The Decibel - Inside the greenhouse above the Arctic Circle

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Two hundred and fifty kilometres above the Arctic Circle is a greenhouse that provides fresh local produce to its community. It’s called Naurvik and it’s located in the Inuit hamlet of Gjoa Haven, Nunavut. Powered primarily by wind- and solar-energy, Naurvik is becoming a new source of food for a region of Canada that suffers chronic food insecurity given how remote it is.Photojournalist Amber Bracken visited Gjoa Haven earlier this year and will take us on a tour inside the greenhouse that is beating the odds.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

When you first look out the window from the airport, you can see almost nothing in one direction, because it's just an expanse of white. And in the other direction, you start to see some small houses dotting the landscape. There's just this sprinkling of candy-coloured houses, you know, in pastel shades of yellow and green and pink and blue. And everything is just crusted in snow because the wind, when there is a blizzard or something, or when it snows, the wind just blasts everything in sight with snow. Amber Bracken is a photojournalist who traveled to Joe Haven.

It's a hamlet in Nunavut, located 250 kilometers above the Arctic Circle. It's so far north that very little grows from the rocky ground. It does feel very, very remote. It's a kind of place that is both magical, but you also feel your vulnerability as a human. Like you can really feel the mortality, you know, at the edge of every day. Amber was there in the middle of winter to visit an unlikely place, a greenhouse growing fresh produce. From the outside, the greenhouses don't look like very much at all. It just looks like a storage facility, because all you really see is a couple of shipping containers and some machinery. And if you look a little bit closer, of course, you'll start to notice the solar panels and the wind turbines. And then as you step inside, it reveals itself as this magical refuge for plants.

Today on the show, we're taking you to the northern reaches of Canada to find out how a Joe Haven greenhouse is expanding food sources in the Arctic. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Amber, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So take me back to that moment when you first walked into these shipping containers. What did that feel like, Amber? Well, I mean, my first concern was actually change in climate from the outside to the inside. And really what this bubble, this intense bubble that's being protected.

So every time that door opens, you're having this confrontation between the very dry and very cold and the very warm and very humid. And you have frost crystals that just attach themselves to everything. So that's the, these vestibules, which are the stopover between inside and outside, just get coated with these, you know, magical little crystal forests. Wow. Okay, so let's talk about this greenhouse then called Norovik, which translates to growing place. How does this work, Amber? How do you grow plants in such a remote spot? Well, it's been likened to growing in space, because what they have to do is completely create their own growing conditions to isolate themselves from the surrounding environment. So they've built these well-insulated shipping containers. They also have vestibules to slow down the influx of the outside climate. So you go

through kind of a couple of steps before you get into the actual growing space. And using primarily the wind and solar power, they heat and provide lights, and then they grow plants in this hydroponic solution. So hydroponic growing is a way of growing plants in water that's infused with nutrients. So rather than using soil, and it's effective for getting higher production in a lower footprint. So it's more efficient use of that energy use in the smaller space and of course when you step into the space there's a constant hum of these fans that are there to both move the air around which helps to prevent disease and mold and

other kinds of problems that can occur on the plants, but also helps to strengthen their stems and help them grow up to be healthy, happy little plants. So why was this community of Joe Haven in particular selected to be the location for the project? I think in some senses, a project like this could have been in any northern community. But, of course, Joe Haven is the nearest hamlet to the site of the failed Franklin expedition where the two ships looking for the Northwest Passage shipwrecked. So that work or that site has been associated with a lot of research from the Arctic Research Foundation, and so they've been active in that community for some time, have very good relationships, and the whole Norovik program is really built on those relationships. Tell me about the people running this project.

So Betty Kovic is the general manager, which has been involved in the project for a number of years and had to learn herself how to grow plants and get comfortable with it. She works pretty closely with Kitticovic, who's another technician who helps to tend to the plants. Kittie or Katie? Kittie. Kittie, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. And of course, there's a whole array of other helpers and men that manage the lights and the electricity and the power systems for the project.

