by Arran Forbes
14 May 2010

This summer has many exciting and significant developments in store for our community agriculture project. The cost of shipping fresh produce to Igiugig is almost prohibitively expensive, and this is felt not only in food bills, but on health impacts as well. Through a series of federal and state grants, we have the funds to start a large wind-powered greenhouse that, with any luck (and some good engineering), will be productive through our long winter months. Between the greenhouse and the two outdoor acres we have allocated for planting, we hope to grow a variety of vegetables for consumption not only within the village, but also for potential sale to the neighboring lodges—whose clientele is increasingly vested in organically and locally grown produce.

The project, though well-funded, will nonetheless face some considerable challenges this first season. Alaska has never been a particularly productive agricultural zone, due to wildly erratic weather patterns, thin soils, and constantly changing daylight hours. The greenhouse, with an underground heating system, should help us overcome the climatic challenges that so often decimate crops with just one cold night; and our compost bin (along with the fertilizer from our chickens) will help build the soils. In the Matanuska Valley—Alaska’s premier agricultural region with the benefits of mild summers and fertile volcanic top soil—crops are world-renowned for reaching megalith sizes despite very short growing seasons; this is due to the intense amounts of daylight the plants are able to photosynthesize, both day and night. We expect similar results this summer, and have oriented the greenhouse to receive maximum light exposure. As for the winter, very few over-wintering greenhouses in Alaska have had much success, but we’re hoping that with our state-of-the-art technology, we can be not only productive, but also serve as a model for other establishments trying for the same goals.

While we wait for the paneling to go up on the greenhouse, the foyer of the IVC Office is our temporary seed nursery. In it, we have started cabbage, broccoli, beets, celery, lettuce, thyme, basil, dill, cilantro, parsley, chamomile, yarrow, pumpkin, and watermelon. And this is just a beginning! We see this not only as an opportunity to increase self-sufficiency when it comes to our food source, but also as a way to expand upon our relationship with this land; while many view agriculture as conflicting with a hunting and gathering lifestyle, we see it as yet another way to augment our traditional subsistence practices.