OLATHE, Kan. — This Kansas State professor is working to feed the world.
Eleni Pliakoni teaches and researches urban food production and post-harvest handling at K-State’s Olathe campus.
But she’s not just studying better ways to grow crops. She’s also raising the next generation of crop scientists with the mission to make healthy food more accessible to people worldwide.
For Pliakoni, green thumbs run in her family.
“My grandpa was a horticulturalist. My mom was a horticulturalist before she retired,” she said. “I am the third generation, the only one who ended up going to higher education.”
Her love of growing things began when she was a small child in her home country of Greece. She learned while tending the garden alongside her family.
“I grew up surrounded by the love for plants and growing,” Pliakoni said. “And grandpa had this yard, and our summers would be with grandma, eating whatever was in the garden.”
In her college studies, Pliakoni got interested in how important fruit and vegetable crops are for human health — and the challenges that come with that.
Now at K-State’s Olathe campus, she teaches graduate students and supervises research. They study and develop ways to improve food crop production, especially in urban areas, and methods to preserve crops from harvest to consumer.
But Pliakoni has developed an even greater passion for training the next generation of horticulturalists and agriculturalists. She encouraged them to work together to develop new solutions.
“They will have to work in urban areas and not only know how to grow, but also all the directions going on in urban areas and how important policy is to be able to grow and how important community is,” Pliakoni said.
She extends that focus far beyond our Kansas City area.
She and her team meet and collaborate with others to solve food supply problems in the United States and around the world.
They’ve helped farmers in developing nations like Tanzania and Bangladesh. They work with urban farmers who might not have the technology to maintain their produce.
They come up with better, cheaper, faster methods to get fresher, quality produce to urban consumers, and they brainstorm affordable ways to improve urban food systems across the public, private and non-profit sectors.
“I love sharing knowledge. Like that’s the biggest thing for me,” Pliakoni said.
She’s putting the Kansas City area on the map with her innovation.
Hundreds of people attend the Urban Food Systems Symposium she started. Students learn about farming in or near cities on the urban agriculture tour she designed.
She even led game-changing research on developing resilient urban food systems that ensure food security in the face of climate change.
But Pliakoni says it’s not the problem solving, or even the plants, that he loves most about this job. It’s the people.
“I had a student who started with me after college and stayed four years, and now she’s like in the research and development of a company in Boston,” she said.
“This is like the most amazing part of my job, I think: growing with the students, and like, being there to see their success … It’s so fascinating. I really like that.”
The scope of her work is global, but her focus is on Kansas and Missouri.
Pliakoni said she couldn’t do it all without the love and support of her husband Cary. He works in the same field, and now his 6-year-old son already loves growing things, too.
It’s the fourth generation in her family, learning to nurture and nourish, collaborate and care — learning that builds a better future for everyone all starts with just planting a seed.