BISMARCK, ND — A Native American tribe in North Dakota will soon grow lettuce in a massive greenhouse complex. When fully completed, it will be one of the largest greenhouses in the country. It will allow the tribe to grow much of its own food, after a federal dam decades ago flooded land where they had grown corn, beans and other crops for thousands of years.
Work is underway on the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s 3.3-acre (1.3-hectare) greenhouse, which will make up the bulk of the first 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 once part of an Aboriginal trading center for thousands and thousands of years because we grew crops — corn, beans, squash, watermelons — all these things on a large scale, so all the tribes relied heavily on us as part of the Aboriginal trading system.”
The tribe will spend about $76 million on the first phase, which will also include a warehouse and other facilities near the small town of Parshall. It plans to expand the growing space in coming years, eventually 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 first greenhouse will contain enough glass to cover the equivalent of seven football fields.
The tribe’s fertile land along the Missouri River was flooded in the mid-1850s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Garrison Dam, creating Lake Sakakawea.
Getting fresh produce has long 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.
That isolation makes the greenhouses all the more important, because they allow the tribe to provide food to the approximately 8,300 people on the Fort Berthold Reservation and to reservations elsewhere. The tribe also hopes to supply food banks that serve isolated and impoverished areas of the region, and plans to export its produce.
Initially, the MHA Nation expects to grow nearly 2 million pounds (907,000 kilograms) of food annually, eventually increasing that to 12 to 15 million pounds (5.4 million to 6.4 million kilograms) per year. Fox said the first phase of the operation will create 30 to 35 jobs.
This effort coincides with a nationwide push to increase food sovereignty among tribes.
Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic have led tribes across the country to use federal coronavirus relief to invest in food systems, including underground greenhouses in South Dakota to feed local communities, said Heather Dawn Thompson, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Tribal Relations. In Oklahoma, several tribes are operating or building their own meat processing plants, she said.
The USDA promotes its Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiativewhich “really challenges us to think about food and the way we do business at USDA from an indigenous, tribal perspective,” Thompson said. Examples include indigenous seed hubs, foraging videos and guides, cooking videos and a meat processing program for indigenous animals.
“We’ve always been a very independent, sovereign people who have been able to hunt, gather, grow and feed ourselves, and there have been forces that have intervened over the last century that have disrupted those independent food sources, and it’s made it very challenging. But the desire and the purpose has always been there,” said Thompson, whose tribal affiliation is Cheyenne River Sioux.
The MHA Nation’s plans for a greenhouse project are largely possible because of access to drinking water and natural gas.
The released natural gas North Dakota’s Bakken oil field has long been seen by critics as a source of waste and an environmental problem, but Fox said the tribe plans to capture and compress the gas to heat and power the greenhouse and process it into fertilizer.
Natural gas burn-off, which involves burning natural gas from pipelines taken from the ground, has long been a problem in the world’s third-largest oil-producing state.
Justin Kringstad, executive director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority, said the key to capturing the gas is building the necessary infrastructure, as the MHA Nation plans to do.
“With the operators trying to get to that zero level, there will certainly be a need for more infrastructure, more expansion of pipelines, processing plants, and all of the above to stay on top of this problem,” he said.
In April, the Fort Berthold Reservation had nearly 3,000 active wells, with total oil production on the reservation reaching 203,000 barrels per day. Oil production has helped the MHA Nation build schools, roads, housing and medical facilities, Fox said.