Teaching kids about where their food comes from and how to grow their own crops isn't a topic talked about in many schools. But in the Electric City, kids got a firsthand look from an expert on the subject on Thursday.

Students at Schenectady’s Zoller Elementary School welcomed a special guest during Agriculture Literacy Week in New York.

“Good food is going to make you happy and healthy,” said Will Allen, who is known as the "Father of Urban Agriculture."

Allen knows just about everything there is to know about growing food and feeding urban communities.

“I grew up on Maryland," he said. "I’m the son of sharecroppers in South Carolina. We’ve been farming, my family, 400 straight years.”

After playing professional basketball, Allen returned to his roots. He bought and restored six greenhouses and the land they sat on in Milwaukee, where he planted and grew vegetables to help feed the surrounding communities.

It’s a story he tells in his children’s book “Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table.”

“Why should we be shipping food outside the country or from California or other places far away when we can grow a large percentage of food in our own cities and states?” he said.

Rebekka Henriksen oversees Schenectady’s Farm to School Program, which has brought gardens to schools around the district.

“I always want guests that look like our students that they can see themselves in," Henriksen said. “Connect kids to nutrition to access to healthy foods, as well as giving them opportunities of those wonderful hands-on lessons that they only really get working in a space, getting their hands dirty.”

Henriksen and her students use vermicomposting to sustain the gardens at school.

“These are red wigglers," she said. "They eat their weight in food every day in the form of decaying organic matter. So in our school, we put in the scraps from the carrots the kids didn’t eat.”

It’s the same technique Allen practices in Milwaukee, which is why his visit meant so much.

“I’m just trying to pass on what I’ve learned to others," he said. "I think that’s what we all should be trying to do, especially for our young people.”