Fresh, homegrown food sprouting up in the North

Researcher and gardeners tackling food security issues

Fresh, homegrown food sprouting up in the North Published 8:43 am Thursday, July 16, 2026 Jocelyn Apps restocks her small outdoor fridge on the street at 110 Niven Drive with fresh vegetables and eggs three times a day. You have to hurry, or within a couple hours everything is gone. Right now, the farmer’s market-style fridge, which goes under the name Yellowknife Urban Farm, is packed with fresh chard, kale, cucumbers, parsley and fresh eggs, all of which go for $5 a bundle.

Apps says she can’t keep up with demand. This call for fresh, healthy produce is growing rapidly throughout the territories as some people move away from goods brought up from the south, some of which goes bad before it can be eaten. With the increasing number of fires, floods and other natural and unnatural disasters, such as inflation, the food supply chain in the North is under increasing threat.

Just last week, transport trucks hauling food to Inuvik were stuck at the Peel River crossing because flooding caused the barge’s cables to break. And of course, the real focus on the supply chain happened with the wildfires in 2023, when highways shut down and even threatened supplies for emergency personnel in Yellowknife. The growing problem of food insecurity here is why the federal government launched a four-year project through Sir Wilfred Laurier University to make the territories more food sovereign.

“We get a lot of food from the south,” says Brandon Pludwinski, the researcher recently hired by Laurier to look into food sovereignty in the North. “It flies or comes by truck, which contributes to climate change impacts. That is a very big piece of it.

How do we create a food chain that reduces the impacts? There are researchers in the communities looking at what food sovereign systems look like...” “We are looking for a solution made in the North and by the North, with input from the communities,” he says.

Though only on the job a few weeks, Pludwinski says his role ranges from building garden boxes in the communities to working in schools, helping students better understand the food chain, the importance of locally grown food and even how to grow it themselves. Pludwinski knows about food sovereignty issues in smaller centres — he did much of his work there while employed by Ecology North in Yellowknife for the last four years. He says helping communities to get their food growing programs started is one of his major objectives, and he’s now drawing the interest of researchers all over Canada as the North is receiving increasing attention from Ottawa.

He did a PhD in the intersection of capitalism, colonialism and climate change and how it impacts on-the-land harvesting. His specialty while with Ecology North was water stewardship, which is crucial in the communities. “On an individual scale, there is a lot of momentum — community gardens are harder to get.

The work at the urban farms is amazing. We are seeing people at the market line up for hours to get good fresh produce,” he says, proof that people here are hungry for fresh locally grown food. Broader effort needed Franziska Ulbricht, owner/operator at Madeline Lake Market Garden, says she sells all 20 veggie boxes containing eight different products at the Yellowknife Farmers Market every Tuesday evening.

Anything left over goes to local restaurants. She says she would easily be able to sell more products if she wanted, but one producer selling more goods is not the answer to the North’s food sovereignty problem. Ulbricht says the government needs to step up and devise a strategy to encourage other agricultural producers to take up the challenge.

The NWT, she notes, lags far behind the Circumpolar North when it comes to food production and having a workable agricultural strategy. It needs to pay attention to other Northern jurisdictions and find out what they are doing to keep their populations well-fed and healthy. Pludwinski notes that the city is starting to step up to the challenge by hosting garden tours — there were tours at Madeline Lake and Laughing Lichens farm market over the weekend and again Thursday evening, July 16, at Yellowknife Urban Farms) and a competition throughout August.

All of these events are designed to draw attention to the important work gardeners are doing in the North and how they are working to become more food sustainable. In the Yellowknife area, Giant mine’s legacy of toxic arsenic pollution makes some people nervous about growing locally, Pludwinski admits. While the quality of the soil has improved dramatically and is more normalized, most gardeners still mix their soil with other dirt bought at local stores.

Apps says she has her soil tested regularly — an expensive process. For now, she and others pay the high testing price, enabling them to grow organic food. The goal for Apps and others in the agricultural sector is simple: provide healthy food to help their community.

Apps is a public health nurse professionally, so the well-being of people is especially important to her. The lack of food security and good quality food in every community is hindrance to achieving Arctic sovereignty, Pludwinski notes, because as a territory, we cannot be healthy without healthy food, which is our life blood. Gardeners multiplying Dave Taylor, a key organizer in the Yellowknife garden program, says that there are now 252 community garden plots assigned to 260 people in the city — representing a 33 per cent increase of new gardeners over last year.

An added benefit to growing more good food locally is the offsetting of climate change impacts, since little to no plastic is used to wrap the product and truck and airplane traffic used to transport goods is reduced. Perhaps best of all, the next time highways into the North are shut down, the North might be better able to feed itself and its emergency personnel. In the meantime, Apps is looking forward to her garden tour Thursday, beginning at 7:40 p.m.

She says she loves to show off her 32 laying chickens, which produce a dozen eggs a day, plus her healthy garden, which gives people an idea of what they can do in their own yards. Creating a healthier North is what agriculture here is all about, she says.