This guy is amazing

Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.

It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.

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Wow

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.
Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.
Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.
Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.
Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.
Being poor is living next to the freeway.
Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

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Arrival in Kenya

My trip to Kenya was amazing. My girlfriend and I flew into the country at 7:00p.m. on a Tuesday. In our cramp airbus we were able to see the lights of Nairobi shining up at us in the darkness. The landing was smooth and we evacuated the plane rather quickly. Kenyatta Airport has the look of a building built in the sixties or seventies. We were able to get our luggage relatively quickly as there were men working on the conveyer belt who helped us. We tipped them and headed to the car were we met my girlfriends cousin with whom we stayed. As I walked towards the car I was greeted by and old man who said “Jambo”. This made me realize that I was easily identifiable as American, as Kenyans generally don’t use the term. For the rest of the trip I would learn that rather then a greeting, Jambo meant “I know you’re a tourist so I’m going to try and charge you more”. Riding down the street on the opposite side of the road from the United States, I was struck by how smooth the street was. Most of the Kenyans in the states that I had spoken to told me about how rough the roads were, many of them hadn’t been home for a few years and so did not know that they roads had just been repaved. I grew up in Detroit and now live in Baltimore, the roads in Nairobi were as smooth as these two cities. In fact, for the majority of my trip the roads were smoother than my own home town.

How do I describe Nairobi in a way that will make you see it? If you imagine a large Black run city, such as Detroit and Baltimore, you’ll have a general idea of Nairobi in terms of upkeep. The majority of the buildings seemed to have been designed and built in the middle of the last century. There are palm trees in parts of the city, similar to places in Florida and South Carolina. It was generally warm in the city, although the country tends to cool down in June and July. The city, and all of the places I visited in Kenya, were well built but slightly run down. It’s not as if the country was in bad shape, but merely untidy. People had a tendency to litter, the grass was cut but un-edged, the flowers were planted well but grew somewhat haphazardly. It made me realize just how closely that Detroit, the city of my youth, resembled a developing nation.

Public transportation in Nairobi, and throughout much of the country, was amazing. There are these private buses called matatoos that one can use to get around. It costs less than a dollar to ride one, about 40 Kenyan shillings. They are small Nissan buses that people buy and then use to hire out as public transportation. This is probably one of the most amazing things about Kenya. Everyone I met in Kenya was hard working and enterprising. They were people who, if they were in the United States, would be business owners and probably quite well off. In Kenyan they were just getting buy, but their entrepreneurial spirit created a simple, but efficient bus system. The matatoos are privately owned but have route numbers. This means that you can take the number 12 matatoo from point A to point B. They arrive quite regularly, probably faster than buses in D.C. and are more reliable than the subway in Washington. This spontaneous order of the bus system is awe inspiring. In addition, the owners of the matatoos will often paint them different colors and place well drawn pictures of their favorite hip hop, reggae, and local musicians. It’s an amazing show of creativity and individuality among the drivers of the buses. I have never seen, nor heard, of anything like this before and I wish that some economist somewhere would take the time to study the phenomenon.