A Conversation with Yemi Amu
There’s a moment near the end of my conversation with Yemi Amu when I asked her: if the whole world went utopian – if there was no financial pressure, no need to hustle, no system demanding your productivity – what would your daily practice be?
She didn’t hesitate.
“I would grow purely for the joy of growing.”
That’s not a metaphor. Yemi Amu is the founder of Oko Farms — New York City’s first and only public accessible outdoor aquaponics farm, established in Brooklyn in 2013. She means she would literally be in the soil, with the fish, and the bees, and the butterflies, at sunset, long after her staff has gone home.
The Winding Path
Yemi grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and came to New York for undergrad — supposed to do law school and return home. Her mother’s plan. Her own plan was less clear: she wanted to feel like her life meant something. Not a career that made money, but work that brought meaning.
The path was long. Journalism major. Music publishing (couldn’t break into the creative side). Writing sci-fi and collecting rejection letters. Vegan baking. Ayurvedic nutrition. A culinary program in Harlem cooking four hundred meals a day. A job cooking organic meals for formerly homeless adults. And then, eventually, a patch of soil in Brooklyn.
“I didn’t have that thing in my brain that allows you to quit,” she told me. “I just don’t have it.”
Farming as Ancestral Practice
What I didn’t expect was how much Yemi’s farm has become an act of cultural reclamation.
Oko – as in Orisha Ok0, the Yoruba deity associated with agriculture — wasn’t just a name. It became a path back to something she didn’t know she’d lost. Through farming, Yemi started researching Yoruba philosophy, Ifa divination, the transatlantic slave trade, the agricultural heritage that enslaved Yoruba people brought to the Americas. She started growing Nigerian vegetables, fiber crops, indigo. Medicine plants.
“This work itself is ancestral practice,” she said. “It is what my people did. It is what ultimately brought my people here in the beginning.”
The Question of Progress
When we got to AI and automation, Yemi didn’t get defensive or dismissive. She got philosophical.
She told me about an eighty-year-old German teacher who taught her aquaponics in Florida – a man who grew up in World War Two. While other instructors taught students how to use instruments to measure water quality, this man would walk in and say: “You should be able to tell the pH of the water just by smelling it.”
Yemi thought he was insane.
Then he asked: if you do not have access to those instruments, does that mean you won’t grow food?
“There is nothing more beautiful than creating something out of nothing,” Yemi told me. “You can’t lose that. But we also can’t be anti-progress. What type of progress, though? Sometimes I feel like we’re being sold something as progress that I’m not sure is progress.”
Watch the Full Conversation
We also talked about the conflict between Nigerian immigrant expectations and finding your own meaning, what it felt like to be featured in Vogue and realize she wasn’t doing so badly after all, and how she finds ways to keep the joy alive when capitalism keeps demanding productivity.
The full episode is embedded above (paid subscribers get early access to Practice Ground episodes).
Also on YouTube and Spotify/Apple Podcasts.
This was one of the most grounding conversations in the entire series. Yemi is growing things in Brooklyn that haven’t been grown there in centuries. And she’s doing it for the joy of growing.
—Nifemi
