For the fun of it, Hubby decided to try “Arena Driving” with the boys. Ann Miles of the Carriage Barn (Newton, NH) donated an “Introduction to Arena Driving” clinic spot to the Granite State Carriage Assoc.’s Annual fundraising Auction back in March. Hubby was the winning bidder– we thought we’d try something new, and support the GSCA at the same time.
But then the “Introductory” clinic got cancelled so the Carriage Barn said we could come to the first “Trial,” which is an actual competition. Though we had never tried dressage driving before, in fact we have never even practiced any serious “dressage” driving, OR obstacles, we were assured it was very low-key and beginner level so we figured “what the heck” and arranged to go.
Following is an amusing tale of how NOT to go into your first Arena Driving Trial!
For the 3 days before the ADT, we had the boys camping and driving at GSCA’s Chocorua Drive/Ride. On Saturday we got some much-needed coaching from Laurie, VP of Planning for GSCA, as to what an ADT consisted of. On Saturday Hubby practiced a few circles in the camping field, taking them past an open umbrella, a lounge chair and a utility table turned on its side. That was the extent of our dressage and obstacle “training.” (Actually, each of them have had a few turns between joint compound buckets in their singles training, practicing maneuvering.)
So on the Sunday of the Trial, we learned that none of the 3 tests Hubby had memorized were the ones being used, so in the parking lot at the Carriage Barn he memorized his fourth “pattern” for the actual Test. There was no practice drive either because we were running late as it turned out and had to go into the ring!
“Arena” driving is so named because it is done in an arena or ring which is smaller than a full-size dressage ring for driving (which would be 40×80 metres.) The ADT test is modified for a smaller arena. It consists of trotting and walking, circling, straights and diagonals, with changes of gait at specified points, and this test had one place where Hubby was to drive one-handed for a few strides.
In this driven Dressage Test, as in ridden dressage, the horses are scored by a judge on such things as impulsion (energy going forward), relaxation, willingness to take direction from the driver, rhythm and steadiness of pace, smoothness of transitions (gait changes), and, for a pair, how well they work together as a team.
These are all things which require practice and fine-tuning for the driver and horses to learn. These are things which do not get practiced by our boys in a ring or arena. On our driving excursions, they get real world practice on roads and trails, which do not have so many circles. What little training we do is in a field on uneven surfaces. We do not have a ring or arena in our back yard.
Arena Driving Trial phase 1– driven dressage at its worst! (Well maybe not its VERY worst, Hubby DID remember the pattern!)
Our dressage phase of the ADT was successful in that Hubby remembered the pattern and didn’t go “off course.” Comments by the judge on our test score told us our horses needed “more impulsion,” to be “rounder” and more “together as a pair,” and to have “smoother” transitions. This was all as I expected it would be. Our score was well below average. Should work on that stuff in advance if you wanna do this kind of thing!
The judge told us he liked our “turnout” (our carriage and what we and the horses were wearing.) He was being quite kind! He coached dad on the proper way that a man is supposed to salute the judge, by doffing his hat. He suggested we lengthen our pole at least 8 inches, and raise the boys’ nosebands higher. (We have never been too concerned with clamping their mouths shut but that is “proper” for better dressage control I think.)
So– onward and upward to the second phase, the Cones course. We could only go up from where we stood so far!
Lunch break! Are we done yet??
The Cones course is done for speed (supposedly) and you drive the horses between a series of cone pairs (gates) in numbered order, with a whiffle ball on top of each cone which is a dead giveaway if you bump one with a horse or a wheel. (Usually they are tennis balls I think.) There were 10 gates and the driver (and groom/navigator– ME!) gets to see and walk the course on foot ahead of time. You are supposed to plan your route and especially to note where there are tight turns to get from one gate to the next.
At this time, I need to mention that our competition was all single horses, put to either 2-wheeled carts or a couple to small 4-wheeled marathon carts. About half of the competitors were MINI horses pulling mini-carts! Although they were in their own division, the cones were not moved any closer together for their size– they did the same course WE had to do!
One of the other competitors– a ringer if I ever saw one!
