Brooklyn-based Oko Farms was recently awarded a grant from Slow Food USA. Below, we discuss aquaponics, food security, and sustainability with founder and director, Yemi Amu.

Oko Urban Farms (or Oko Farms, for short), is New York City’s only aquaponic farm and education facility. The Brooklyn-based establishment “serves primarily as an outdoor classroom,” explains Yemi Amu, its founder and director. Additionally, Oko Farms produces vegetables and fish for consumption, provides online education, and offers aquaponics design and consultation services.

The farm’s current outpost in East Williamsburg provides hands-on education and nutritious, clean, and fairly-produced food to vulnerable communities in New York City—and while education is the core of the farm, for Amu, the mission is all about access.

In support of this work amid the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 crisis, Slow Food USA awarded Oko Farms with a grant through the second round of its National Resilience Fund alongside 14 other organizations to give direct financial support to vital businesses and workers in community-based food systems. The grant will assist in the establishment of a second farm site, where the team plans to expand to year-round food production, operate a farmer’s market, and increase both the variety and volume of educational and entrepreneurial programming.

KNOWLEDGE DOESN’T ALWAYS EQUAL POWER

“Knowledge isn’t always what helps—you could know that you should eat vegetables, but that doesn’t mean you are actually going to incorporate vegetables into your diet,” Amu explains. “Grad school was extremely helpful in understanding what the barriers were, and one of the barriers that became increasingly clear was access to healthy foods.”

After completing both culinary and holistic nutritional education programs, Amu took charge of daily nourishment and nutrition education for 40 adults with mental health conditions in a non-profit housing facility. While preparing healthy meals for residents, she started thinking more about nutritional behavior and what could lead to the healthful transformation of dietary lifestyles.

For Amu, dietary transformation requires that healthy foods be affordable, close and familiar—and the question of access to nutritious food in specific communities leads to an important distinction:

“The term food desert definitely does not apply in most neighborhoods in New York City that I both live and work in,” she explains.”There’s a lot of food. [But] in food swamps, there’s junk food everywhere, and it’s accessible. What is expensive and difficult to come by are vegetables and fruit.”

With this in mind, she and a small group of colleagues organized a rooftop farm to provide the residents of the facility with sustainable and easy-to-access fresh, organic produce. There, a community volunteer introduced Amu to aquaponic farming and she was struck by both the amount of water conserved in the process, as well as its potential to provide affordable proteins to residents.

A PERMACULTURE APPROACH TO FOOD

In this same spirit of education and access, Amu established Oko Farms in 2013, which spans 2,500 square feet on Moore Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Oko is the Yoruba word for “farm” and growing vegetables familiar to West African, Caribbean and Middle Eastern cuisine is just one way that it distinguishes itself from other aquaponics operations. Eschewing high-tech models, Oko Farms draws inspiration from ancient Mexican and Peruvian systems, as well as Thai models of traditional rice production:

“We’re one of the few, maybe the only, aquaponics system that I know that is really focused more on a permaculture approach to food. In our practice of aquaponics itself, we do take inspiration from a lot of the different, more ancient practices that combined both soil and aquaculture,” Amu explains.“We look at that integrated approach to farming rather than the indoor high-tech approach to food production.”

Unlike other aquaponics operations that use high-tech indoor systems to maximize leafy green production, Oko Farms intends to discover what possibilities exist for growing more diverse and nutritious products familiar to the community and approach decisions around decisions on what to grow based on what the community is most likely to be excited about. Here, culturally appropriate equates to familiarity, which, when combined with access and education, can fuel positive change in nutritional behavior, Amu shared.

Oko Farms grows several grains (rice, millet sorghum), fresh herbs (lemongrass, basil, mint, lemon balm, cilantro, bergamot) and a variety of vegetables (standards like tatsoi, cabbage, kale, peas, peppers, and chilis, as well as West African products like molokhia, lagos spinach, and scent leaf).

To keep this system going and fertilize the plants through turning waste into nitrates, fish are the primary denizens of the loop, consuming a mixture of insects, leafy greens grown on the farm (watercress is their favorite), black soldier fly larvae, and fish food pellets sourced from domestic suppliers. The ornamental fish are goldfish and koi, while the edible fish change seasonally including catfish, bluegill, tilapia, crawfish, and prawns—all with enough space and clean water to carry out their natural behaviors in a comfortable environment, including measures for disease prevention and stress management.

“THE BEES LOVE US”

Though the farm is not certified organic, Amu says that the farming practices they use follow similar principles—meaning no chemical fertilizers, nutrients, or pesticides. To control insect populations, the farmers use neem oil, encourage natural predators, and remove pests from plants by hand:

“We are as organic as possible because the system actually requires it, [because] the fish are really sensitive,” Amu explains. “Anything that goes in that water must be taken up by the plants or the fish. So if you put anything in there that is inorganic, it could harm your fish or the microbes the system depends on.”

Fresh water is an increasingly precious resource, and its conservation is one of aquaponic farming’s many compelling attributes. Although aquaponics makes use of a closed water loop, the system itself interacts, just like any other farm, with the world around it.

Dragonflies come to lay larvae on the water and provide a snack for the fish, while also helping to keep mosquitoes at bay. Thieving birds attempt to thresh grain and nibble greens while bees come to work. “The bees love us. We have a really diverse range of pollinators that show up on the farm because we have water,” says Amu. This integrated approach not only improves nutrition in the community, but fosters environmental health.

COVID-ERA CLASSROOM AND BEYOND

In 2020, the school groups and visitors that would normally have gathered in the outdoor classroom were absent as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. Still, Oko Farms found that the demand for knowledge about food production increased during this time, and the production aspect of the farm faced urgent new pressure to feed a community with an increased concern for nutritional health:

“The pandemic inspired people to demand healthier food options,” Amu explains. “On the one hand, people wanted more food. On the other hand, people got more interested in knowledge about food production and growing food for themselves.”

The farm pivoted to an increased production model and an online-heavy programming schedule to meet both the hunger for knowledge and the very immediate need to address food shortages in low-income communities, including the one in which the farm sits. The farm was able to donate produce to local pantries, take grains and produce directly to the community at farmer’s markets, as well participate in subscription-based farm share programs.

Though there are limits to a virtual farming education, Amu says that through the virtual programming they were able to reach more people around the world than ever before. In their new site, the farm will focus on year-round operations and continue to be an outdoor classroom. They will also increase the variety and quantity of virtual classes they conduct.

As we all know after more than a year of social distancing, sometimes there’s just no substitute for in-person experiences—so we must be patient. Oko Farms will identify their second location and begin construction this spring, if all goes according to plan amid the pandemic—and looks forward to welcoming people back into their spaces when it is safe to do so.

Written by James Mather, Slow Food NYC Volunteer