There's lots of barriers to why
people are not getting food in the city.
I think the biggest barrier is the knowledge.
Schools are not teaching it.
It's not part of our basic education.
Most people don't have yards.
So that's another barrier that people have to cross, is
“Yes, I'm interested in food, but now do I even have the space?”
It is human right to be able
to grow food for yourself.
To me, that's what aquaponics represents.
This power and ability to feed yourself regardless of what
your circumstances are.
Morning.
Stop that.
Biting my finger, stop.
I'm just checking the water quality before I feed them.
This is the ammonia here.
If there's too much ammonia,
that's like literally waste in the water, then I won't feed them.
So I do that every morning
so that we know
as soon as we get
started that we have what we need to make the aquaponics system
essentially work.
So aquaponics can be defined in a lot of different ways.
I like to define it as a multi-species approach
to growing food in water.
And what you're doing is raising fish and using that fish waste
water as a food source for both microbe and plants.
So the three species in an aquaponics system are fish,
plants, and microorganisms.
Microorganisms exist everywhere on earth.
In us, on us, everywhere.
We're breathing them in right now.
They also exist in water.
What they do is break down organic matter
and turn it into something useful in aquatic environments.
They take that fish waste
that would otherwise kill the fish, and they turn it into nutrients,
nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium,
all of that that plants are able to take up.
And as soon as the plants take up all of that,
the water is now clean for the fish.
And it's called an aquaponics cycle.
So fish produce waste, that’s the ammonia that we were looking at.
The microbes break down the fish waste and then produce
their own waste as a byproduct, which is nitrate.
And then the plants take up the nitrates through their roots,
and then in return, the water is clean for the fish.
So it's a multi-species approach to food production,
and it's also this symbiotic, reciprocal relationship
between fish, plants, and microbes.
So the aquaponics cycle
essentially begins by feeding your fish.
And that water you see coming out over there, that's water
that's actually been filtered by plant roots
and coming back into the fish tank.
And that water leads through that pipe here.
Some of the actual physical solids of the poop
settles here and then the rest of the water flows outside.
So you have a constant loop, fish tanks out to grow beds,
into the pumps, back to fish tank, out to grow beds.
And I'll walk you outside so that you can see.
Hey guys, here you go.
So we call this our deep water bed.
A deep water bed is just a pool of water,
typically 8 to 12 inches deep,
where the roots are submerged in water
and the rest of the plant is growing above.
And these boards here are just like floating installation.
And those microbes I was telling you about,
they are all over the system.
Same thing you would have in soil.
That's what healthy soil is.
Healthy soil is just soil that's full of microbes.
That's what compost is.
We're just creating compost constantly, except it’s liquid compost.
But this is just
one of the different ways you can grow plants in aquaponics.
It doesn't matter how you do it.
It's up to your own creativity, which is why I love it.
And there's so many places where you can incorporate it.
In classrooms, in basements, in apartment buildings, in your backyard.
And you never have to worry about watering the plants.
I cannot overestimate how great that is.
As long as you have a container to hold your fish,
and a container to hold your plants,
and you’re able to move your water from your fish
tank to your plant roots, you have aquaponics.
It's that simple and it's that basic,
and literally anybody can do it.
When I tell people I’m a farmer-
I actually don't like telling people I'm a farmer,
because I always get the, “What?”
“How?”
“Where?”
“In Brooklyn? No.”
Aquaponics is often presented
as this high technology, controlled environment,
expensive system.
But there are people all around the world
who are using it to address real hunger and real crisis.
And it does play a role.
It plays a role in New York City
where accessing fresh food is still a huge barrier
for the average person, especially for black and brown communities.
It doesn't make sense.
Low income neighborhoods are just inundated with junk food.
And then those who live in
higher income environments are able to access fresh fruits
and vegetables.
So it creates this horrible, vicious cycle,
like the foundation of a healthy life is a good diet.
We can't get around that.
We at Oko Farms work really hard
to eliminate those barriers
by actually creating access to the healthy food options.
So we donate almost 50% of what we grow,
but we are the only aquaponics farmers
in New York City that is not just growing food for the public,
but actively
engaging the public in conversation around food production.
We want people to come in and be like, “This is really cool.
Can I do it?” And not just, “Can I do it?”
“How can I do it?”
I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria,
a city of 20 million plus people.
And I moved to New York City in 1996.
I was 16 years old.
In Nigeria, our diets are just
rooted in fruits and vegetables, and I took that for granted.
When I moved here.
I was so excited
by all of the junk food.
I was excited to go to McDonald's.
And it wasn't until I was in college that I started to realize,
Oh, actually this is not normal.
So I set out wanting to be an nutrition educator,
and farming grew out of that.
I never set out to be a farmer.
I was just running into a lot of frustrations with my clients
being able to afford healthy food options.
And that's how my journey of growing food started.
It was just putting a couple of plants on the roof, and that's it.
I was just thrown into food production.
I am thinning out
some of these plants here.
We have several growing in here.
I want to thin them out,
but before I do that, I want to create more of these blocks.
That's what I'm doing here, which believe it or not, this is not soil.
People always are like, “What do you mean it's not soil?”
It’s actually not.
It's a soil substitute.
And we start all of our seeds in it.
This actually is called waterleaf, or efo gbure.
It's a vegetable that's popular in Nigeria.