Lo and behold, Hubby went around mostly trotting, having to slow to walk for our very tight turns, and got through the first 7 gates without hitting any cone or dislodging a whiffle ball, which would have meant penalty points. My job as groom was to keep quiet in the rear seat. That was tough!
Then, just as the boys were starting along the end wall where the entry door was (which was almost shut), a man stuck his head into the arena door to see us better, right in front of Glendale who was a bit jumpy anyway just from being inside this strange confined space, and of course Glen startled and jumped sideways pushing Gilford, causing a cone knockdown in Gate 8.
Then we were too out of line to make Gate 9 cleanly and tipped the ball off one of those cones too. The final Gate 10 was clean. We were sorta ripped at the dude who should have had more sense– you don’t see him in the video but all poor Glendale saw was a head suddenly appearing out of a wall right in front of him!!
Red on right! Coursing through the cones cleanly, except for the unplanned dodging of the appearing head at Gate 8… almost only counts in horseshoes!
Oh well, on to phase 3, the Obstacle course.
Practicing outside for the Obstacle course, showing the boys some trash cans and funny-looking jumps to trot tight turns around. Funny how they seem to have plenty of impulsion when they are outside…
We had been told that the “Obstacles” would consist of upside-down trash cans to maneuver between. We were supposed to go through them in A-B-C order, two different obstacles. Time starts and stops when we pass between the white cones in the middle. Each driver got two turns, I suppose they took the best score; this phase is also timed and can be trotted as fast as manageable. Which was not fast at all for our large rig… LOL!
But, having seen this course in advance as well, Hubby did pretty fine on round one, taking a couple of U-turns which were remarkable. On one turn Glendale side-kicked at his brother because he felt like Gil was pushing on him too much. The trash cans turned out to be embellished with giant frisbees and swim noodles, and decorated with a pony cart full of stuffed animals. The boys gave these very little notice… maybe by then they were too pooped to pay attention to minor details.
This is our second Obstacle round; sadly, on the last obstacle, Hubby was distracted by something (senior moment?) and went through Gate B first, therefore was off course. I tried too late to warn him (not knowing if I was still supposed to be keeping quiet or not!) He circled around and redid things A-B-C but our time was certainly way long by then.
If we had known the rules of driving trials, we COULD have legally backed OUT of Gate B without penalty and reentered at Gate A. The Gate is not counted until your rear axle crosses the gate line, but what did WE know! (That’s of course IF we’d been able to back them up that far… they DO back but it’s not something we practice much!)
Thanks in part to a frisbee toss at the end, where Hubby threw the giant frisbee the furthest and earned some bonus points, we actually came away with a fourth place ribbon. Fourth out of five I think, but still… considering that this Trial was our INTRODUCTION to Arena Driving, AND we drove the only pair– not too bad I’d say!
Fourth place! Who would believe?
Thanks to Ann Miles and the Carriage Barn for giving the driving community– both young and old– the opportunity to try something new and fun! Will we do it again?? Stay tuned!
July 17 was the Granite State Carriage Assoc. drive/ride in Tamworth NH. This was a 3-4 day event. Horse camping was in a private field looking out to Mt. Chocorua, and driving was on lovely dirt roads and woods trails in the foothills of the Sandwich mountain range.
1-The view of Mt. Chocorua from our campground
2-Camp sweet home
We went on a Thursday and returned home on Sat. because we had a concert Sat. night and an Arena Driving Trial with the boys on Sunday. We drove a short one Thursday and a longer excursion Friday, about 8 miles… and Saturday we did some light schooling in the field then took a visiting couple from Brazil on a 2-mile drive.
3-Much scurrying around to prepare all these horses!
4-Catching up on the latest…
Our boys encounter a wooden bridge at Chocorua lake which mirrors the mountain peak… Glen tries to jump over it, we U-turn past it and return back across.
This same drive a year ago was our first outing with the boys hitched as a pair (see Pair driving pics from Chocorua NH 08 also Pairs carriage driving in Chocorua NH (videos)). They didn’t seem to remember that they had been over all these trails before– imagine that! Our weather was unusually decent, the rain limiting itself mostly to nighttime.
