Farmer Allen talks urban agriculture

Will Allen’s family has been farming for 400 years.

A MacArthur Genius Fellow and urban farmer, Allen spoke Tuesday at the Indiana Memorial Union as part of SustainIU week. 

He started his urban farm 21 years ago, and it’s now the largest urban farm in the world.

Urban farming can be defined as growing food and raising livestock in the city.

“We’ve lost that connection to what good food is all about,” he said.

Everyone has an ancestor that was a farmer, Allen said. And that’s something many people have forgotten.

Now, most people eat about 3 percent of really “good food,” or food that has a high nutrient value, Allen said.

“Our food should be our medicine,” Allen said.

It was never his intention to have the largest urban farm, Allen said. But he did want to prove urban farming was actually possible.

Now his farm grows enough food for 10,000 people.

Part of his non-profit was to hire young people to improve the community, he said.

When he noticed the children he was teaching to farm didn’t have good reading and writing skills, he had them write about their experience every day after they had been in the field.

“And their grades improved because they became connected with this kind of hands-on project,” Allen said.

Along with volunteers, Allen has worked to add more gardens and foliage to side streets and public areas in places where crime rates were especially high, Allen said.

Those areas saw a drop in crime, including drug dealing and auto theft.

“And the drug dealers felt uncomfortable, so they went away,” Allen said. “We teach those young people a lost art.”

“I said I just want to work with these kids and teach them how to grow food,” he said.

For all the people it feeds, Allen’s farm has made more than a million pounds of soil.

“Well, the way we’re able to do it, because over time we’ve been able to engage the community,” he said.

His non-profit is also training people to become farmers, and is encouraging other non-profits to, as well.

“We need to grow a lot of farmers,” he said.