Canada: Where no trees grow, fresh strawberries all year round

Ottawa: Like many others in Gjoa Haven — a hamlet perched high in Canada’s Arctic, alone on a large, flat windswept island — Betty Kogvik never had any interest in plants.

Gjoa Haven lives through weeks of total darkness during its long winters. Shrubs stir alive as ice and snow recede but keep their heads down during the short summers by hugging the tundra floor. The nearest trees are hundreds of miles south on the Canadian mainland, the shortest and skinniest of spruces.

Today, though, Ms. Kogvik grows strawberries, carrots, broccoli, bell peppers, microgreens, tomatoes and myriad other fruits and vegetables — year round.

“I didn’t know anything about plants before,” said Ms. Kogvik, who is Inuit like most people in the Canadian Arctic. “Now I’m a green thumb.”

Ms. Kogvik works inside a high-tech greenhouse that yields locally grown fresh produce for the first time in the memory of the region. Inside insulated shipping containers with no view of the outside, artificial lights grow plants in soil and water, protected by constant heating during much of the year.

The greenhouse, researchers hope, will eventually provide an alternative to perishable goods flown in at great cost from southern Canadian cities — and a healthier diet for the Inuit, the only people who have lived in Canada’s Arctic for centuries.

The nomadic Inuit long survived by drawing nutrients from raw meat and fish to compensate for the absence of fruits, vegetables and sunlight. Over the centuries, a lack of vitamins is believed to have led to the deaths of many European explorers of the Arctic, including members of the Franklin expedition, who perished near Gjoa Haven in their doomed search for the fabled Northwest Passage.

Today, many Inuit in Gjoa Haven and in other corners of the Canada’s vast Arctic are caught between traditional and Western diets. Forced by the Canadian government into hamlets like Gjoa Haven in the 1960s, the Inuit now lead largely sedentary lifestyles and depend on local supermarkets, suffering from increasing obesity and the highest levels of food insecurity in Canada. In Gjoa Haven, a community of about 1,500 people, the cost and the quality of fresh produce at the two local supermarkets had long been a source of discontent.

So several years ago, hamlet elders told researchers at the Arctic Research Foundation, a private Canadian organization, that they were interested in a greenhouse. The foundation, which had found one of the sunken Franklin ships in 2016 thanks to the help of residents of Gjoa Haven, had been seeking a way to continue working with the community.

In 2019, shipping containers were placed on a spot chosen by elders, on a hill on the outskirts of the village. Wind turbines, solar panels and a backup diesel generator provide power to the containers that have been retrofitted as greenhouse and named “Naurvik,” or “the growing place” in the Inuit language.

For many Inuit who had no experience with plants, working at the greenhouse was at first nerve-wracking. Ms. Kogvik said she panicked when the foundation’s researchers left Gjoa Haven after setting up the facility in 2019.

“I told them, ‘In the next couple of days, you’re going to hear me screaming and shouting because all the plants are going to be dead,’” she said. “But two weeks later I harvested them.”

Today, Ms. Kogvik trains new employees like Kyle Aglukkaq, 35, who was at work on a recent Saturday afternoon. Mr. Aglukkaq recalled that as a child he had been fascinated by an episode on plant life on the television series “The Magic School Bus.” But with no plants around him, he said he had no idea how to take care of them, believing that they were all extremely fragile.

“But actually you don’t have to be really careful with them,” he said.

“You can rough them up,” Ms. Kogvik joked.

Both workers tended to a variety of vegetables and fruits growing in soil or water on shelves inside the two shipping containers.

“This is a really impressive strawberry,” Ms. Kogvik said, handling a bright red, medium-sized fruit dangling from a stem. “These are a bit sweeter and tastier than those in the stores, which taste old.”

Later that afternoon, Ms. Kogvik packed a variety of greens in sandwich bags and took them to the hamlet’s community center. The greenhouse’s produce is also regularly donated to the hamlet’s elders and members of its search and rescue team.

For now, the greenhouse yields only small quantities and also functions as a research center, financed, in part, by the Canadian Space Agency. So far, the greenhouse has cost about 5 million Canadian dollars, or $3.6 million, to build and operate since 2019, said Tom Henheffer, the chief executive of the Arctic Research Foundation.

But the greenhouse is expected to shift to full production on a larger scale over the next three years, Mr. Henheffer said. The foundation believes that the greenhouse — coupled with a facility to process and export other local products, like Arctic char — can become economically sustainable in Gjoa Haven and other Inuit communities.

The foundation also hopes to qualify for a federal program that provides subsidies to retailers that ship healthy perishables from southern Canada.

“Instead of giving money to grocers in the south, you’d be paying it to people in the community growing food,” Mr. Henheffer said.