6-Enjoy the view we had of the Sandwich Range
7-Along the woods trail, Dad and the boys
8-Portrait of a pair!
9-Out on the trail
10-P. giving her horse some R&R after their ride
11-Ponies can be so versatile!
12-Bonding after their fun ride
13-Pink and paint…
14-No love like that between a girl and her horse
15-Thank you my good friend!
16-The girls ham it up with Bob C.
17-Friend Sonja fell in love with her borrowed pony!
18-Hug me!!!
19-Aaahh, such relief when the harness is taken off!
20-One of our cowboy-oriented riders.
21-These are samples of the club’s logo shirts for sale…
This obstacle is a quite narrow wooden plank bridge, only slightly wider than our carriage. Hubby negotiated them over this one handily, despite Glendale’s hesitation.
22-The boys concentrated on relaxing in their downtime (after their bellies were full, of course.)
23-Our last day there we gave a ride to some friends of the landowner, a visiting couple of Brazilians.
This drive was July 12 and a gorgeous day! Lyndeborough, N.H. has a lot of beautiful old farms and pasture land, a country village, and miles of dirt roads to explore by carriage and horseback. (Granite State Carriage Assoc. organized pleasure drive.)
Peaches came along with us, and was very well-behaved in the rear seat. I keep a leash on her for safety, but I hold it and do not tie her into the carriage.
So happy for the sun to be out!
The boys are unperturbed when meeting up with a flatbed trailer. This day we put Glendale in the left (lead) position. It is good for them to mix them up so they don’t get one-sided.
Here we pass a Friesian rider and two miniature horse carts.
Closeup of the lady driving her mini in a mini cart.
Several riders were enjoying the lovely day too!
Friends driving a pair of fjords, newly put together.
Another cart driver on the road.
Pass wide and slow!
Hi from us! Wish you could be here!
Return to the staging area…
The same Friesian rider practicing her mare’s canter and trot, back in the staging area.
Our friends taking care of their fjords after the drive.
Hubby and the boys, Glendale in lead position.
Mini horse and his person, back from their excursion.
Many drivers and riders joined up at lunch time for R & R.
Peaches always knows a dog-lover when she finds one!
When Sonia Sotomayor sits down next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about her qualifications to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, thoughtful observers may do well to reflect that, by certain measures, she shouldn’t be there. That’s because decades ago, in her late teens, Sotomayor faced another important test — the SAT, the traditional route to top-tier placement in our national meritocracy — on which, by her own admission, she didn’t do well. What exactly her test scores were she hasn’t said, but she has revealed that they “were not comparable to that of my colleagues” at Princeton University, where she was admitted as a self-styled “affirmative-action baby.” The fact that she later graduated from Princeton with highest academic honors and went on to reach the upper echelons of her chosen career, the law, speaks well of her intellect, her drive and the discernment of Princeton’s admissions office, but it doesn’t speak well, necessarily, of the conventional, test-based notions of merit that might well have stopped her, had they been strictly applied, before she even got started.
As a product of the same education system that molded Sotomayor (and as a fellow Princeton graduate who took his degree seven years after she did), I would like to think that I know a tiny something about what she and others experienced while trying to scale, percentile by percentile, the ladder of academic and social distinction. I call this group of contemporary strivers — a group that has largely supplanted the moneyed gentry as our country’s governing class — the “Aptocrats,” after the primary trait that we were tested for and which we sought to develop in ourselves as a means of passing those tests. As defined by the institutions responsible for spotting and training America’s brightest youth, this “aptitude” is a curious quality. It doesn’t reflect the knowledge in your head, let alone the wisdom in your soul, but some quotient of promise and raw mental agility thought to be crucial to academic success and, by extension, success in general. All of this makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more aptitude that a young person displays, the more likely it is that she or he will have a chance to win the golden tickets — fine diplomas, elite appointments and so on — that permit you to lead the aptocratic establishment and set the terms by which it operates.