And who's paying for it? Like, where does the funding come from? The funding comes from a variety of sources, including the Arctic Research Foundation. So I would imagine the women, Betty and Kitty, who are running this place must have been learning these new gardening skills as they go. Did they tell you how they felt about learning those new skills? Well, I think any new gardener can be a little overwhelmed with all of the things that there are to know about plants. Once you start to really think about what a plant needs and how to care for it, it can be overwhelming. But especially in the north where the conditions make it so hard to garden or impossible to garden really, that there's just no,

there's no cultural reference point. And for many people, they've never even had houseplants, let alone being responsible for a garden. So both women told me they were, you know, overwhelmed and completely not confident that they would be able to even keep the plants alive when their, you know, when their trainers left them. I was telling the people that was training me, as soon as you're gone, everything's going to die. Everything that we planted, they're all going to die. That's what you thought? Yes, that's what I was thinking. You and I are first starting. Yeah. And a couple weeks later,

I noticed that I'm becoming a green thumb. In the end, they've turned out to be really, really accomplished and just remarkable plant guardians in the north. Wow. And I'm curious, what do they decide to grow? I mean, they grow all kinds of things. I think the hydroponic system lends itself really well to lettuces and greens and things like that. You know, because your ability to harvest is much faster, like you're growing, the time to get to maturity takes a lot less time.

But they also grow more complex plants, like fruiting plants, such as peppers and strawberries. And when I visited, they also had potted, well, they had mums, which is a type of flower, which they did as almost as a as a practice to figure out how to get a plant to flower and to have a get a plant to maturity which is more challenging than getting lettuce leaves and also interestingly they grow some varieties of sorrel which is another type of greens and are talking about attempting to grow some of the native types of sorrel that already grow in the Arctic to provide a more culturally relevant form of greens for elders and the

community. Wow, yeah, that's fascinating to have kind of the native plants growing, but also things like strawberries in the Arctic. That's amazing. What was your reaction when you saw that? I mean, I was absolutely blown away. There's strawberries. I think I knew what I was walking into, but it's a different thing to know it intellectually and to walk into a room and suddenly be confronted by strawberries in the arctic i'm i'm a gardener myself i love i love green growing things i i think a lot about the honestly it's the alchemy of these plants that we feed with water and light and nearly invisible nutrients. And they create these, their little bodies and then give us fruits. I think that's the most

amazing thing. And to encounter that in such an inhospitable place where, you know, a few minutes before I had been freezing cold with my, you know, fighting frostbite on my nose and my fingers, just to make pictures outside and walking into this space and finding these tender and sweet little fruits and greens. It's truly miraculous. We'll be back in a minute. So this is just one area of Nunavut, and they're only growing small quantities of things right now. But we know in general that it's really hard to get fresh food up north. So, Amber, I'm curious, how does the territory fare when it comes to food security? Nunavut has the highest levels of food insecurity in Canada.

So depending on which stats that you reference, the most recent ones from Stats Canada from 2017 to 2018 cite that at least 49.5% of Nunavut households experience food insecurity. That compares to just under 9% of all Canadian households overall. So much higher than the national average. Much, much higher. And about half of those, you know, 50% of Nunavut households,

so about 25% of Nunavut households experience what they call severe food insecurity, which is when people actually eat less, you know, that you have such a high level of food insecurity that you're reducing your calorie intake and you're basically going hungry because you can't get enough to eat. So it's a major issue with very complex causes and solutions. So food is a really big deal in the North and in Nunavut specifically. Let's talk about the food economy in the North. Where do people in a place like Joe Haven, where do people typically get their food from? So it continues to be a mix of store-bought and traditional foods. So more and more people are relying on store-bought food, but there's still

a huge reliance on country foods. And I don't believe that the food economy in the North would work without them. And when you talk about country food, can you give me some examples of what that is? Yeah, country food is all of the traditional food that Inuit have survived on for the past 5,000 years. So it's things like whale, caribou, fish, sometimes bear, but whatever hunted or gathered food that they can get locally. Okay, so it's usually a mix of country food then and store-bought food. And I think a lot of us have heard that prices for store-bought food in the North are really quite high. Can you, again, give us a sense, Amber, of just how high those prices actually are. Yeah, in the piece I cited two

