Teacher In Remote Inuit Community Teaches Students To Garden

Adam Malcolm hopes to eventually raise the funds for a greenhouse.

By ELLEN BRAIT Staff Reporter

Wed., April 26, 2017

Adam Malcolm, a high school teacher in the remote Inuit community of Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, has a simple plan: teach his students to garden.

“But nobody around here is a natural gardener,” Malcolm said. “There’s nothing to garden and there never was.”

Malcolm, who teaches at the Inuksuit School, is trying to help combat food insecurity for his students by teaching them to grow their own fruits and vegetables. He has about eight Grade 10 - 12 students in his class on a “good day,” and 16 students during the two periods he spends teaching eighth and ninth grade. And they’ve already started growing some plants inside the school.

“I was trying to look at ways that I can be a positive influence on the community outside of the school,” Malcolm said. “I feel like starting off with just the young people first and giving them some skills to be able to do some gardening might be a good first step.”

The goal is to move the student’s gardening outside and into a greenhouse before summer vacation starts. In order to do that, he has to raise the funds to buy a greenhouse.

He has started a crowdfunding campaign, looking to raise roughly $4,350 dollars in order to purchase a greenhouse and ship it up from Ottawa.

Food insecurity is a major issue in Nunavut. According to a report released in 2016 by University of Toronto researchers, nearly 47 per cent of households in Nunavut experienced some level of food insecurity in 2014. This included 19.3 per cent of households experiencing severe food insecurity. The second highest prevalence of food insecurity was in the Northwest Territories at 24.1 per cent.

Malcolm said with the installation of a greenhouse, he’s hoping they can start to “bypass the crazy prices at the grocery store.”

The Nunavut Bureau of Statistics' 2016 food price survey which compares Nunavut communities food prices with average Canadian prices, compiled by Statistics Canada, showed a large gap in prices between Nunavut and the rest of Canada. Shoppers in Nunavut paid $5.32 for canned tomatoes while the average Canadian was paying $1.60. Carrots cost about three times more at $6.90 in Nunavut compared to $2.25 in other parts of Canada, and oranges were approximately two times as expensive at $7.10, compared to $3.47.

Malcolm said he plans to offer gardening as a weekly science project or after school extra-curricular, only for students who are interested.

“There is a lot of interest among students,” he said. “They love planting stuff and growing in class too. It’s a novelty for them to see plants bearing fruit because you just don’t see it in the wild here.”

He’s already ordered seeds for a variety of fruits and vegetables including tomatoes, beans, melons, and carrots, and he has several litres of soil ready to use. He’s also hoping to obtain a small heater as “it’s cool at night.”

Eventually Malcolm is hoping gardening their own food is “something that the community will embrace too.”

“I’m starting small, having the greenhouse here,” he said. “And starting with the students will be the introduction in the community.”

The municipality of Qikiqtarjuaqhas also taken steps to help end food insecurity in their community. Memorial University’s branch of Enactus, a not-for-profit organization, will be sending three hydroponic systems to the municipality, as part of Project Sucseed, an initiative to address the need for fresh affordable produce in Northern Canada. The hydroponic systems can grow anything that’s not a root vegetable, according to Kate Fradsham, a volunteer with the organization who runs the Nunavut expansion of Project Sucseed.

“This is just a way to create community interest for the very art of growing which is not that common up here,” said David Grant, economic development officer for the municipality of Qikiqtarjuaq.

In five weeks, a system can yield 12 heads of lettuce. And in one harvest, 122 tomatoes or 360 strawberries can be grown, according to Fradsham.

“Food is a basic right and as Canadians, we’re here to be able to provide food to other Canadians,” Fradsham said. “We can’t forget that northern Canadians are part of Canada and they deserve the same access to food that we do.”

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