The key aptocratic concept, of course, is fairness. The reason that most thinking Americans consent to our modern procedures for advancement (and the reason some seek to correct their “cultural biases,” in the words of Sotomayor, with policies like affirmative action) is that we esteem the ideal on which they’re based, namely that of equal opportunity. To America’s propertied white male founders, this particular definition of “justice for all” wasn’t uppermost in mind, of course, but to me, as a public-school student in the ’70s concerned with eventually moving to the head of his generational class, it constituted an entire theology. From the first time I raised my hand in kindergarten, eager to prove that I’d memorized my alphabet, to the day I sat down with three sharpened No. 2 pencils to demonstrate my mastery of analogies on the SAT, I held it as self-evident that being created equal was just Step 1 in the process of proving myself somewhat superior. I eagerly gave myself over to this program, because I believed that its principles were just and that any benefits it conferred on me would be deemed legitimate by all, and especially the students I’d surpassed.
Only when I entered Princeton did I start to have doubts about the system that got me there. Some took the form of doubts about myself. My impressive performance on the SATs (whose supposed biases I was blind to, perhaps because I was a middle-class Caucasian and they operated in my favor) didn’t seem to count for much now that I found myself having to absorb volumes upon volumes of information rather than get the right answers on multiple-choice tests. Yes, I had a large vocabulary, and yes, I knew how to deploy it to good effect in classroom discussions and during professors’ office hours, but suddenly my prowess felt slightly fraudulent. Called upon to read whole books, many of them old, obscure and difficult, I discovered that I lacked stamina and insight. The little word puzzles I cut my teeth on were irrelevant to the daunting task of digesting Chaucer and Milton. My solution? I didn’t have one. Like countless college students before and since, I relied for my scholastic survival on a combination of verbal bluster, teacher-pleasing good manners and handy study aids.
While I dished out the high-level baloney that my aptocratic mind excelled at, I looked around at the students who didn’t resemble me in terms of skin color and background and wondered how they were staying afloat at all. As a child of the rural Midwest, I felt decidedly out of place at Princeton among the debonair Eastern prep-school graduates who still, in the early 1980s (just a decade or so after the campus went co-ed) seemed to embody its privileged heritage, so I could scarcely imagine the alienation of these other yet more marginalized students. And while I happened to know that some of them gained admission on special terms meant to make up for their social disadvantages, I didn’t resent them for this. Not at all. Because I came from a geographic region that Princeton hadn’t favored in the past, but which it was now intent on drawing from, I was also a sort of affirmative-action student. What’s more, the poorer and browner of my classmates — particularly the women — seemed to study twice as hard as I did, clocking endless hours in the library and forgoing weekend parties for late-night cram sessions. Maybe their SAT scores were lower than mine, but they ranked higher than I did on the effort scale. And on the bravery scale too.
A system of advancement by aptitude, by statistical measurements of mental acuity, doesn’t concern itself with determination and courage, but if the world were truly fair, it would. This was one of the things I learned at Princeton, along with the lesson that multiple-choice tests don’t predict a student’s grasp of Shakespeare. To judge by her statements about her college days and by her ruling on the use of a vocational examination used to promote firefighters, Sotomayor is also skeptical about one-size-fits-all testing. That’s probably natural, given her experience as an aptocrat who needed help, made the most of it when it was offered and may soon succeed to a position that could allow her to see that others receive it. But what does the American public think?
According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 67 percent of Democrats support affirmative action, while 60 percent of Republicans oppose it. These numbers reflect an old philosophical split over the nature of social justice. Does it consist of devising enlightened rules and applying them equally to everyone or does it entail sometimes modifying those rules when it appears that they treat some of us a bit more equally than others? This argument could go on forever (and has), but there’s a way out of it, I think, which even my most exacting Princeton professors might not find entirely idiotic. The premise of this solution is that all systems that seek to rank human beings according to “merit” — an inherently complex idea — will inevitably fall short of fully accounting for what merit consists of in the real world. As such, these systems, like our Constitution, should be subject to amendment from time to time, since no definition of merit lasts forever.
The orthodox combination of high-school transcripts and SAT scores that allowed me into Princeton wasn’t, I found out after I was admitted, a guarantee of my ability to make the most of its academic offerings. Put simply, I wasted a lot of time there, I engaged in a lot of shoddy, pretentious dodges, and maybe I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Perhaps someone else deserved my spot — someone whose talents weren’t so easily indexed but might have been another Sotomayor. How would I know? And that’s the point: I can’t.
