Food Freedom Milwaukee

04/25/2026

Want to do something for Earth Day last minute? Join us in working with a community garden-a couple hours of your labor makes a huge difference in getting a community garden ready to grow food!

40th and Florist Garden: 10am-2pm

Fratney and Auer Garden: noon to 2.

We Got This, 9th st, north of Burleigh, 2-4

Also we are giving out free seeds!

04/23/2026

The math stopped working for some farmers. Corn and soy prices swing too wildly. The inputs keep climbing. You plant a field and hope you break even.
So the USDA started offering a different deal. Convert marginal cropland to prairie through CP43 prairie strips, and they'll cover your costs. The program runs through 2028 with $3.1 billion on the table. Farmers are taking it.
Illinois alone has already enrolled 7,966 acres. That's nearly 8,000 acres of cornfield turning into milkw**d, blazing star, and big bluestem. The strips run through active fields or replace corner patches that never yielded much anyway.
Monarchs get nectar corridors and host plants. Farmers get stable payments instead of gambling on commodity markets every spring. The soil gets held in place instead of washing into the Mississippi after every heavy rain.
Forty thousand acres nationwide are converting. It's rare when conservation and farm economics line up this cleanly. Prairie strips do both. You don't have to abandon farming to make room for habitat. You just stop fighting the marginal land and let it work for you instead of against you.
The monarchs flying through the Midwest this summer will notice the difference. So will the soil. And so will the farmers who sleep better knowing their paycheck doesn't depend on the Chicago Board of Trade.

04/19/2026

Your HOA just became legally required to kill your lawn.
Nevada passed the most aggressive turf prohibition in American history, and it specifically targets the Las Vegas valley where 31 million square feet of grass must die. Not suggested. Not incentivized. Mandated. The "HOA Entrance" sign in this photo now represents the gatekeeper of ecological compliance rather than aesthetic enforcement.
The law defines "non-functional turf" with brutal clarity. If grass exists purely for decoration between sidewalks and streets, in median strips, or in front of commercial buildings where no one plays on it, it must convert to desert natives. The yellow blooms you see here are desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata) and brittlebush (Encelia farinosa)—plants that survive on 4 inches of annual rainfall instead of the 40 inches required to keep Kentucky bluegrass alive in 110-degree heat.
Landscape contractors are scrambling. The conversion deadline is moving faster than the drought. HOAs that spent decades fining homeowners for "messy" yards with native plants are now required to install those same plants. The megadrought didn't just change water availability—it killed an entire industry's business model.
The irrigation lines in this photo are for establishment only. Three years from now, this landscape survives on sky water alone. Vegas is buying back its desert identity one dead lawn at a time.
Would you miss the grass if your neighborhood looked like this instead? Or is the green lawn so ingrained in your definition of "nice area" that this looks like abandonment?

04/14/2026

Iowa farmland looks different from the sky now. Row after row of corn still dominates, but between those rows—mandated by state law—ten-foot strips of prairie are establishing. Purple milkw**d (Asclepias purpurascens). Wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa). Big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii). The Monarch butterfly pipeline just got legally guaranteed across every acre of state-managed farmland, whether farmers support it or not.
This mandate breaks a century of agricultural precedent. Iowa State University's STRIPS research proved years ago that prairie strips cut sediment loss by 95% and nitrogen runoff by 85%, but adoption was voluntary and slow. Now it's compulsory on state land. Ten feet of native habitat between corn rows—wide enough to support breeding Monarch populations (Danaus plexippus) and native bee forage, functioning as ecological stepping stones across landscapes that were previously dead zones.
The ten-foot specification matters. That's not a w**d buffer—it's a habitat corridor connecting remnant prairies. During heavy rains, these strips filter topsoil and nutrients before they hit waterways. The law makes ecological function as mandatory as soil testing.
Does your state have anything this aggressive in the pipeline? Or are you watching agricultural policy treat pollinator habitat as optional landscaping while Iowa treats it as critical infrastructure? Tell me what you'd mandate in your county if you had the pen.

04/13/2026

04/11/2026

04/11/2026

Just had the 1st Elderberry Summit, where around a dozen community gardens are represented by garden leaders for good food, sharing and gathering of resources and making plans to grow successfully this year. I’m grateful to be connected to so many amazing people also doing this work in their own ways. We had Mr Dye’s Purple Monster sweet potato pie, very purple, and my vegetable soup, and Alex’s Kuumba smoothies. Want to be part of the Food Freedom Garden Volunteers or get a bed in a garden? Let me know!