Bounty in Canada's Frozen North

Perhaps 'bounty' is too extravagant a description. Bounteous harvests will never materialize in the far North of Canada's vast Northwest Territories, not all that far, in fact, from the Arctic circle. Living in the North is expensive. Fresh food hard to come by; what is trucked in on winter ice roads or flown in has come a long way and vegetables and fruits become the worse for wear by the time they reach a retail market source in the Northwest Territories.

But in Inuvik, which really is the frozen North, an old hockey rink has been converted to a local community greenhouse. And it is flourishing. People are able to tend their garden plots and grow, unbelievably, watermelons, tomatoes, apples and cherries, even corn, although most peoples' aspirations are likely confined to more modest garden vegetable produce. The greenhouse is open 24 hours a day.



In Norman Wells, N.W.T. the average high temperature is about 13-degrees C. three months out of the year. There, Doug Whiteman amended whatever soil there was available to his gardening efforts with compost, fertilizer and vegetable matter to add nutrients that would allow him to grow the aforesaid vegetables and fruits.

"Some places have permafrost, some don't, and other places you're just going to have large pieces of ice in the ground", he explains.

"You can do this here?" is a question asked of Andrew Cassidy, executive director of the Territorial Farmers Association. "In the Northwest territories, we probably have about 20 commercial producers. It's a small number but I would probably say ten years ago, we might have had half a dozen." 

And Gene Hachey, agricultural consultant for the Government of the Northwest Territories lauds all attempts to grow food in such an agronomy-hostile environment. "There's something cool about having 'a cob' at the end of the year. And you take it off and you hold it like a diamond." 

A family formerly from New Brunswick keeps goats and chickens and rabbits on their Boreal Barn farm. They were aided with $10,000 in government funding to help improve and expand their family farm. Where their animals are free to roam in spring and summer, but temperatures plunge to -40C in the winter, and the sun doesn't shine for months.

"We have the lights set up so that they're on 14 hours a day so they have a kind of daytime in their barn." Their hens produce about 72 eggs each day, which the farmers sell to their neighbours.  But there is never enough to satisfy demand.

That kind of determination and self-sufficiency is nothing short of amazing, given the obvious climate constraints and the difficulties in coping with permafrost, extreme winter cold, and long months without the sun.

Inuvik's 24-hour-operational greenhouse where a hundred community members look after their 74 plots is made possible with the aid of joint federal and territorial programs.