Last weekend the State Fair Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, played host to Growing Power’s National-International Urban & Small Farm Conference. The conference was to bring farmers, educators, politicians, urban planners, chefs, nutritionists, and medical professionals together to share ideas and spark a good food revolution. With 200 speakers flying in from as far as South Africa and the Netherlands, the conference focused on building sustainable communities around food issues and showcased the leadership role that Milwaukee has taken in urban agriculture.
photo credit: Molly Theobald
Some of the more local speakers included Will Allen, CEO and founder of Growing Power, an urban farm and community food center in Milwaukee and world leader on agriculture and food policy, and Judith Palfrey, director of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The conference aimed to cover a variety of topics for its over 1,000 participants such as successful farm-to-school initiatives, renewable energy, how to convert vacant and surplus properties in cities into urban gardens that will produce food year-round.
Prepared by Amanda Stone, Nourishing the Planet’s Communications Assistant.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