Which is why certain questions of merit and advancement have no definitive answers and, on occasion, ought to be left blank.
We have not put many miles on the boys yet this season due to all the unbelievable rain in June. On record it rained 26 days last month. That’s 4 days it DIDN’T rain! Jeezum crow! I’m just amazed the horses aren’t growing fungus. The gnats have been horrible, and mosquitoes will be too if the rain ever does stop!
We did just have two decent days, July 5 and 6. Sunday July 5 was mostly sunny with only a couple of intermittent showers passing through, so we headed out in the morning. We hitched Glen and Gilford together and swapped places with them from their usual order of go, putting Glen on the left (lead) spot and older brother Gilford on the right.
Looking towards the Belknap range… our horses’ butts seen from a slightly different perspective (when I’m on Willy and not IN the carriage!)
Preparing to cross the highway…
Crossing Rt. 11-A…
First we stop at the Village Store for our Sunday New York Times. Today the manager gave us curb service!
Their momma mare Willy needed exercise too so I rode her, trying to manage some photos and a couple of videos from the saddle. If she didn’t neck rein it would be really difficult for me to hold the camera; fortunately she does and the camera is a handy little point-and-shoot.
Before we got started I did some filing on Willy’s hooves. I had let her hind feet go too long without shaping and didn’t want to ride her with them that way, so I did a lot of rounding of her hoof walls and had to smooth out a couple of spots where her hooves had chipped a little. She’s so good I was able to work on her in her stall without even tying her, using our Hoof Jack with its sling support to hold up each hind foot. I believe she may have a little stiffness in her joints these days, because she needed me to release her foot occasionally to take the bend out of her ankle.
Willy mare was plenty spry when we went out though. When I kept her behind the carriage, she had to be RIGHT behind it about 6 inches back. My technique was to let her smack her nose on the carriage a couple of times to realize she really SHOULD listen to me when I ask her to slow down and back off a little.
When I rode her in front of the carriage, she became very strong and eager to go (she is a leader and a competitive horse and has energy to spare), and I had to use a lot of muscle and a firm grip to hold her to a strong trot at times. I had her in a hackamore because I don’t like having to pull on her mouth when she’s like that. She’s well manageable in a hackamore even though I’m not as strong as I used to be. When my arms got tired I took her behind the carriage again and let her practice rating her pace herself!
Meanwhile Hubby drove the brothers and they had no problem being reversed. We went through Gilford village and did a loop around the neighborhood of maybe 3-4 miles walk and trot (well, only a short little canter or two.) Sadly there are no dirt roads left in town; we were on pavement the whole time, but traffic was pretty light. My knees began to bother me a little by the end; did I mention I’m not getting any younger? Driving really IS easier than riding! We had a fine time and the horses earned their pasture turnout afterwards.
We’ve noticed that “baby” Glendale has not been pestering his brother nearly so much this year when harnessed with him. Glendale at right is in “lead” position and seems comfortable with it. They do however chase each other around a LOT when they’re shut out of the pasture and bored with limited grass!
I reprint this because I feel it’s really important… that there may actually be some kind of answer to America’s industrialized food [and, by extension, health] problems, some small glimmer of hope here.
Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.
It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”
Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.
And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.
With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.
Onward through the hoop houses: rows of beets and chard. Out back: chickens, ducks, heritage turkeys, goats, beehives. While Allen narrated, I nibbled the scenery — spinach, arugula, cilantro.
If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”
Propelled by alarming rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity, by food-safety scares and rising awareness of industrial agriculture’s environmental footprint, the food movement seems finally to have met its moment. First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack have planted organic vegetable gardens. Roof gardens are sprouting nationwide. Community gardens have waiting lists. Seed houses and canning suppliers are oversold.
Allen, too, has achieved a certain momentum for his efforts to bring the good-food movement to the inner city. In the last several years, he has become a darling of the foundation world. In 2005, he received a $100,000 Ford Foundation leadership grant. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation honored Allen with a $500,000 “genius” award. And in May, the Kellogg Foundation gave Allen $400,000 to create jobs in urban agriculture.
