BISMARCK, ND. A Native American tribe in North Dakota will soon grow lettuce in a giant greenhouse complex that, when fully completed, will be among the largest in the country, allowing the tribe to grow much of its own food decades after a federal dam flooded the land where they grew corn. , beans and other crops for millennia.
Work is underway at the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s 3.3-acre greenhouse, which will make up the majority of the initial phase of the Native Green Grow operation. However, enough of the structure will be completed this summer to begin growing leafy greens and other crops such as tomatoes and strawberries.
“We are the first farmers on this land,” said tribal chairman Mark Fox. “We were already part of an Aboriginal trading center for thousands and thousands of years because we grew crops – corn, beans, squash, watermelon – all these things at massive levels, so all the tribes were very dependent on us as part of the Aboriginal trading system.”
The tribe will spend about $76 million on the initial phase, which will also include a warehouse and other facilities near the small town of Parshall. It plans to add to the growing space in the coming years, totaling about 14.5 acres (5.9 hectares), which officials say would make it one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world.
The initial greenhouse will have enough glass to cover the equivalent of seven football fields.
The tribe’s fertile lands along the Missouri River were flooded in the mid-1950s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Garrison Dam, which created Lake Sakakawea.
Getting fresh produce has always been a challenge in the area of western North Dakota where the tribe is based on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The rolling, rugged landscape — bisected by Lake Sakakawea — is a long drive from the state’s largest cities, Bismarck and Fargo.
This isolation makes the greenhouses even more important, as they will allow the tribe to provide food to the approximately 8,300 people on the Fort Berthold reservation and other reservations. The tribe also hopes to supply food banks serving isolated and impoverished areas of the region and plans to export its products.
Initially, the MHA Nation expects to grow nearly 2 million pounds (907,000 kilograms) of food per year and for that number to eventually increase to 12 to 15 million pounds (5.4 million to 6.4 million kilograms) annually. Fox said the first phase of the operation will create 30 to 35 jobs.
The effort coincides with a national movement to increase food sovereignty among tribes.
Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic have led tribes across the country to use federal coronavirus aid to invest in food systems, including underground greenhouses in South Dakota to feed the local community, said Heather Dawn Thompson , director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Tribalism. Relations. In Oklahoma, several tribes are running or building their own meat processing plants, she said.
The USDA promotes its Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative, which “really challenges us to think about food and the way we do business at USDA from an indigenous and tribal perspective,” Thompson said. Examples include indigenous seed centers, food foraging videos and guides, cooking videos, and a meat processing program for indigenous animals.
“We have always been a very independent and sovereign people, capable of hunting, gathering, cultivating and feeding ourselves, and over the last century forces have intervened that have disrupted these independent food resources, which has made everything very challenging. But the desire and the goal was always there,” said Thompson, whose tribal affiliation is Cheyenne River Sioux.
The MHA Nation’s greenhouse plans are possible in large part because of access to clean water and natural gas resources.
The natural gas released in North Dakota’s Bakken oil field has long been seen by critics as a waste and an environmental concern, but Fox said the tribal nation intends to capture and compress that gas to heat and power the greenhouse and turn it into fertilizer.
Flaring, in which natural gas is burned from pipes that emerge from the ground, has been a long-standing problem in the third oil-producing state.
North Dakota Pipeline Authority Director Justin Kringstad said the key to capturing the gas is building the necessary infrastructure, as MHA Nation intends to do.
“With operators trying to get to that zero level, it will certainly be necessary to have more infrastructure, more pipeline construction, processing plants, all of this to keep an eye on this issue,” he said.
The Fort Berthold Reserve had nearly 3,000 active wells in April, when oil production totaled 203,000 barrels per day at the reserve. Oil production helped the MHA Nation build schools, roads, housing and medical facilities, Fox said.
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