what I consider staples, so milk and bread are pretty common things that lots of people include on their grocery list. And the milk was $12.50 for a four liter jug of 2%. And for a loaf of bread, it was $9.50, nearly $10. But I also looked at prices of food that I would consider, you know, more like discount or cheap food for people that are on a tight budget. So things like Cheez Whiz, a large jar of Cheez Whiz was $20. A pack of hot dogs was $10. You know, $30 for a can of coffee. And, and I mean, these are pretty common staples that a lot of people take for granted and might think of as, as part of a budget friendly, friendly diet.

But in, in the North, I mean, there's no, there's no, there's no anticipating how high the prices can get. So we were talking about store-bought food and country food, obviously country food, hunting, fishing, and gathering, that's a huge part of Inuit culture. Is there any chance that these grocery stores and store-bought foods could actually ever replace country foods? Country food has some serious challenges right now. I mean, as we all know, the impact of colonization on the sharing of knowledge in Indigenous communities has created a big disconnect. So, you know, there's a loss of, some loss of traditional knowledge. There's, of course, the higher costs of harvesting equipment. So things like snowmobiles or having gas to be able to go out and, you know,

do the work. That being said, it's still a very mainstream thing in these communities. Almost everybody is eating them at home. And it's very common for hunters to share their catch with other people. And I just don't see how economically you could ever replace how it would even be possible to have communities living in the north without at least some of the food coming from the territory. Yeah. It sounds like it wouldn't be economically or culturally feasible to have that replaced. You need kind of a balance of both of those things. Yeah, absolutely. And to follow on the cultural point, it's really a central rooting part of Inuit culture and an opportunity for children to learn from elders and for different cultural teachings to be passed on. So there's a bit of a balance between country food and grocery store food, it sounds like. But how could the greenhouse factor into this food economy?

I mean, really, it's part of the plan to increase self-reliance of communities. So rather than having expensive and sometimes unhealthy forms of food from the grocery store, it would increase the self-reliance of the community by having locally available, very fresh and very healthy foods. Okay. So we've been talking about this one project in Joe Haven, but I wonder, are we seeing similar types of projects happening elsewhere in the North too? There's been lots of interest in creating local food production in the North. As I said, there's this ongoing issue with food security for Northern communities. And so the idea of being able to produce food locally is very exciting for lots of communities. One of the places where they've tried something very similar to Norvik is in Kugelaktuk, which is, so they have a similar concept hydroponic shipping container project.

But in that community, they ran into the issue of paying for the electricity because that one was on the regular grid. And back in 2019, their electricity, monthly electricity costs were close to $3,400 a month. Wow. Okay. So this one in Joe Haven maybe gets around that a bit with the solar panels and the wind energy as well. Yeah, it reduces their need for external energy a lot. So they still do have a diesel generator that they run on a backup, but they don't have to use it very often. Yeah.

Okay, Amber, just lastly here before I let you go, so you talked about Betty who's growing the food, tasting the food. Did you see anyone else, I guess, or any other situations where the food that was being grown there actually emerging in the community and being eaten by other people? Yeah, actually, I was fortunate to be able to attend a community feast that was hosted by the Arctic Research Foundation and so we got to just watch this giant table be filled with every kind of food you can think of. Whoever wants an apple? My dad wanted apple pie. Oh Ben, she wants an apple pie. Here you go.

Oh he has apple pie already. Simon, you want cherry? Yeah. Okay, cherry. You know, there was turkeys and hams and also roast muskox and also all kinds of fish and maktuk, which is the whale skin, and all kinds of desserts and treats. And right in the middle of it was a big pile of Narvik greens. So watching the community come and fill their plates with this mixture of food really representing the complex food system of trying to feed people in the north, which is the reliance on country foods

and store foods, and also this local production of fresh greens was quite something to see. Amber, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thanks so much for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our interns are Wafa El-Rayis, Andrew Hines, and Tracy Thomas. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.