Check Out Alan Powell’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alan Powell

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s I was a professional musician doing sessions, recording with my own band, teaching guitar as ell as songwriting and music theory at NSAI events- all things well in line with my degree from Berklee College of Music. Then an important person in my life was killed, my band broke up, and I needed a change. As it turns out, in the last year of the band’s existence, the drummer and his wife (who were hosting our rehearsals at their house) had joined something called a “CSA”. That was a new concept to me!
The farmer whose CSA they had joined was Jeff Poppen, The Barefoot Farmer, who is a bit of a local celebrity and was at the forefront of the CSA movement in TN. He was giving them so much produce each week that they could not eat through it before the next CSA pick up. Knowing I was a vegetarian who was always trying to eat healthy, the generously offered me any CSA veg left over from the week before. I gratefully accepted, it was free food every week. Tasty food!
It did not take long to feel more energetic, more vital, and this was from eating food grown over a week before, which I naively at the time thought made it “old”, or at least less fresh than what was at the big grocery stores. I needed to understand how this “old” food was making me feel so good, so when the next CSA season started, the drummer, his wife, and I, split a CSA share, and I volunteered to assist with the setup and distribution at the CSA site to try and get to the bottom of what was so different about this food. Of course I met Jeff, and we got to be friends. I was taking on a bigger and bigger role at the CSA pickups, and so when the woman who was running them chose to stop and focus on her new marriage, I was asked if I wanted more responsibility. I said yes. The next season, I was in charge of the pickup site, and when Jeff and his girlfriend broke up a little ways into to season, I began to run the whole show.
Jeff is notorious for being generous, and so he would send in more food than his members could take. He told me to do whatever I wanted with the leftovers, but since the farm never had the budget to pay me properly for the work I was doing, Jeff suggested I sell at least some of it to bring my salary up to a reasonable level. I also made arrangements with at least one charity a season to take a get some of the extras to people in need. At the same time, our members wanted things Jeff’s farm did not offer, like kimchi, raw food creations, salsa, blueberries, fresh ricotta cheese, local honey, eggs, and more. I started engaging with other local farmers to offer their products at our CSA like a mini farmer’s market at our CSA pickup site. I built the membership up from about 50 when I first got involved, to a high of about 185 members at peak. Then something important happened.
Jeff was doing farm consulting as a side gig, and had just been hired by a couple in Bells Bend to look into turning some of their land into a working farm. This initiative was born out of the community’s fight against the massive Maytown Center development in the early 2000’s, that fortunately got defeated, preserving the last swath of uninterrupted rural land in Davidson Country. As soon as they wanted to discuss distribution and how to build a CSA, Jeff brought me in and I ended up running both CSA’s that season. Now I was dealing with more excess food than ever, and needed a plan to do something with it. In that week’s paper was a chef profile of the head chef at the Capitol Grille, Tyler Brown, who was talking about how much he loved supporting local food, and that he had Jeff Poppen’s book on his nightstand. He was my first call. He not only began purchasing leftover produce from me for the restaurant, we and his wife joined the CSA for their family. It was clear to me that while CSA’s and farmer’s markets had become commonplace and consumers now had good access to local food, the gap, the missing piece, was the wholesale piece to businesses that prepare food for a living- restaurants, caterers, private chefs, hotels, grocery stores, etc.
With Jeff being at the forefront of the local food movement and having the oldest organic farm in the state (it’s actually biodynamic, several steps beyond organic) word started getting around to chefs that they could buy high quality, ultra fresh local produce from me, and to farms that I was helping maximize farm sales and minimize waste, so I started getting asked to help more farms and sell to more restaurants. This was all from my land line with a pen and a pad of paper. I was driving the food around in my Subaru. I would show up at the back door of restaurants with my car jam packed full of fresh vegetables, they would buy what they wanted and I’d move on.
