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.”

Image Will Allen Credit... Nigel Parry for The New York Times

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.”