Combat veteran grows victory garden
By Patrick McCallister
For Veteran Voice
Brian Sales is fighting for his country by sowing the seeds of food independence.
The Operation Iraqi Freedom combat veteran sees urban farming as his next national security mission. In January, he’s off to Wisconsin for a month-long urban farming boot camp with the renowned Will Allen, founder of Growing Power.
“What I’m doing now with my career, it’s food security,” Sales said. “A lot of farmers are getting older, and somebody is going to have to take over.”
Sales is the director of operations at Palm City’s Sublime Soil. Dean Lavallee, owner of Park Avenue BBQ Grille, started the not-for-profit about seven years ago with a mission to completely eliminate landfill waste from his seven restaurants.
Sublime Soil is involved in numerous recycling — what Sales and Lavallee call “upcycling” — projects, but the biggest is vermiculture. That’s a fancy word for worm farming.