The story of Will Allen and his urban farming non-profit organization (described in his book “The good food revolution”)has inspired a book found in the children’s section of the Miller Library. “Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table,” written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Eric-Shabazz Larkin, focuses on the role neighborhood children played in helping Allen’s enterprise be successful.

In vivid colors, this book captures the diversity of food produced in these greenhouses, including the pools for tilapia, chickens for eggs, sprouts for quick greens, and hives for honey. The people are colorful, too, and of many ethnicities and ages.

The children were especially eager to help bring food garbage, and to come back every day to watch the red wiggler worms turn these scraps into compost. There is tragedy in this story, as some of the worms died until the kids discovered the proper care and feeding they required, but in the end, “the squirmy crew has stayed hard at work.”

Excerpted from the Winter 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.

In describing her book, “The Color of Food,” Natasha Bowens explains, “I never would have imagined that my desire to dig in the dirt would lead me here, digging instead into the stories of farmers of color across America – Black, Latina, Native, and Asian farmer and food activists.” Initially, her interest in improving food and agriculture systems led her to working on organic farms, but often as the only “brown person” there. Through her blog (Brown.Girl.Farming), she discovers there are others like her, and decides their stories need telling.

At the same time, she was learning about her heritage, including the uneasy discovery that her white mother’s ancestors owned her black father’s ancestors. “I’m literally the product of ownership and oppression reuniting, as if to rewrite the story.”

Her trip takes her across the country. For the purposes of this review, I’ll concentrate on stories she found amongst farmers on the West Coast. These include Menkir Tamrat, who came to the United States from Ethiopia for college in the 1970s and now lives in Fremont, California. Missing the special ingredients of the favorite dishes of his native land, he recognized that he would need to grow his own. This is what he does, but also enjoys preparing traditional dishes and some of the intermediate ingredients to sell to Ethiopian markets and restaurants.

In the Skagit Valley of Washington, Nelida Martinez is a Mixteca native – from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico – who now has her own organic farm focusing on raspberries, blackberries, and various vegetables. She made this bold move after her son sickened with leukemia, possibly from exposure to pesticides at the conventional farm where his mother once worked. She describes the experience of Latino farmworkers as “a lot of humiliation for us, and many of us never think about having our own farm because we feel degraded by the work.” Now, she is very pleased to not be working “for anyone else!”

Valerie Segrest is not a farmer in the traditional sense, but rather an advocate for the foraging traditions of her people, the Muckleshoot tribe based in Auburn, Washington. This includes cooking and eating traditional foods in season, a practice that has required compromises because of dams, pollution, or what she calls “European land management styles.” While she appreciates the role of conservation, she argues that the foraging and harvesting of native peoples ensured “a balance with nature where you’re working together and not having dominion over that space. Even as foragers, we use harvesting techniques that make it look like we’ve never even been there while also actually benefitting the plant.”

Excerpted from the Winter 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.

Will Allen grew up on a small farm in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D. C. His parents grew up as sharecroppers in western South Carolina, very close to the home of J. Drew Lanham. As a young man, he was embarrassed by his heritage, instead hoping to make his career as a basketball player.

A talented competitor in both high school and college, he had a limited career as a professional, primarily playing in Belgium. While in Europe, he had time to observe the local agricultural customs, including the many small farms using traditional, organic practices. This reawakened in his interest in growing food. After starting a successful corporate career in metropolitan Milwaukee, he began farming as a hobby.

In 1993 by chance, he discovered the last agriculturally zoned property in the poor, mostly black northern part of the city. At the time he was in his forties, doing well in his career, but feeling unfulfilled. He decided to purchase the property, leave his safe job, and open a vegetable stand because he “wanted to try to heal the broken food system in the inner-city community where my market operated.”

He also wanted to connect Wisconsin farmers to African American communities, especially as Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the country. “But on our small piece of earth, we struggled and celebrated together—black and white, Hispanic and Hmong, young and old—as we worked to produce healthy food.”

This hasn’t been easy, and much of “The Good Food Revolution” by Allen (with Charles Wilson) is the story of the last 20 years of building what is now a very successful urban farming non-profit organization that not only serves its home community but has fostered similar programs in many other cities. The author is a good storyteller, praising the many individuals who contributed to his work, so that they become your heroes, too. While this work is not a panacea to all of the troubles of racism and poverty, there are many happy endings.

Excerpted from the Winter 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.