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US (AK): St. Paul finally gets fresh food thanks to indoor ag

St. Paul’s greenhouse isn’t what you’d imagine. There’s no big glass structure. All the windows are covered from the inside. It’s underneath the city’s grocery store on the first floor of the building.

It’s hydroponic. Blue and red LED lights hang suspended above the plants. Pumps fill the room with white noise.

“Let’s try to find a big one,” greenhouse manager Dallas Roberts said.

He dropped by on a recent afternoon to harvest six heads of lettuce.

“These have been growing for close to a month or month and a half,” Roberts said. “They’re fantastic.”

The 19-year-old grew up on the island. He said the availability of fresh produce is a big deal in St. Paul. There’s only one shelf for it at the grocery store.

Lauren Divine is the co-director of the tribe’s Environmental Conservation Office (ECO). She said problems with cargo shipping mean that by the time vegetables hit the shelves, they’re already rotten.

“We ran out of carrots, potatoes, and onions,” Divine said. “Those are cold-cellar, long-storage type vegetables. They were spoiling and going bad. The store had to throw them away.”

St. Paul’s greenhouse was built with more than $400,000 in federal grant money. The goal is to produce high-quality, affordable food for the community. At first, the idea was to build a traditional all-glass greenhouse.

But when Divine joined the project, she scrapped those plans because she didn’t think it was sustainable.

Read more at Alaska Public Media
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