Flip Clip: Growing Food at Arcosanti

During our recent visit to Arcosanti, we got a chance to see how the desert community is working to build up sustainable food production. Arcosanti is a community that in many ways strives to be self-sufficient, and producing organic food on-site would be a major step in that direction.

As you can see from the scale model of the greenhouses pictured at the bottom of this post, plans for food production at Arcosanti are pretty ambitious. However, they currently have just one experimental greenhouse where they're testing to see which plants they can grow in the climate. So far, organic lettuce, tomatoes and various herbs are productive enough to be used in the main kitchen that feeds the fifty permanent residents of Arcosanti.

We saw a variety of edible plants on the grounds including olive and apricot trees plus a good number of chickens, guinea hens, peacocks and one lone duck! In addition to the greenhouses, there are also nearby fields that have been farmed in recent years, but because the community's agricultural specialist moved on, they aren't producing any food right now. Our tour guide Lindsay also mentioned that the community is planning to grow a variety of blue corn in their fields in partnership with a local Hopi tribe.

Arcosanti: An Experiment in Sustainable Living

Arcosanti was an unplanned stop on the Southwest Tour, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting places we've been. The driving principle behind Arcosanti is "arcology," a term coined by the mastermind behind the development, architect Paolo Soleri, that describes a combination of architecture and ecology.

Soleri sought to concentrate large numbers of people in dense living quarters, limiting the impact on the surrounding lands, which are either kept wild or used for agriculture. True to that goal, Arcosanti sits on more than 4,000 acres of protected land, while the 50-100 residents live on only about 25 acres. Soleri's buildings are built on a pretty steep ravine, looking out on some pretty stunning landscape. His buildings are designed to take full advantage of passive solar heat in the winter, and most of them have nice cross-ventilation to cool them in the summer.

Dorothée and I took a tour of the grounds yesterday in hopes of learning about the way they produce food at Arcosanti. We were pretty impressed by the architecture and the natural beauty of the site, and after the tour, our guide Lindsay took us down to show us some of the experimental greenhouses.

-Mark

Taking a Tour of Growing Power in Milwaukee

Over the years, we've read and heard a lot about Growing Power, a large urban farm on the northwest side of Milwaukee, but until this weekend I had never been there. So on a trip to Milwaukee, I set aside a couple of hours and took a tour of the farm (tours are given every day, and they cost $10). Growing Power was started by Will Allen, a former pro basketball player who grew up on a farm. Allen bought the property in the early 1990s, and it has since grown into a Milwaukee institution that attracts hoards of visitors and volunteers and produces loads of organic vegetables.

The thing that struck me most about Growing Power is the sheer amount of food production that takes place on the less than three-acre plot. Aquaponic grow beds that are rigged up with two-by-fours are layered, with the top beds capturing the UV rays from the sun and grow lights hanging over the lower levels. Beneath them, fish are grown and harvested, and hanging baskets hang from the sides, growing more vegetables. No space is wasted, inside the greenhouses or out.

Will Allen didn't guide the tour, but he had a brief cameo, swooping in to spread a few handfuls of worms in one of the big compost bins in the middle of the greenhouse.

The rub on Growing Power is that it isn't a business model that could easily be replicated elsewhere, because they depend heavily on various grants (Allen recently was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant) and volunteers. Additionally, Milwaukee allows Growing Power to keep fish and livestock on-site, because agricultural zoning was grandfathered in when Allen acquired the site.

That all may be true, but Allen and Growing Power still set a good example of the potential that unused urban spaces hold, and Growing Power is currently doing outreach, helping people in other cities, like Buffalo, Louisville, and Detroit, to set up similar urban farms. In fact, my tour group included a few guys from Reno to study some of the techniques used at Growing Power in hopes of replicating it back home.

In the course of the week, I'll post some more photos and take a closer look at some of the techniques used at Growing Power. For more about Growing Power, check out this recent New York Times Magazine article about Will Allen.

-Mark