ARCTIC HARVEST

A HIGH-TECH GREENHOUSE BRINGS FRESH PRODUCE TO AN INUIT HAMLET

- STORY: NORIMITSU ONISHI / NYT

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 kilometres south on the Canadian mainland, the shortest and skinniest of spruces.

Today, though, 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 Kogvik, who is Inuit like most people in the Canadian Arctic. “Now I’m a green thumb.”

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.