Volunteer Work at Growing Power

Growing Power Storefront (Google Images: Photobucket.com)

There it is.  That’s Growing Power.  Humble yeah?

Located in North Milwaukee on Silver Spring Rd. in what has been classified as a “Food Desert” where there are little fresh produce options, Growing Power’s Community Food Center is an extraordinary urban farm and sustainable food market for fresh vegetables.  Hosting thousands of volunteers every year, the organization aims to teach young adults and adults alike about ecosystems, composting, and the importance of sustainable food resources.  Their mission statement reflects a simple goal: “To grow food, to grow minds, to grow a community.”

I’m Nick Donalds, a sophomore at UWM studying Interdisciplinary Arts ad Technology at Peck School of the Arts.  I was excited to volunteer here for my service learning component of Introduction to Conservation and Environmental Science 210.  I was learning so much already about a whole host of relevant subjects in class and in the book Principles of Environmental Science.  Chapter 7: “Food and Agriculture” describes sustainable agriculture as environmentally-safe alternatives to producing agriculture as opposed to the synthetic fertilizing and industrialization of agriculture.  Sustainability is key for our future; that we can continue to grow crops with little to no harm to the environment.  The end of the chapter also stresses the importance of being a “locavore” and buying locally produced food.  This is also part of eating low on the food chain because your food has minimal transportation involved so minimal energy was needed to get that food into your hands.  The meat and processed food industries however, seem to be high on the food chain and have a disastrous ecological toll.  All of this in Chapter 7 is directly relevant to Growing Power, a local sustainable food market.

It was the brainchild of Will Allen.  A former basketball player and successful marketer, he purchased a foreclosed plant nursery in Northern Milwaukee that became Growing Power.  He also purchased a 100-acre farm in Oak Creek that is Growing Power’s second site.  The organization has expanded to a third location in Chicago run by his daughter Erika.  This is Will:

Will Allen (Google Images: http://healthimpactnews.com)

When I first showed up on a warm Saturday for a 30 minute orientation in late October, I got to experience exactly what I thought I would.  After a short introduction we started our tour.  After checking out the pea shoots in the first greenhouse (I’ll talk about those more soon) we were introduced to their vertical aquaponic system.  A canal dug into the ground is home too many fish including Yellow Perch (a population that has decreased in Lake Michigan 80 percent since 1990) and  African Tilapia (growingpower.org/aquaponics).  The fish are farmed and sold to chefs.  Right above the fish is a shelving unit made of wood that holds various plants.  A pump in the fish canal pumps their dirty waste water up and into the plants so they can get special nutrients like nitrogen.  The system represents a Symbiotic relationship as identified in Ch. 3 “Evolution, Species Interactions, and Biological Communities”.  The fish’s waste help fertilize the plants and the plants filter out the waste so clean, habitable water can re-enter the fish canal.  Maybe Jordan Stone can give you a visual of aquaponics.

I then saw a few more greenhouses with different vegetables growing.  The guide also pointed out that the gigantic piles of dirt all around the outside area of the farm was mostly composted soil.  I just remembered being absolutely impressed with all that was going on.  There were volunteers and staffers working together and they all seemed to know what they were doing.

I was surprised at the variety of projects they had going on in such a small space.  I wasn’t expecting livestock at Growing Power, but at the back of the farm they had goats!  They raise goats for their milk.  I also saw their turkeys which are apparently being kept as pets?  Maybe they lied to me to spare my feelings.  To top things off, they also keep bees.  Luckily they keep them way in the back corner of the farm so workers can feel safe.  The bees are crucial for pollination, workers also collect their honey (150 lbs a year), and at the Chicago location, beeswax is gathered to make lip balm, soap, scrubs, and candles.

About 2 weeks later I came back to volunteer.  Geared up in work clothes and hiking boots and gloves, I was ready to get dirty.  I met with a delightful staffer named Chris who put me to work emptying trays of harvested pea shoots into a wheelbarrow to take back to a greenhouse where I would compost the remaining shoot-roots/dirt.  Here’s a picture of the shoots:

Pea Shoots (Google Images: Photobucket.com)

GP produces about 200 trays a day.  They sprout up and when they grow their leaves, they are harvested (cut off from their stems).  The rest is composted.  It’s a simple process but its a ton of work.  This is one of the main jobs volunteers handle.

The mixed up dirt and pea shoot remains sits in a large container where it gets plenty of oxygen to help it break down.  As I learned in Chapter 13: “Solid and Hazardous Waste”, composting is an excellent way of reusing the Earth’s organic waste to make a nutrient rich soil.  In fact, composting is a huge part of Growing Power.  Everything is planted with composted soil and when it is harvested, it can all go back into the compost-soil pile.  It is part of a cycle.  Everything in nature tends to work in cycles.

Growing Power also has a famous Vermicompost, or Worm Compost area.  There are many worms in this section of compost that help break down food waste in the soil and essentially poop out extra nutrients.  Worms provide an essential service for the soil.  This can also be seen as an example of Symbiosis as well, where the compost helps the worms, and the worms help the compost.  A source for much of the food waste here is the organic scraps from many local restaurants.  I thought this was one of the coolest parts about GP, is they partner with restaurants in the area to collect their food waste and compost it.  (Another one of my volunteer jobs on a different day was to clean the restaurants’ compost buckets so they could return back to the kitchen.  Not so much fun).

And I went, cheerily about my business, composting away.  I got some great exercise doing all that shoveling and carrying the wheelbarrow around.  I realized I kind of loved it there and would certainly keep volunteering even after this class is over.  I returned another day and helped plant Kale, a big project they do there before winter comes.  Kale is a very hardy plant and can grow throughout the winter months.  I’ll certainly be back there very soon since I have enjoyed my experience there so much.

Kale (Google Images: Blogspot.com)

Growing Power has been acclaimed and recognized nationally for a reason.  It’s that, while GP is not only an urban farm, it is integrated with the community to have a very positive impact.  It provides a message that we can not only feed people who need food, we can provide healthy options, especially when this nation is in the midst of a major health/obesity crisis that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.  And hey, it’ll help the environment as well.

We depend on the environment.  I wouldn’t call our relationship with the environment symbiotic like the Growing Power’s vertical aquaponic system because the Earth’s environment doesn’t seem to “need” us around, but its similar.  We require plants’ oxygen to breathe and we need vegetables to live.  It’s like, in our constant development as an intellectual force, we forget we’re animals and we forget about where we came from.  As we deplete our natural resources, pump chemicals into the air, cut down trees and artificially feed ourselves, we compromise the safety and survival of our species and others.  Chapter 9: “Air: Climate and Pollution” is all about humans’ effect dramatically increasing the effects of global warming by burning fossil fuels on a mass scale (Transportation, Energy), causing the release of toxins like methane (Meat Industry, Landfills, Natural Gas), CFCs (Aerosols), and nitrogen oxide (Fertilizer).  With this in mind, it seems we’ve been neglectful.  To survive, we must change our destructive ways.  It will be our sole responsibility to not only live with nature, but to embrace it for the health of our species.

Growing Power shows us the humble, grounded future we should be striving for.  Hopefully it will serve as inspiration for more urban farms to pop up nationwide and more environmentally friendly ideas.  It is time for the common American people, politicians, and media to focus on sustainable food resources, diet, and the environment.  For a mass movement of urban farms to come into development giving people the option of fresh vegetables as opposed to meats and processed foods, we could tackle more than problem at a time.  Hopefully a local-sustainable food source initiative could provide healthy food for starving people in desolate climates.  We could save the world and help each other if follow Growing Power’s model.  They’re doing everything right.