The Oko Farms Aquaponics Education Center located at 104 Moore Street, Brooklyn. It is the only outdoor aquaponics farm in New York City. The farm was established in 2013 and serves as a production, research and education farm. It’s an incredibly interesting and fun place to be, and they’re expanding to another site in Weeksville soon.
Their stated mission is twofold:
1.Practice and promote aquaponics as a sustainable farming method that mitigates the impact of climate change, and increases food security for New York City.
2. Spread the knowledge and skills required to practice aquaponics farming by educating children and adults of all racial and socio-economic backgrounds.
A little primer from The Aquaponic Source website in case you’re not sure what aquaponics is. I wasn’t until I visited Oko Farms!
Many definitions of aquaponics recognize the ‘ponics’ part of this word for hydroponics which is growing plants in water with a soil-less media. Literally speaking, Aquaponics is putting fish to work. It just so happens that the work those fish do (eating and producing waste), is the perfect fertilizer for growing plants. Aquaponics represents the relationship between water, aquatic life, bacteria, nutrient dynamics, and plants which grow together in waterways all over the world. Taking cues from nature, aquaponics harnesses the power of bio-integrating these individual components: Exchanging the waste by-product from the fish as a food for the bacteria, to be converted into a perfect fertilizer for the plants, to return the water in a clean and safe form to the fish.
The Aquaponic Source
I visited Oko farms at the end of 2016 interview the founder and director, Yemi Amu, for a podcast I made called ‘Maeve in America: Immigration IRL.’ This was a podcast about immigrants, in our own voices. Yemi featured in “The Yemi Episode: Coming To America” where we discussed her immigration from Lagos, Nigeria to New York City as a teenager, her eating disorder, and her path to becoming one of the city’s leading aquaponics experts and a committed educator. Thinking on it now, I wonder if disordered eating intersects with climate injustice in that colonialism and capitalism contribute massively to both. In striving for some impossible idea of constant growth and perfection, we harm what already serves us well and keeps us alive: our bodies in the former, and the latter, the planet.
Of the Climate Action Lab videos we watched, one of the participants really stood out to me. Saara Nafici from Value Added Farms in Red Hook, Brooklyn spoke about that two site urban farm project as a “space of joy” for the young people that work there, what the Lab summarizes as “providing a kind of collective psychic and spiritual sustenance in tandem with the healthy products grown and distributed by the farms themselves.”
Oko Farms echoes this message, that joy is an important part of their work, saying in a recent post about growing jute:
“It is a great opportunity to be able to grow food that sparks joy in people, connects them to home, and reflect our diverse food cultures.”
Oko Farms has had a vigorous response to the recent shifts in the Black Lives Matter movement, using their social media to support and expand on the BLM message. This includes educational posts about Juneteenth as well as fundraising and distributing funds to pertinent black organizations and individuals, like ‘Gardens Not Guns’ with the goal of getting money directly into the hands of BIPOC land stewards, healers, community gardens and mutual aid organizations.
This summer the farm is largely closed to visitors due to COVID-19, meaning no workshops or tours like they usually host, but they still harvest and sell food at local Brooklyn food markets.
The best place to follow them right now is Instagram.
