Since 2007, Groundwork Milwaukee has been an organization in the city that is fundamental to the development of urban green spaces, urban farming and sustainability-focused programming for youth. During this time of crisis, their Urban Farm Program is the initiative that is changing lives by growing food and donating it to people in need.
Michelle Cannon of LarryVille Gardens
Michelle Cannon is the sole owner of LarryVille Gardens, living on her gorgeous 11.5-acre farm in Burlington Wisconsin. On any given day at the farm, you will see her two dogs running around the fields kicking up dirt behind them. Throughout the year, she relies heavily on summer and winter farmers markets which are now closed due to COVID. But she has adjusted her delivery methods and is currently delivering to the Fondy Food Center in Milwaukee and offering pick-up orders at the farm. The hardest part of all this, she says, is the community that she is unable to interact with. For her, the people she gets to meet and talk to are one of the most important parts of her farm.
You can contact Michelle to order produce at www.larryvillegardens.com.
Healthy Food for Everyone - The Victory Garden Initiative
Many of us take for granted what we have available to us when choosing the food we eat. We often try to make healthy choices at the grocery store, telling ourselves to buy more produce and less packaged foods. But what if those fresh vegetables aren’t available? For many people in Milwaukee, grocery stores are hard to come by.
The 2015-2016 Milwaukee Community Health Assessment shows people in lower income neighborhoods are nine times more likely to have less access to healthy food choices than those in higher socioeconomic areas. The report defines a “food desert” as a “neighborhood where a high proportion of residents have low access (more than one mile in an urban setting) to a supermarket or large grocery store.” Food deserts are very prevalent in our city. Access is even harder when residents have to rely on public transportation. Their options are corner stores with rotting produce (if there is any produce at all) or a long bus trip to a higher income neighborhood with more grocery stores.
Montana Morris, the community programs manager and event coordinator at the Victory Garden Initiative (VGI), sees the answers to these problems in urban farming and food education. For 10 years, the organization has been providing healthy food access to the community through events like their Garden BLITZ, their pay-what-you-can farm stand every Tuesday and their upcoming fifth annual Farmraiser harvest festival on Saturday, Sept. 28, from 4-7:30 p.m.
The organization started the Farmraiser to advocate the basic human right for everyone to grow their own food. Since their first year, VGI installed raised beds in yards around the city through their Garden BLITZ event, an annual 15-day event with 300 volunteers installing 500 raised beds.
VGI has become deeply rooted in the Harambe neighborhood. On any given day, you may walk into the garden space hidden between bungalow houses to find local kids doing summersaults amongst the crops. It feels like a refuge away from the busy city. Growing our own food is “helping us personally get in touch with the changes of nature, learning how to work with nature and getting something rewarding out of it,” says Morris.
Morris regularly works with kids that have never seen food pulled from the ground. Not knowing what a carrot was, one youth told Morris it looks like a Cheeto. Such a profound moment allowed Morris to realize how disconnected people are from their food and how easy it is to overlook what is available to us. “I realized that education was the most important part [of the solution],” she says. Through education on healthy food, VGI puts power in the hands of the people to become self-reliant food sources.
Learn more at victorygardeninitiative.org.
Read the article on the Shepherd Express.
Venice Williams Cultivates Food and Community in Alice’s Garden
Aware of the significance a bridge has in connecting two places, crossing bridges is an integral part of Venice Williams’ identity. Originally from Pittsburgh, the city of bridges, she grew up walking across them to get everywhere. Years later, Williams describes herself as a bridge between communities. She has made it her life’s work to connect different groups of people, helping them “bridge their uniqueness,” she says. Today she runs Alice’s Garden, an intersection of the many neighborhoods in Milwaukee.
Williams began her community work through the Lutheran Church, always using her love of food and gardening as a way to bring people together. From a young age, she learned to grow plants in her family garden. Her father was a chef, her mother a grocer. She learned the importance of cultivating her own food and having a connection to the soil. As an adult, she works to teach others that same value.
