Climate change makes farming easier in Alaska. Indigenous growers hope to lead the way.

Editor’s note: Anna Canny reported this story for NPR’s Climate Solutions Week. 

Growing up in rural Alaska, Eva Dawn Burk recalls hunting, trapping and going to fish camp every summer, gathering traditional foods with her family.

Burk is Alaska Native, Dene’ and Lower Tanana Athabascan. She grew up in the small villages of Nenana and Manley Hot Springs along the Tanana River in Interior Alaska, where her family and neighbors relied on the land to fill their pantries and freezers.

But that way of life is increasingly threatened. Alaska is warming faster than any other U.S. state as a result of human-caused climate change. Heat waves and other shifting weather patterns are causing chaos in ecosystems that Indigenous hunters and fishermen have long relied on, disrupting everything from the migration of caribou and reindeer to the abundance of wild-berryharvests.

“It doesn’t matter what part of the state that we look at,” says Burk, now a community food activist and a student of sustainable agriculture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Climate change is wreaking havoc on the habitat and on our fish and wildlife.”

But the warmer temperatures and changing seasons have also had another impact: Climate change is making agriculture more possible in many parts of Alaska. That’s driving a new enthusiasm for farming across the state.

Few of the state’s rural villages have farms or even community gardens. So in 2020, Burk decided to start a training program to teach aspiring Alaska Native farmers how to grow their own food.

The goal, she says, is to help Alaska communities that are being most affected by climate change — and to shore up food security as traditional foods become more unpredictable.

“An Indigenous value is to be prepared for the future,” Burk says. “What our program is doing is working to prepare some of the most vulnerable communities.”

“You can’t farm in Alaska”

Alaska isn’t usually considered farm country. Much of the state has cool summers, harsh winters and a short growing season, which can make it challenging to grow anything other than hardy crops like cabbages and potatoes.

But climate change is bringing higher temperatures during many parts of the year and longer frost-free summers.

First frosts are already arriving later in some parts of the state, allowing growers to keep their crops in the field longer. Research done at the University of Alaska Fairbanks predicts the growing season could be weeks or even months longer by 2100.

Hotter summers could support larger yields, and milder winters could shift the state’s plant hardiness zones, which describe the crops most likely to thrive in a region. By 2100, the hardiness zones in Fairbanks may resemble those in modern-day Kansas or Kentucky, the UAF study found.

Even now, Alaska farmers and gardeners are experimenting with crops that have historically been extremely difficult to cultivate.

“We’re successfully able to grow things like artichokes and field-grown tomatoes, peppers and corn here in Fairbanks,” says Glenna Gannon, a professor of sustainable food systems who runs crop trials at UAF. “I don’t think 30 or even 10 years ago that would have been successful.”

The state’s tiny agriculture industry is growing fast. The number of farms in Alaska has nearly doubled over the last two decades — from just about 600 in 2002 to almost 1,200 by 2022.

But Alaska growers like Gatgyeda Haayk still encounter a lot of skepticism.

“I hear that a lot. Like, ‘You can’t farm in Alaska,’” says Haayk, an instructor at the Indigenous-led agriculture training program at Calypso Farm and Ecology Center, just outside Fairbanks. “Even when I first came here, I didn’t think of myself as a farmer.”

Haayk runs a community garden in Metlakatla, a Tsimshian village of about 1,500 people in Southeast Alaska.

She first came to Calypso as a student, learning skills like seed starting and garden planning. Now she’s eager to pass that knowledge along.

Alaska farmers will not be exempt from the downsides of agriculture in a hotter world, like increased risk of drought or pests.

But in Haayk’s eyes, farming is still one of the best ways for Alaska Native villages to adapt to climate change. Alaska Native people make up more than 20% of the state’s population. As Alaska’s agriculture industry grows, Haayk wants to see more Indigenous-led farms and gardens.

“I feel like it’s time for the Indigenous people to be the pioneers of this change,” Haayk says. “We know this land best.”

She also thinks Alaska communities need to be less dependent on the Lower 48. Alaska currently depends almost entirely on produce grown elsewhere: Almost 95% of the state’s food is imported. Most grocery supplies arrive in Anchorage on barges. From there, everything must be transported to the state’s far-flung communities, many of which are not connected to the road system. Supplies are delivered by smaller boats or planes.

All of that means groceries are much more expensive. And shipping delays during the COVID-19 pandemic and recent natural disasters have demonstrated how fragile the system can be.

Those are all issues Eva Dawn Burk hoped to combat when she founded Calypso’s Indigenous-led farmer training program a few years ago.

Fresh veggies for remote villages

The Calypso Farm and Ecology Center was founded in 2000, just as the current wave of interest in Alaska agriculture was starting. It’s a small farm, nestled on 3 acres of land in the boreal forest just outside Fairbanks. But it grows hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables, just a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle.

Burk first visited Calypso in 2019.

“I was really in shock and awe,” Burk says. “I was like, ‘How come we haven’t ever built something like this in one of our villages?’”

By 2020, Burk had launched the Indigenous agriculture trainings, building on Calypso’s existing suite of educational programs.

Burk views growing food as a natural complement to hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods. She hopes the training program will spur more farms in rural communities, where growers will tend to crops on the same land where they smoke salmon and tan animal hides.

Burk and her partners at Calypso have already helped develop a small statewide network of Alaska Native farmers and teachers. Late last year, the nascent program received a boost with nearly $750,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program.

On a drizzly day in August, this year’s training was well underway.

Tom Zimmer, who owns Calypso Farm, dug a hole in the deep brown soil and held out a small apple sapling to a group of trainees from across the state.

“Whoever plants this, in four years you get to come back and have some apples,” Zimmer said.

Bernadette Pete raised her hand. Pete took three flights to get to Calypso Farm, traveling for 12 hours from her hometown in Western Alaska for a weekend of lessons.

She and the other trainees were learning about transplanting and seed starting, composting and soil health, and irrigation. Between lessons, they spent the weekend camping and harvesting food for meals they cooked together.

Pete stepped up, pulled the tree roots from their plastic covering, and plopped the sapling into the ground.

“Write my name on it!” she said, laughing, as she packed the soil with her heel.

Fresh apples are one food it can be hard to get back home, Pete said, along with many of the veggies she snacked on that weekend, like sugar snap peas off the vine and celery straight from the ground.

Like almost all the students who come to Calypso, Pete has stories about how the environment around her home is changing. Her hometown, the Yup’ik village of Alakanuk, sits at the mouth of the Yukon River, near the Bering Sea.

The community of about 700 people relies on wild foods like seabird eggs, berries, moose and especially salmon, which have been hit hard by climate change.

The decline of sea ice in Arctic and sub-Arctic communities like Alakanuk is making hunting more difficult and dangerous, and more extreme fall storms in Western Alaska have destroyed not only homes but also the gear used to get food. Salmon populations in the Yukon River have collapsed, driven at least in part, scientists say, by warmer river temperatures.

“I notice fall flooding, a lot more rain, less fish,” Pete said.

Endless rainstorms last summer drenched the salmon on Pete’s drying rack, being preserved for winter. She had to throw much of it away.

Since salmon stocks have crashed, the region’s only commercial salmon-processing plant has started pivoting to agriculture, putting up greenhouses in Alakanuk and surrounding villages.

With the knowledge she gained at Calypso, Pete is eager to get planting.

“Everyone here is so eager to teach you. It’s like they know every plant and how it grows,” Pete said. “I want to grow lettuce, potatoes, sugar snap peas.”

“I want my own little greenhouse.”