This week, an up and coming company builds its innovative business for the benefit of their community’s health and beyond.
Transcript
Marie: This is Minnesota Native News, I’m Marie Rock.
Headlines: This week… an up and coming company builds its innovative business for the benefit of their community’s health… and beyond.
Here’s reporter Leah Lemm with the story.
STORY #1 - HARVEST NATION INC.
REPORTER: I drive out to the Lake Vermillion Reservation where the company Harvest Nation Inc. calls home. The company is owned by four Anishinabee women, all family in fact, and they are working on providing healthy food to their communities. But in a new way… Harvest Nation is using aeroponics to grow food.
If you don’t know what aeroponics means… stay with me… we’ll get an explanation… but first let me introduce Denise Pieratos… the primary founder of Harvest Nation. She and her team have lots of technical knowledge and are creating a new approach to growing food… that better fits their needs.
Speaker 1: (00:04)
I'm Denise Pieratos. I'm the CEO of harvest nation.
Speaker 1: (06:06)
we're going to have a, um, energy crisis is just a matter of time when, and I thought, well, we don't have any, we don't grow food anymore. You know, we don't have food up here that we could grow. You know, we, we're, we're at the end of the food pipeline anyway. Most of our, our, um, fruits and vegetables are, you know, have the least shelf life because we're the last place where
Speaker 1: (06:40)
everything's transported and so, and everything doesn't have any nutritional value. You know, head of iceberg [inaudible] is nothing, you know. So I started doing research on first I was gonna just build it in the backyard. And then I thought, no, I want it longer to last longer.
Reporter: Energy demands, lack of access to healthy food, and a climate that’s not very friendly to year-round gardening prompted Denise to spend years researching highly nutritious food to grow and… how to grow them. And she landed on….
Speaker 1: (09:15)
so up here the only option we have is aeroponics to grow indoors.
Speaker 1: (09:38)
aeroponics is where the roots are hanging in the air, and they're being doused with water at intervals - it's basically water and nutrients.
Reporter: Aeroponics differs from the more widely known, Hyrdoponics, which is where the roots of the plants are submerged in nutrient rich water.
The hard part about being first, is there’s really nobody to follow. No best practices to repeat. There are other aeroponic facilities, but they’re also trying to meet the needs of their community in a culturally appropriate way, with a wide variety of produce, which means more time spent on developing growing methods.
The aeroponics technology is more than a means to get more healthy food out there, it’s a way to help heal. Dani Pieratos is Harvest Nation’s Sales and Marketing Director.
Dani Pieratos: (00:18) [Anishinaabemowin] Hello, my name is Danny Pieratos. Speaker 2: (01:00) Traditionally native food systems are disrupted with colonization, which, I personally have suffered from. In terms of my physical wellbeing.
Speaker 2: (01:24) I really didn't know or care much about health for a long time and neither did my peer group.
Speaker 2: (02:41) with the fear, you know, diabetes and the effect it's had on family members. I'm sick of seeing my family members get their limbs chopped off. especially when we had traditional foods that met our needs. of course the physical needs, but the spiritual and cultural and you know, it, it makes me want to cry even talking about it. how unjust, um, the whole history is there and that, um, you know, it's, it's gonna take us to heal us is what I'm seeing or finding.
Reporter: And that healing, Dani talks about, begins with healing the relationship with food, and doing it in a way that will align their goals with the growing food sovereignty movement.
Dani Pieratos: We can start with food. We had a talking circle where one of our, um, family members had attended and said, my great grandpa, my mom and my aunts, grandpa George Strong, he taught that food is medicine, that he verbally transferred that information to our cousin. And I was like, I never got that teaching.
Speaker 2: (05:25) And so harvest nation, we've aligned ourselves with the food sovereignty movement and there are four principles that are our core values. The first of course is the local production and access to food healthy food. the second is having culturally appropriate food. And then the third principle is outreach and education. Speaker 2: (10:53) the fourth pillar is using environmentally sound practices.
Find out more about how Harvest Nation is working towards food sovereignty on their website: harvestnationinc.com
For Minnesota Native News, I’m Leah Lemm.