Expecting to stay for only two years, Williams moved to Milwaukee in 1989 to pursue her ministry work. She found it hard to leave the city after quickly building relationships with the people she worked with. Still in Milwaukee 13 years later, she found her way to Alice’s Garden, a community garden since the early ’70s. Located on 21st Street and Garfield Avenue, the garden presented the perfect opportunity for Williams to marry her passion for food and building community relationships. Alice’s Garden is now part of her ministry called The Table. Even as the executive director of the garden, she still calls herself the “the weed puller.”
Alice’s Garden has become a center point in the community. It is a place where people of different cultures and ethnicities intersect to celebrate their similarities through food. “Everyone wants to come to this piece of land to cultivate food, but you’re cultivating community just as much,” explains Williams. There was a point when you could tell the ethnicity of a gardener based on the crops they grew. Now the garden plots are diverse like the gardeners cultivating them. With a multitude of programs focused on food and spending time outdoors, Williams has helped people share their traditions and cultures.
The garden comes alive with programs and events during the growing season. Events like yoga classes, meditation walks, group book readings and drum circles all take place in the garden with “the sky as the ceiling,” says Williams. “We create a stronger bond with each other and with the land when we are in the open air,” she explains.
Williams believes “authentic development comes from within a community,” meaning the garden structures its programming based on what the local neighborhoods say they need. Cultivating change is a group effort, requiring help from community members and partnering organizations. Everyone involved with the garden has redefined what a community garden can be, bridging the diverse parts of a segregated city.
Learn more at facebook.com/alicesgarden
Pat Wilborn, Fish Farmer from Port Washington
When Pat Wilborn learned about aquaponics 12 years ago, it opened his eyes to a sustainable way of farming and he knew immediately that this was something he wanted to pursue. “I bought into the concept and decided it was time to give something back,” says Wilborn. He and his wife, Amy Otis-Wilborn, first built a small aquaponics model in their home in Port Washington, and after refining the process, they eventually built a 3,500-gallon aquaponics system called Port Fish. The nonprofit has a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model and also sells their larger fish to local restaurants. But most importantly, Pat Wilborn explains, the farm is a teaching device.
Aquaponics is the combination of aquaculture (fish farming) and hydroponics (farming without soil). The system works in a cycle: Fish create waste, which is then used to fertilize the water where the plants grow. When the plants take in those nutrients, they clean the water, which in turn is transferred back to the fish tanks. Or as Wilborn states: “You feed the fish, they create waste, plants grow.” Simple enough.
It’s hugely beneficial for the environment because it conserves water, fertilizes plants with natural fertilizer, has no run-off into rivers and lakes, and the list goes on. But unfortunately, aquaponics is not used on a large commercial scale despite the environmental benefits because it is expensive, something that the Wilborns realized when they started their first aquaponics experiment. They make some revenue with their CSA and restaurant fish sales, but they continue to put money into their organization to keep it running. The Wilborns, however, look at their venture in a different way. “It’s not a money-making opportunity,” says Wilborn, “but an opportunity to expand the capacity of knowledge.”
Traditional agriculture techniques must adapt to our changing climate, and people need to be educated about possible solutions. That is why the Wilborns and James Godsil of the Sweet Water Foundation (a supporter of Port Fish) strongly believe that aquaponics should be taught in schools. Port Fish has been working with the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and Johnson Controls to install an aquaponics system in Browning Elementary School. Located in the greenhouse on the school grounds, the small garden is expected to be finished next month and incorporated into the curriculum. Pat Wilborn’s intention is to help the school staff be self-sufficient in terms of maintaining the garden. The greenhouse allows the students to get out of the classroom and learn by getting their hands dirty—literally. “They have to get over the fact that they don’t know anything about it and just start poking it,” says Wilborn. When the children are physically involved in the growing process, they get a chance to see where their food comes from and how to lead healthy lifestyles.
Aquaponics has given Pat and Amy a healthier outlook on life and encouraged them to change their diets to whole-food and plant-based diets. In 12 years, they have built a sustainable farm, a strong connection to their community and a space for learning. Wilborn smiles while standing in his greenhouse and says, “The people that come through here benefit, I benefit, the community benefits.”