Today Allen is the go-to expert on urban farming, and there is a hunger for his knowledge. When I visited Growing Power, Allen was conducting a two-day workshop for 40 people: each paid $325 to learn worm composting, aquaponics construction and other farm skills. “We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen told them, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: as oil prices rise, cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space becomes ever more important. As Allen can’t help reminding us, with a mischievous smile, “Chicago has 77,000 vacant lots.”
Allen led the composting group to a pair of wooden bins and instructed his students to load them with hay. “O.K., you’ve got your carbon,” he said. “Where are you going to get your nitrogen?”
“Food waste,” a young man offered, wiping his brow. Allen pointed him toward a mound of expired asparagus collected from a wholesaler. As the participants layered the materials in a bin, Allen drilled them: “How much of that food is solid versus water weight?” “Why do we water the compost?” The farmers in training hung on every word.
If Allen at times seems a bit weary — he recites his talking points countless times a day — he comes alive when he’s digging, seeding and watering. His body straightens, and his face brightens. “Sitting in my office isn’t a very comfortable thing for me,” he told me later, seated in his office. “I want to be out there doing physical stuff.”
Which includes basic research. Warned by experts that his red wrigglers would freeze during Milwaukee’s long winter, Allen studied the worms for five years, learning their food and shelter preferences. “I’d run my experiments over and over and over — just like an athlete operates.” Then he worked out systems for procuring wood chips from the city and food scraps from markets and wholesalers. Last year, he took in six million pounds of spoiled food, which would otherwise rot in landfills and generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Every four months, he creates another 100,000 pounds of compost, of which he uses a quarter and sells the rest.
Uncannily, Allen makes such efforts sound simple — fun even. When he mentions that animal waste attracts soldier flies, whose larvae make terrific fish and chicken feed, a dozen people start imagining that growing grubs in buckets of manure might be a good project for them too. “Will has a way of persuading people to do things,” Robert Pierce, a farmer in Madison, Wis., told me. “There’s a spirit in how he says things; you want to be part of his community.”
Allen owes part of his Pied Piper success to his striking physicality and part to his athlete’s confidence — he’s easeful in his skin and, when not barking about nitrogen ratios, incongruously gentle. He told me about his life one afternoon as we drove in his truck, which was sticky with soda and dusted with doughnut powder, to Merton, a suburb of Milwaukee where Growing Power leases a 30-acre plot. “My father was a sharecropper in South Carolina,” Allen said. “He was the eldest boy of 13 children, and he never learned to read.” In the 1930s, he moved near Bethesda, Md. “My mother did domestic work, and my father worked as a construction laborer. But he rented a small plot to farm.”
A talented athlete, Allen wasn’t allowed to practice sports until he finished his farm chores. “I had to be in bed early, and I thought, There’s got to be something better than this.” For a while, there was. Allen accepted a basketball scholarship from the University of Miami. There, he married his college sweetheart, Cyndy Bussler. After graduating, he played professionally, briefly in the American Basketball Association in Florida and then for a few seasons in Belgium. In his free time, Allen would drive around the countryside, where he couldn’t help noticing the compost piles.
“I started hanging out with Belgian farmers,” Allen said. “I saw how they did natural farming,” much as his father had. Something clicked in his mind. He asked his team’s management, which provided housing for players, if he could have a place with a garden. Soon he had 25 chickens and was growing the familiar foods of his youth — peas, beans, peanuts — outside Antwerp. “I just had to do it,” he said. “It made me happy to touch the soil.” On holidays, he cooked feasts for his teammates. He gave away a lot of eggs.
After retiring from basketball in 1977, when he was 28, Allen settled with his wife and three children in Oak Creek, just south of Milwaukee, where Cyndy’s family owned some farmland. “No one was using that land, but I had the bug to grow food,” Allen said. As his father did, Allen insisted that his children contribute to the household income. “We went right to the field at the end of the school day and during summer breaks,” recalled his daughter, Erika Allen, who now runs Growing Power’s satellite office in Chicago. “And let’s be clear: This was farm labor, not chores.”
