Grow Your Own

A friend told me that Will Allen of Growing Power (one of my favorite organizations) was going to be speaking tonight on behalf of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. So we headed up to the Minneapolis Urban League office where the event was being held.

The place was crawling with people, but we got seats in the second row, right in front of the podium -- hence this picture.

I know I've already written this before, but Allen and his organization are so inspiring! They've created a model of what a locally based food system could be like, and they want to share everything they know. Some cool new facts I learned:

• Worms live for 50 years, so treat them like livestock
• Eight inches of woodchips covered in compost can be used to grow a garden right over asphalt
• The aquaponics system that Growing Power has worked out and will share with anyone who asks can be built for $3,000 worth of materials. They grow an incredible amount of fish (as well as plants) in the system.
• Growing Power works with kids and teens on its six farms (three in Milwaukee, three in Chicago), and also with teens who've been paroled from the prison system. So they're working on that part of the problem, too.
• It's important to farm the vertical space in the greenhouses. Growing Power plants salad greens in multiple tiers of hanging baskets... each basket has worms working in the soil.
• They've got their first anaerobic digester going now. The plan is to build one at Miller Brewing, so they can turn their brewing waste into methane and then into electricity.
  

I also heard at the event about Homegrown Minneapolis, the city's effort to get on board with local food production and distribution, from farmers' markets to community gardens to small-scale ag businesses in the city.

An evening well spent.