Learn more at portfish.org
Springdale Farm
Located just Southwest of Plymouth and alongside the Northern Kettle Moraine State Forrest, Springdale Farm sits peacefully in a valley. In the fall of 1987, Peter and Bernadette Seely moved to Wisconsin to start their farm with a business model that was new to the midwest: Community Supported Agriculture. When their farm first opened in 1988, they had 45 members that subscribed to the farm in order to receive fresh produce every week of the growing season based on which crops were available. “It seemed like a good idea to build a better economy based on good food,” says Peter Seely.
Raised in a suburb of New York City, Peter didn't know much about farming but when a movement for organic food started in the 70s and early 80s Peter states, "the role of food and health became pretty obvious to me.” So he apprenticed at an organic vegetable farm in Maine for a summer, which first made him consider farming full time. A few years later, Peter taught high school math at a school in Iowa where he first met his soon-to be-wife Bernadette. The school had a garden that was part of a program to teach kids about farming that Bernadette and Peter managed together. In 1986, the couple spent a season touring farms, and among them were the first CSAs in the country. After learning how these farms functioned, the couple thought: “Let’s see if that idea could take route here in Wisconsin.”
That idea took off. For the first 20 years, they had a waiting list for their CSA, which serves Sheboygan, Ozaukee and Milwaukee counties. Springdale is now one of about 12 farms in Southeast Wisconsin that follow the Community Supported Agriculture model. The farmers are in the process of creating a group called CSA Farms of Southeast Wisconsin, in which they help each other with advice and outreach about CSAs.
"So how does Springdale Farm benefit the Milwaukee community?", I asked Peter Seely. As a CSA member, Peter explains, people "know they are directly supporting a local farm dedicated to keeping the soil and the environment safe to pass it on to future generations.” Additionally, people know exactly where their food comes from and can have it delivered the day after it was picked from the field.
Now 29 years later, Peter and Bernadette Seely have 750 CSA members, 13 greenhouses, electric tractors powered by solar panels and a continued mission to provide healthy food and a sustainable future for our environment. And in case you're wondering, their favorite thing to cook this time of year is pesto.
Learn more about the farm on their website: www.SpringdaleFarmCSA.org
View the full blog at www.MKEinFocus.com
Three Sisters Farm
Three Sisters Community Farm is a young organic farm run by Kelly Kiefer and Jeff Schreiber. They recently started their farm in 2011 using Kelly's family land where she grew up and additional land nearby.
The name Three Sisters is unique because it has two meanings: Kelly is one of three sisters and there is a group of three crops that support each other when grown together which native groups called the three sisters. These three crops are corn, beans and squash. The corn grows tall providing a trellis for the beans to climb while the beans create nitrogen rich soil, needed to make plants healthy. And finally the squash grows on a vine which provides ground cover for the soil around the other plants. "We liked the picture of this synergistic combination of plants contributing to the greater benefit of the whole system as a metaphor for how we build relationships with our community of supporters," mentioned Kelly.
I recently visited their farm in the fall while they had volunteers helping plant garlic and prepping the tomato plants for spring. While having the privilege to speak with Kelly and Jeff, I was able to gain some insight on how much work they do both on and off the farm. Working on the land is not easy and farmers often spend 10 or more hours working on their land every day. But owning a farm also means owning a business. Winter is their opportunity to catch up on calculations for the season, taxes and all of the less glamorous pieces of running a business.
Kelly and Jeff stay connected to their supporters in multiple ways including volunteer opportunities and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). One of their goals is to build community relationships and create a welcoming sanctuary at their farm so if you are interested in volunteering, I hear they pay in vegetables. For those of you who don't know, becoming part of their CSA means that you subscribe to the farm for the growing season and Kelly and Jeff deliver fresh produce to a location near you every week. The produce you receive every week depends on what is in season so you get a chance to discover all kinds of new vegetables that you never knew existed. Three Sisters Farm is unique because they actually allow you to pick some of the vegetables that go into your box each week on their website.
So you if you're looking for volunteer opportunities, a CSA to join or just two genuinely welcoming farmers to talk to, look up Jeff and Kelly.