“Our spinach is really big spinach, sometimes the leaves are bigger than my head,” Makenzie Jones said of the greenhouse he manages in Nipissing First Nation. “The arugula as well, sometimes they’re as big as my forearm. It’s really not typical stuff you can get in a grocery store.”
Jones works at Mnogin Greenhouse, which supplies his northeastern Ontario community with reasonably priced local greens year-round. Like other northern, rural and remote communities in Canada, his nation experiences high rates of diet-related diseases like type 2 diabetes, largely because of the limited access to nutritious, fresh food. To help reduce those ailments, and provide better food security in a changing climate, the nation opened the greenhouse in 2023.
The name Mnogin means “grow well” in Anishinaabemowin, and was chosen from community members’ suggestions.
“It was the perfect name because it meant not only growing food, but growing the nation, growing the economy in a healthy way,” Nipissing First Nation Chief Cathy Bellefeuille said.
Bellefeuille was sworn into office in August, but also sat on the nation’s council back in 2016, when the idea of a greenhouse first arose. The inspiration was the success of similar projects in places with “really dry climates or very cold climates where they had very little sunshine and you could do growing around the clock, around the calendar year,” Bellefeuille said. “So we said, ‘We have to get in on this. Let’s give it a try.’ ”