Then a woman right out of college moved to town looking to start a “food hub”, another new term for me at the time, and began asking both farmers and chefs around town who she should partner up with to start this project, and everyone gave her my name. Her name was Sarah Johnson, and after helping launch the more formal business known as Nashville Grown, getting us a grant, and getting us our 501c3 status, she went to MIT to pursue a masters and we literally never heard from her again, but NG was now a real business with a refrigerated truck, a walkin cooler at the Nashville Farmer’s Market on Rosa Parks, and an online ordering system. That was in 2012.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Is any road smooth? I am in no way a normal business person, I come at things from a very different perspective. The biggest struggle for me was that prior to starting NG, my life was a mismatch of unusual income streams coming from my various musical pursuits (including playing classical guitar at wedding and private events), some public speaking (I also became a Toastmaster) and classes on other things I became good at, like food preservation methods and some primitive skills (edible plant walks are very popular when I give them). So going from a life where I got to constantly use my varied skill sets and knowledge on diverse topics, with such varied pursuits, I was suddenly doing the same things every day.
The business struggles were more about growth, how to do it without sacrificing my high standards, how to navigate a food safety system designed to mitigate problems born of an industrial food system operating in a way I reject and want to change? In other words, how do I reinvent the wheel? It turns out, being a thoroughly unconventional businessman and thinker makes people accustomed to the normal motivations, goals, and trajectories of American business, resistant to many of my ideas. I find it interesting that many people praise my unconventional approach, but then want me to become more conventional because that’s what they are used to. The pressure for me to be like everyone else despite having built this by doing things like no one else, is a big struggle for me.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Starting with the music. I have recorded two albums, the first under my name “Alan Powell”, titled “Seeds” (if you look this up, be aware there is another Alan Powell who spells his name the same, lives in Nashville, and has a music and acting career. He is a Christian artist, I am not). My second album was with my band Liquid Village and is called “All At Once”. I am in the process of recording a third album now. I am a highly versatile guitarist who can play almost any style at the professional level. My songwriting is a wild mix of genres.
I designed my own teaching system for guitar, which proved to be very effective. I am not currently teaching guitar, but I still pass around my materials when asked. Several of my past students have made careers in music. Especially when it comes to music theory and understanding the guitar neck, I am able to move people forward at a much faster rate than conventional methods. I have also taught banjo, bass, and mandolin, though in reality I remain a guitar player at heart.
My studies of Native American skills and philosophy have allowed me to develop skill sets largely lost to humanity. I mentioned plant walk in an earlier response, but I also teach flintknapping, cordage (fiber technology), and bow drill for starting fires. I will be offering some through Nature Explorers this spring and fall. For several years my workshops on edible plants were the most popular at the Centennial Park Earth Day celebrations. I have also spoken at colleges and churches, primitive skills gatherings, and on TV shows. I recently spoke as a keynote at Cheekwood for their annual Herb Society event. I am able to use Nashville Grown as a platform to offer chefs food I forage from the wild.
With all the locally farmed food I had access to, preserving it became important both to minimize waste and to keep from relying on industrial foods for the winter. So people started hiring me to teach classes on how to preserve foods, which refers to freezing, dehydrating, canning, and fermenting.

What were you like growing up?
I believe had I been born in 2000, I would have been diagnosed with both ADHD and some form of autism. As a child, focus was very hard for me. In school I was usually bored, having understood what the teacher was trying to teach us in the first explanation, then having to wait as my fellow students got it over the course of 2 more explanations over the next half of the class. So I talked in class, cracked jokes, and was disruptive. It was not until college that I finally felt challenged and was able to keep my focus.
My parents went through a contentious separation when I was 6 that lasted until their actual divorce at 11. I was unhappy. The first personal computers showed up when I was in high school and I thought that was going to be my path at first.
Then I found guitar at age 15 as a fill in course in school. It completely changed my life. Suddenly I had focus I had never known before. I had a passion and a path forward. I went from nearly failing out of high school despite testing as highly intelligent, to graduating music college Cum Laude. Turns out finding oneself and pursuing a career where you passion lies is not as dumb as the “sensible” adults of my youth, none of whom were happy with their own lives, taught me. I recall being asked repeatedly, “if music does not work for you, what will you fall back on?” I couldn’t have known the answer back then, but it turns out music is not just one thing, and I fell back to other parts of music besides performing. And no one could have predicted my foray into primitive skills and the beneficial impact on my awareness and understanding of the natural world, one fo the things that keeps me sane in this insane world of ours.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nashvillegrown.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realnashvillegrown/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nashvillegrown
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/dpnKVNk8reI
• Other: https://nashvillegrown.localfoodmarketplace.com/