Allen grew food for his family and sold the excess at Milwaukee’s farmers’ markets and in stores. Meanwhile, he worked as a district manager for Kentucky Fried Chicken, where he won sales awards. “It was just a job,” he said. “I was aware it wasn’t the greatest food, but I also knew that people didn’t have a lot of choice about where to eat: there were no sit-down restaurants in that part of the city.”
In 1987, Allen took a job with Procter & Gamble, where he won a marketing award for selling paper goods to supermarkets. “The job was so easy I could do it in half a day,” he says now. That left more time to grow food. By now, Allen was sharing his land with Hmong farmers, with whom he felt some kinship after concluding that white shoppers were spurning their produce at the farmers’ market. Allen was also donating food to a local food pantry. “I didn’t like the idea of people eating all that canned food, that salty stuff.” When he brought in his greens, he said, “it was the No. 1 item selected off that carousel — it was like you couldn’t keep them in.”
After a restructuring in 1993, P&G shifted Allen to analyzing which products sold best in supermarkets. He was good at that too: “I won sales awards six times in one year.”
Driving across his Merton field, Allen smiled. Suddenly, I got it: Allen was a genius at selling — fried chicken, Pampers, arugula, red wrigglers, you name it. He could push his greens into corporate cafeterias, persuade the governor to help finance the construction of an anaerobic digester, wheedle new composting sites from urban landlords, persuade Milwaukee’s school board to buy his produce for its public schools and charm the blind into growing sprouts. (“I was cutting sprouts in the dark one night,” Allen said, “and I realized you don’t need sight to do this.”)
After parking his truck at the field’s edge, Allen made an arthritic beeline for a mound of compost. “Oh, this is good,” he said, digging in with his hands. “Unbelievable.” He saluted a few volunteers, whom he had appointed to pluck shreds of plastic from the compost under the hot noonday sun. He turned to scan the field, dotted with large farm-unfriendly rocks.
The rocks gave me pause: didn’t millions of Americans leave farms for good reason? The work is hard, nature can be cruel and the pay is low; most small farmers work off-farm to make ends meet. The appeal of such labor to people already working low-wage, long-hour jobs — the urban dwellers Allen most wants to reach — is not immediately apparent. And there is something almost fanciful in exhorting a person to grow food when he lives in an apartment or doesn’t have a landlord’s permission to garden on the roof or in an empty lot.
“Not everyone can grow food,” Allen acknowledged. But he offers other ways of engaging with the soil: “You bring 30 people out here, bring the kids and give them good food,” he said, “and picking up those rocks is a community event.”
Of course, if rock picking or worm tending — either here or in a community garden — doesn’t attract his Milwaukee neighbors, it’s easy enough for them to order a market basket or shop at his retail store, which happens to sell fried pork skin as well as collard greens. “Culturally appropriate foods,” Allen calls them. And the doughnuts in his truck? “I’m no purist about food, and I don’t ask anyone else to be,” he said, laughing. “I work 17 hours a day; sometimes I need some sugar!”
This nondogmatic approach may be one of Allen’s most appealing qualities. His essential view is that people do the best they can: if they don’t have any better food choices than KFC, well, O.K. But let’s work on changing that. If they don’t know what to do with okra, Growing Power stands ready to help. And if their great-grandparents were sharecroppers and they have some bad feelings about the farming life, then Allen has something to offer there too: his personal example and workshops geared toward empowering minorities. “African-Americans need more help, and they’re often harder to work with because they’ve been abused and so forth,” Allen said. “But I can break through a lot of that very quickly because a lot of people of color are so proud, so happy to see me leading this kind of movement.”
If there’s no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, says Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms, “we’ve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right — that this is a consumption club for people who’ve traveled to Europe and tasted fine food.”
In 1993, Allen, looking to grow indoors during the winter and to sell food closer to the city, bought the Growing Power property, a derelict plant nursery that was in foreclosure. He had no master plan. “I told the city I’d hire kids and teach them about food systems,” he said. Before long, community and school groups were asking for his help starting gardens. He rarely said no. But after years of laboring on his own and beginning to feel burned out, he agreed to partner with Heifer International, the sustainable-agriculture charity. “They were looking for youth to do urban ag. When they learned I had kids and that I had land, their eyes lit up.” Heifer taught Allen fish and worms, and together they expanded their training programs.
