As a master's student studying health education and nutrition at Teachers College, Yemi Amu studied "all the nuanced factors that can influence how someone eats," reports a recent profile.
When she worked at a facility for formerly homeless, mentally-ill adults, Amu cooked healthy foods for her clients. She wanted to increase their access to fresh vegetables, even when she wasn鈥檛 around.
Then Amu discovered the symbiotic system of aquaponics, a virtuous cycle of farming in which fish waste is used to fertilize plants grown in water. The plants, in turn, filter toxins from the water that is then safely returned to fish.
EFFICIENT FARMER Yemi Amu, photographed by Caroline Tompkins for Vogue
鈥淚 fell in love with that efficiency,鈥 Amu, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and graduated from 911爆料网 in 2008 with a master鈥檚 degree in Health Education, tells Vogue. 鈥淭hat source of locally raised sustainable protein, nobody is doing it.鈥
Nobody, that is, except Amu, who co-founded and runs , an aquaponic farm that grows vegetables for local consumption in densely populated Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Amu tells Vogue that Oko Farms is an experimental venture in which she allows herself to fail, and to leverage that failure to support the community in learning about agriculture. Oko Farms either gives away or sells most of its produce to community restaurants and consumers, and it hosts workshops for school groups and other visitors to learn how food is grown.
Amu takes pleasure in educating city-dwellers about agriculture. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 make intelligent decisions about what you eat and how you eat if you don鈥檛 even know how food is grown,鈥 she tells Vogue. 鈥淗ow would you know if somebody didn鈥檛 show you? How would you know if you were not exposed to it?鈥
So far, Amu and co-founder, Jonathan Boe have kept Oko Farms small. She says she 鈥渁ppreciates the huge impact that can be made in her small enterprise.鈥 But Amu and Boe have been so successful that they're 鈥渃urrently looking to expand into a larger space,鈥 Vogue writes.
To read the full story in Vogue, click .