With its cheap land, fertile soil, few pests other than hungry moose, and a growing season that is being drawn out by global warming, Alaska is becoming increasingly attractive to a younger generation of farmers.
In 2010, Brad St. Pierre and his wife, Christine, moved from California to Fairbanks, Alaska, to work as farmers. “People thought we were crazy,” Brad said. “They were, like, ‘You can grow things in Alaska?’ ” Their new home, not far from where Christine grew up, was as far north as Reykjavík, Iceland, and receives about sixty inches of snow each year. It routinely experiences winter temperatures below minus ten degrees Fahrenheit.
. North-facing slopes are colder, for example, while hollows retain more heat. When farmers and developers clear-cut vegetation on the surface, permafrost thaws even faster. Some farms are encircled with “drunken forests,” or trees that slouch as the ground gives way., subsidence is the “No. 1 issue related to farming that we know of,” Melissa Ward Jones, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, or U.A.F., told me.
Despite its reputation for ice and snow, Alaska has been farmed for hundreds of years. Nenana Native Village members traditionally used controlled burns to boost new growth of wild plants, which in turn attracted moose and beavers. Along the coast, Tlingit and Haida people grew potatoes. Russians who settled in Sitka in the early nineteenth century tended gardens of cabbage, turnips, and more potatoes.
Around the time that Wrigley was setting up shop in Delta Junction, the Alaska Agricultural Action Council predicted that the nearby Nenana-Totchaket area would have a “particularly important role in the future of Alaskan agriculture.” A U.S.D.A. soil survey showed that it had fertile land, and its growing season was longer than Delta Junction’s. The problem, at the time, was access: getting there meant crossing the wide Nenana River by boat.
Someone had brought a small pig. Eva Dawn Burk, who boycotted the event because she opposes the land sale, saw pictures of it later. “I was, like, ‘Whose pig is this?’ ” Burk, who is Dene Athabascan and a tribal member of the Nenana Native Village, told me. She was troubled by the idea of pork production, with its feeder crops, slaughterhouses, and pools of waste, in the place she calls home. “This sounds like the problem they’re having in the lower forty-eight,” she said.
If Permafrost Grown is successful, its findings could help farmers salvage the growing number of fields that are marred by thawing permafrost. In June, Gannon visited Ice Wedge Art and Farm, outside Fairbanks, and planted neat rows of asparagus in a field which was so pitted that it had to be abandoned. Robins sang in the willows; the farmer’s children splashed in thermokarst ponds. She planned to return throughout several months to measure crop-survival rates.
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