Employing locals to grow food for the hungry on neglected land has an irresistible appeal, but it’s not clear yet whether Growing Power’s model can work elsewhere. “I know how to make money growing food,” Allen asserts. But he’s also got between 30 and 50 employees to pay, which makes those foundation grants — and a grant-writer — essential. Growing Power also relies on large numbers of volunteers. All of which perhaps explains why other urban farmers have not yet replicated Growing Power’s scale or its unique social achievements.
So no, Growing Power isn’t self-sufficient. But neither is industrial agriculture, which relies on price supports and government subsidies. Moreover, industrial farming incurs costs that are paid by society as a whole: the health costs of eating highly processed foods, for example, or water pollution. Nor can Growing Power be compared to other small farms, because it provides so many intangible social benefits to those it reaches. “It’s not operated as a farm,” said Ian Marvy, executive director of Brooklyn’s Added Value farm, which shares many of Growing Power’s core values but produces less food. “It has a social, ecological and economic bottom line.” That said, Marvy says that anyone can replicate Allen’s technical systems — the worm composting and aquaponics — for relatively little money.
Finished with his business in Merton, Allen sang out his truck window to his plastic-picking volunteers, “Don’t y’all work too hard now.” The future farmers laughed. Allen predicts that because of high unemployment and the recent food scares, 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But two million of them will eventually drop out, he said, when the potato bugs arrive or the rain doesn’t cooperate. Still, he was sanguine. “The experience will introduce those folks to what a tomato really tastes like, so next time they’ll buy one at their greenmarket. And when we talk about farm-worker rights, we’ll have more advocates for them.”
At a red light on Silver Spring Drive, Allen stopped and eyed the construction equipment beached in front of a dealership. “Look at that front-end loader,” he said admiringly. “That thing isn’t going to sell.” He shook his head and added: “Maybe we can work something out with them. We could make some nice compost with that.”
Joann Gelinas-Snow and Artie at Gelinas Farm (Pembroke, NH) held a cowboy competition last weekend. This vid was taken and posted by Maddy Gray, who has it on her website at NickerNews.net
The challenges of the cowboy competition…
This looks like fun, Willy would do this! Years back I rode her in a fun trail class or two.
Maddy has a blog as well– more fun horse stuff from Maine at Barn Banter!
My most recent pet portrait has just been finished. She is a black labrador named Zara, lying in the shady grass underneath a blossoming tree, surveying her domain.
Shared here are the painting and some of the stages in its development. A few of the reference photos I used are below, which were provided by the client.
This is Zara’s mixed media portrait, created using Corel Painter’s natural media paintbrush tools and a Wacom digital tablet. For visual effect, I frame her face by the sunlit grass in the background and the tree branches at top. The composition echoes and complements the lines of her body.
Because she is lying in the shade, and because she is a black dog, I add yellow, blue and purple tones in her body to liven up her coloring. These same colors are carried into the rest of the painting to tie it together.
It’s so hard to show the detail in these small websize reproductions…
Detail of the tree blossoms… I kept them suggestive with loose brushwork, using splashed-on diffuse colors behind more defined areas, and contrasting the interplay of sun and shadow. This was so fun to paint!
First roughout sketch in colored pencil and chalk effects
Colors blocked in roughly in pastel chalk textures– the added colors will enliven highlight and shadow areas.
Starting to develop Zara’s head and body with digital watercolor brushes.
Close to finishing, detail refinements to come.
Below are the main photos I used for reference:
Zara lying down
A facial reference shot
Another shot provided by Zara’s owner…
The “Mother’s Day tree” in blossom (it is in bloom on Mother’s Day every year!)
There are more artworks (dogs, horses, cat portraits, horse art prints) on my website portraitswithpets.com
Believe it or not! Some are older breeds, a few are newer cross-bred types which establish themselves as a separate “breed” by starting a breed registry.
