Tiny farms freshen up Milwaukee locations
“I found a cucumber!” Six-year-old Kay’Vion Brown proudly raises a Crayola-green vegetable bigger than his forearm above his head, delighting the neighbors gathered at Victory Garden Initiative’s urban farm on a clear-sky Saturday in May.
They’re celebrating the organization’s purchase of a farmhouse across the street from the farm at 220 E. Concordia Ave., in the north Milwaukee neighborhood of Harambee. The addition is the next step for Victory Garden and another anchor in Milwaukee’s urban agriculture community.
Urban agriculture — the growing, harvesting and distribution of fresh food in urban settings — goes back as long as cities have existed. But as recently as the early 1990s, it was almost nonexistent in Milwaukee.
Then in 1993, Will Allen, a former American Basketball Association player who had moved to his wife’s hometown of Milwaukee when his playing career ended, bought a north-side plant nursery out of foreclosure.
The property evolved over the next two years into the nonprofit urban farm called Growing Power, which eventually spread to multiple locations and earned national acclaim —
“People have stereotypes about what 21st and Garfield would be like. This breaks down those stereotypes.” Stephanie Sandy Resident who’s been gardening at Alice’s for almost a decade
plus a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation genius grant for Allen.
The farm provided jobs and training for youths and fresh produce for neighborhood residents in what had been a food desert.
Over time, its food reached thousands of people, and its educational programs taught many of the city’s current agriculturalists. At its peak, Allen has said, it employed nearly 150 people.
Last year, however, Growing Power became enmeshed in financial and legal struggles, and it dissolved in November.
While Growing Power’s large-scale food production is not likely to be matched locally anytime soon, other groups in the city are adopting the hyper-local model that Allen championed, including the Victory Garden Initiative.
Gretchen Mead started the initiative in 2008 with the Victory Garden Blitz, which has sent volunteers to install hundreds of raised bed gardens in residential yards.
“We wanted to help people grow their own food,” Mead said, describing the initiative’s early days as a social movement.
When she moved to Milwaukee after living in a rural town, she said, she felt a disconnect. Her own garden grew out of her innate need to nurture the soil, and she wanted more people to feel that way.
After the 2009 recession, Mead said, the job losses and foreclosures that plagued so many communities hit lowincome neighborhoods like Harambee especially hard.
The farm was a way to create resources when they were scarce. It offers experience and learning opportunities for neighborhood youths, a source of fresh food for residents and extra space for neighbors to have gardens of their own.
“There are a lot of vulnerable people here,” Mead said. “Our work has helped to stabilize that.”
The initiative provides produce to local restaurants as well as the Riverwest Food Pantry, and also lets residents pick their own produce from the farm.
Alice’s Garden
About 3 miles to the southwest, on a farm at the top of Johnson’s Park, Venice Williams is also celebrating. A Girl Scout troop is on all fours in the dirt, challenging weeds with plastic shovels and learning from Williams how to till the soil.
Across the more than 2-acre field, adults and children take a yoga class, a grandfather watches his two young grandchildren play and gardeners tend to their own garden plots.
It’s a pretty average day at Alice’s Garden, 2136 N. 21st St., a community green-space, garden and urban farm in Lindsay Heights. It’s a piece of land with a torrid history that Williams, the garden’s executive director, relates to.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, the beginnings of a freeway project cut through Milwaukee’s northwest side, taking with it businesses and homes in predominantly minority neighborhoods — but the freeway never materialized. Left behind were numerous vacant lots, one of which became Alice’s Garden.
“From the very beginning, it’s been a story of displacement,” Williams said. “The history of eminent domain of people of color is a really multilayered issue.”
Williams is using gardening to address the historic inequities.
“You can’t talk about food and not issues about food justice,” she said.
Williams is striving to regenerate her traditions through ethno-botany, which looks at how various cultures have utilized native plants. She wants people to get back to their roots, and to be able to tell their histories through food.
Williams, who draws on her own African-American and Choctaw heritage for inspiration, said farming is integral not only to her culture but to everybody’s. Ninety families and community groups rent space at Alice’s Garden, and she’s proud of the diversity of cultural traditions represented.
Stephanie Sandy has been gardening at Alice’s for almost a decade, and she said it’s constantly changing perceptions.
“People have stereotypes about what 21st and Garfield would be like,” she said. “This breaks down those stereotypes.”
Groundwork Milwaukee
Kenneth Brown II spent a day last summer walking door to door asking neighbors to help plant fruit trees in a vacant lot at 2501 N. 5th St. in Harambee, and 60 people turned out to help.
He enlisted Groundwork Milwaukee to transform the lot. Groundwork serves as a sort of support group for the city’s aspiring urban agriculturalists. The organization supports 113 community gardens and is launching an urban farm collective that will grow food for the Riverwest Food Pantry.
But Groundwork Milwaukee associate director Matt Rudmann said all of the group’s projects were thought up and spearheaded by community groups or individual residents. Groundwork doesn’t grow, harvest or sell food, but rather builds the infrastructure that connects urban farms with the community resources and customers they require to succeed, Rudmann said.
And the projects, like Brown’s, take a lot of legwork.
This kind of outreach, Brown said, is the key to successful community redevelopment.
“If we’re not talking to people before going out there, we shouldn’t be going out there,” he said.
According to research from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, without that type of community engagement, urban agriculture programs may not benefit the communities they’re meant to serve.
The report emphasizes the importance of involving community members in decision-making and securing support from local and state governments.
Alfonso Morales, a professor of food systems and urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, seconded that.
“Urban agriculture is a process,” he said. “It’s not something that happens from one day to the next.”
It’s also not typically an enterprise whose primary goal is profit, he said.
“Nobody’s going to get wealthy farming, at least not on this scale,” he said.
Rather, in Morales’ view, urban agriculture’s value comes from the potential it brings to the communities it serves.
A difference-maker
High school-age brothers Hailey and Justin Tyra are shoveling debris from a bioswale — a parcel whose vegetation filters storm water runoff naturally — on North 27th Street and Capitol Drive. In the past year, they’ve also built birdhouses and benches, worked with landscaping and aquaponics, and learned to grow their own food.
They’re both part of Groundwork’s Green Team, a hands-on program that employs teens in neighborhoods across the city.
Rudmann notes that education can be a difference-maker for urban communities that are short on resources.
“We don’t want to catch a fish for someone; we want to teach them how to fish,” he said.
Groundwork offers programs for youths ages 8 and up and is constantly looking to instill in them a sense of stewardship for the earth.
Younger students learn the value of food, and older participants learn job skills and are connected to colleges or the workforce, where Milwaukee Food Council president Nya Taryor hopes they’ll continue their agricultural education.
Victory Garden Initiative and Alice’s Garden each have their own educational programs as well. Victory Garden calls its “YEP!” for “youth education program.”
These agriculturalists-in-training are the future of a youth movement that will be the next step in creating a more equitable food system in the city, Taryor said, adding that that’s how to preserve Growing Power’s legacy.
“I think there will be people participating in keeping that tradition Will Allen tried to bring to the city,” he said. “There’s still going to be that mission.”