We proposed that this working institution – not a “think tank” but a “do tank” – be based in Milwaukee, where Growing Power has already created an operating model on just two acres. But ultimately, satellite centers would become established in urban areas across the nation. Each would be the hub of a local or regional farm-to-market community food system that would provide sustainable jobs, job training, food production and food distribution to those most in need of nutritional support and security.
This proposal was forwarded in February to our highest officials at the city, state and federal level, and it was greeted with considerable approval. Unfortunately, however, it soon became clear that the way Congress had structured the stimulus package, with funds earmarked for only particular sectors of the economy, chiefly infrastructure, afforded neither our Congressional representatives nor our local leaders with the discretion to direct any significant funds to this innovative plan. It simply had not occurred to anyone that immediate and lasting job creation was plausible in a field such as community-based agriculture.
I am asking Congress today to rectify that oversight, whether by modifying the current guidelines of the Recovery Act or by designating new and dedicated funds to the development of community food systems through the creation of this national Centers for Urban Agriculture.
Our proposal budgeted the initial creation of this CUA at a minimum of $63 million over two years – a droplet compared to the billions being invested in other programs both in the stimulus plan and from year-to-year in the federal budget.
Consider that the government will fund the Centers for Disease Control at about $8.8 billion this year, and that is above the hundreds of millions more in research grants to other bio-medical institutions, public and private. This is money well spent for important work to ensure Americans the best knowledge in protecting health by fighting disease; but surely by now we ought to recognize that the best offense against many diseases is the defense provided by a healthy and adequate diet. Yet barely a pittance of CDC money goes for any kind of preventive care research.
In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security approved spending $450 million for a new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility at Kansas State University, in addition to the existing Biosecurity Research Institute already there. Again, money well spent to protect our food supply from the potential of a terrorist attack. But note that these hundreds of millions are being spent to protect us from a threat that may never materialize, while we seem to trivialize the very real and material threat that is upon us right now: the threat of malnourishment and undernourishment of very significant number of our citizens.
Government programs under the overwhelmed and overburdened departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services do their best to serve their many masters, but in the end, government farm and food policies are most often at odds between the needs of the young, the old, the sick and the poor versus the wants of the super-industry that agriculture has become.
By and large, the government’s funding of nutritional health comes down to spending millions on studies to tell us what we ought to eat without in any way guaranteeing that many people will be able to find or afford the foods they recommend. For instance, food stamps ensure only that poor people can buy food; they cannot ensure that, in the food deserts that America’s inner cities have become, there will be any good food to buy.
We need a national nutrition plan that is not just another entitlement, that is not a matter of shipping surplus calories to schools, senior centers, and veterans’ homes. We need a plan that encourages a return to the best practices of both farming and marketing, that rewards the grower who protects the environment and his customers by nourishing his soil with compost instead of chemicals and who ships his goods the shortest distance, not the longest.
If the main purpose of government is to provide for the common security of its citizens, surely ensuring the security of their food system must be among its paramount duties. And if among our rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we are denied all those rights if our cities become prisons of poverty and malnutrition.
As an African-American farmer, I am calling on the first African-American president of the United States to lead us quickly away from this deepening crisis. Demand, President Obama, that Congress and your own Administration begin without delay the process of reforming our farm and food policies. Start now by correcting the omission in your economic stimulus and recovery act that prevented significant spending on creating new and sustainable jobs for the poor in our urban centers as well as rural farm communities.
It will be an irony, certainly, but a sweet one, if millions of African-Americans whose grandparents left the farms of the South for the factories of the North, only to see those factories close, should now find fulfillment in learning once again to live close to the soil and to the food it gives to all of us.
I would hope that we can move along a continuum to make sure that all of citizens have access to the same fresh, safe, affordable good food regardless of their cultural, social or economic situation.

The Good Food Revolution

Here is a picture of Will Allen in one of his hoop houses. These are the innovative structures that allow for year round urban farming. You need to get with this growing movement that is taking root and spreading it's branches far and wide, planting the seeds of self-sufficiency all over the land. Click on the link below that will take you to Will's web site and blog. This is something you do not want to sleep on.

Food Crisis
November 20, 2009 Author: Will Allen

A recent government report states that 1 out of 6 Americans are hungry. We must fix this problem by building a local food system that addresses the goal of ending hunger: one that is just, sustainable and culturally appropriate for our people in all of our cities, towns and hamlets throughout America. We believe that this is the only solution.
We need to take action now in order to build this new sustainable food system.
“Let’s continue to grow the good food revolution!” - Will Allen

Here is the blog link:

http://www.growingpower.org/blog/

Here is a picture of a hoop house in the winter - still growing food!

And here is the story about the installation of a hoop house in Buffalo that I was able to visit a week after Will left town. This was my introduction to this movement. I have been greatly inspired!

Successful installation at Buffalo, NY - Green house, Aquaponics, Compost and Vermicompost System
September 9, 2009 Author: Will Allen 1 Comment
Back in August, Robert Roberston of the Halsey Street Green Solutions Group who works as a local consultant with CAO on this project contacted Will Allen to help facilitate the building of a 20×48 hoop house. The hoop house will be used to house aquaponics system similar to the one that Will has developed at Growing Power and have been helping organizations build throughout the nation.
On September 5th and 6th, Growing Power along with CAO staffers and other local partners successfully installed the hoop house aquaponics system, composting and worm systems.
Will was very impressed with the organization led by L.Nathan Hare, the Executive Director of the Community Action Organization of Erie County New York. “I think it will be a great use of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding that the organization received. This project has already produced green jobs at this organization. This is the type of green projects that will help grow the good food revolution.” - Will Allen
Read the rest of the story on the Buffalo newspaper http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/787371.html