It’s a leafy green.
We make soups with it, they’re more like stews.
When I think about what to grow in the aquaponics system versus
what to grow in soil, oftentimes I just,
the first thing I think is,
Have I seen anybody else do it in aquaponics?
If the answer is no, then I'm going to do it.
That's my criteria.
But we grow a wide variety of leafy greens.
We do grains even.
We've done rice in the past.
We do sorghum, we do millet, things like okra and chili peppers.
We try to do, you know, a wide variety of plants.
I also select vegetables that I grew up eating and I miss,
and I just can't find in supermarkets here.
And even if you do find them,
you go to African stores to look for them,
the quality is really, really poor.
So if I'm feeling that way, I'm sure that there are other immigrants
who are feeling that way, and wanting food
that represents their culture or just like reminds them of home.
And I like, I like that we can, we can play that role for folks.
Yeah.
But every single thing get started this way
and then we transfer from here to either the deep water
or these, the media.
That's what this section here with the bags, is called media.
And media just means that
the plants are growing in some sort of medium.
You can see here.
It's the same mix we start the seeds in,
and it's just there to add as a structure.
This, for instance, is edamame.
Edamame is going to get big and, you know, a little unwieldy.
It's easier to manage in a system like this
than it is to manage in the deep water bed.
But the medium could be whatever you want it to be,
as long as it's able to hold the plant up.
You put that medium,
you can put it in a container like we have here,
or you could just spread it in the bed, same thing.
We have the bags because it allows us a little bit of control
and to move things around.
And they're durable and they are inexpensive.
And if there's a rip, I patch it up.
So this medium wicks up water to the plant roots
and that's how the plants stay both hydrated
and also get nutrients that come from the fish.
These are our koi and goldfish.
We've had them for about eight years now.
So the more fish you have, the more plants you need.
If you have too many fish and not enough plants,
then you don't have enough filtration system
to clean the water for your fish.
Remember, the plants are playing an essential role
in keeping the water clean for the fish.
That's why it's this symbiotic, reciprocal system.
If there are no fish, there's nothing for your microbes to consume,
and then there's nothing for your plants to take up as nutrients.
If there are no microbes, your fish will drown in their waste
and your plants have nothing to grow on.
If there are no plants, your fish are producing waste,
then there are microbes,
but there's no one to take up what the microbes are producing.
So eventually your system also collapses.
So you need all living things to be working
and to be healthy and thriving.
We don't know enough about fish,
and because we don't know enough about fish, we have fish dying.
For me,
doing aquaponics farming is also a way of
making the argument for fish.
So it goes beyond just farming fish for food.
It's also about creating awareness and knowledge
about these aquatic animals.
They're not cuddly.
We can't hold them and pet them.
But if they don't exist, we cease to exist.
Without the fish in the ocean, then we also lose aquatic plants,
like phytoplankton, which do about 30%
of removing carbon dioxide from the environment.
So for the most part, they are on the frontline
of an environmental crisis.
Two degrees in global temperature increase is killing them.
Overfishing is killing them.
All of the pesticides and the nitrogen runoff
from farming is killing them.
We need to start talking about fish more.
We need to start talking about water more
and water use in food production because water is
kind of a limited resource and we treat it as if it's not.
And if you're someone who's growing food,
you should know that
incorporating aquaponics into your farming practice
is also in some way a form of environmental activism.
It's a form of addressing
global crisis
because your work as an aquaponics farmer is to recycle water.
Unlike soil, we're using the same body of water indefinitely.
With soil, you water your plants,
a lot of it drains out and then gets washed out.
And then you also lose a lot of it to evaporation.
So because we're constantly recycling water, we use
about 50 to 80% less water
than soil for every square foot of plant you are growing.
I fell in love with aquaponics,
initially thinking about health and wellness.
And I realized that this is bigger than just like,
Oh,I'm growing fruit and vegetables.
Like, this system of growing food can be used to address food security
while also directly addressing water conservation,
the environment,
and eliminating those barriers
to healthy eating options.
When I have kids on the farm,
and I ask them, “What does a farmer look like?”
All of them will say, “A guy in overalls.”
“That's who a farmer is.”
So if you don't even see yourself
as being, you know, as someone who grows food,
why would you grow it?
So, access to space, knowledge that it’s possible,
and then seeing people who look like you who are doing it.
And in cities, where do you find all of those things in one place?
It's rare. Yeah.
So that's what we’re representing.
In my language, “Ara oko”, - oko means farm.
And when you say, “Ara oko”, you're literally referring
to someone who's backwards, who's uneducated, basically a farmer.
But farmers are brilliant people.
They are scientists. They are designers. They’re engineers.
They’re doing all this stuff daily.
I started this not knowing anything.
I jumped into aquaponics not knowing a single thing about plumbing,
not knowing much about fish.
And I've learned so much along the way.
And I think farming actually teaches you those things.
It teaches you to be creative.
It teaches you to be to be flexible.
It teaches you to accept failure.
It teaches you persistence, just because
that's exactly what nature requires.
Nature requires resilience.
Nature requires balance.
Sometimes things are catastrophic, and they fail.
But nature bounces back.
And in the same way, you got up the next day and you kept going.
Because it is through your failures that you you learn.
I want young people,
regardless of where they are in the world,
to be able to look at me and be like, Oh, if she can do it, then
I can do it too.