Red Lake Buffalo Ranch, Gitigaan Acres and Hemp Farm Update

For the past six (6) years, Red Lake Economic Development and Planning has taken the food security concerns from the community meetings Chairman Seki organized in 2015. We began the planning process to build a Department of Agriculture for our community in 2017. Through the generous support of the Native American Agriculture Fund, Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council, NDN Collective, and the American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) funds allocated to Red Lake, we are excited to announce this year our food sovereignty plans will come to fruition for our community.

The Red Lake Department of Agriculture is broken up into three main divisions: Red Lake Buffalo Ranch, Gitigaan Acres, and Red Lake Hemp Farms. Each division supports the other with production of food, value added products, and advanced technology. There are three other divisions: Office of the Youth, Food Safety and Regulation, and Processing provides additional support to the three main divisions with a workforce, compliance and quality control, and scalability.

Red Lake Buffalo Ranch:

The Red Lake Buffalo Ranch has grown leaps and bounds. We will inaugurate the ranch with a new name next month during the full moon to coincide with our traditions. As you may remember, we started out with seven (7) buffalo, one (1) Bull, aka Jumbo, five (5) Cows and one (1) calf, aka Renegade. Renegade was the buffalo who escaped his first night before we turned the electric fence on and roamed our homelands to spread his medicine. When he first arrived on Red Lake a thunderstorm followed him.

Towards the end of spring and beginning of summer, five (5) new calves were born that added to our herd which totals twelve (12). Through the generous support of the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council and Wind Cave National Park, fifteen (15) more yearlings arrived on Red Lake this past November. This spring we are expecting another five (5) calves. We will keep you posted and hopefully our trail cams will be able to catch a birth. Wind Caves' buffalo bloodline is 100% compared to the bison/beef hybrids that are in various herds throughout Indian Country. The buffalo ranch has 280 acres currently fenced in and we will fence in 300 more acres this year. We will be constructing a processing facility for when we begin to harvest our first buffalos. We will invite members to come out and help with the harvest. We are planning to have our first buffalo harvest in 2023. As we move forward with the buffalo ranch, our plan is to train more members on caring for the buffalo through traditional/modern practices such as drone technology, constructing, maintaining, and repairing of fence, and invest in the youth to sustain our ranch in the years ahead. Like Fred says, "Come visit them." Their address is: 13150 596th Street, Gonvick, MN 56644

Beware of the electric fence, do not try to enter the fence area.

Gitigaan Acres:

We are planting numerous vegetables in our eight (8) acre plot along with strawberries, blueberries and rhubarb. We currently have 32 fruit trees of apples, plums, apricots and cherry varieties we planted in the fall of 2020. We will have a greenhouse installed this summer to train our members and youth in growing from seed. We want community members to come out and help construct the greenhouse. We will also be constructing two (2) high tunnels. High tunnels help extend the growing season. With the ARPA funds, we will construct a Pack shed facility to clean our vegetables and prepare for sale and distribution inside a large pole barn. This pole barn will also house a commercial grade kitchen to support our existing canning equipment to preserve our fresh organic vegetables.

One of our main goals is to plant an acre of potatoes, onions, celery and carrots as they are items that everyone uses in Red Lake. We will be teaching various ways of preserving the vegetables to ensure that we do not lose essential vitamins in the produce. Another important product we want to emphasize with produce is how to make your own baby food. We must ensure that we provide our precious babies of Red Lake with healthy nutritious food right from the start and sourced directly from Gitigaan Acres. Our plan is to deliver fresh vegetables to the local schools for their salad bar, to the Elderly Nutrition Program, and eventually to Red Lake Trading Post/Casinos.

You are not sovereign unless you can feed your people.

Red Lake Hemp Farms:

We are planting 140 acres of industrial hemp across from the Buffalo and adjacent to Gitigaan Acres. Our 140 acres is covered under crop insurance for the 2022 growing season. Hemp is a wonderful, old, but recently re-introduced back into the agriculture scene in the United States. There are so many uses for this plant that will advantageous for Red Lake.

This past month, we toured a hemp grain plant in North Dakota that makes hemp seed cake and cold-pressed hemp seed oil. The owner of the plant is a second generation grain farmer and he will help us grow our first hemp crop to ensure that we are doing it the correct way per his food quality specifications. He will buy most of our hemp seed and we will keep the hemp stalks. We will also keep some hemp seed to make our buffalo cakes out of the hemp seed cake and coated in maple syrup. Hemp seed cake is good for the buffalo digestion.

The value added products we will make from the hemp seed is a wild rice hemp bar. We are excited to bring this product to our members as it will be so nutritious. Hemp seeds are high in Omega 3's, Omega 6's, all the essential amino acids to sustain the human body, and one tablespoon packs ten (10) grams of protein. We hope to infuse hemp seeds, puffed wild rice, maple syrup, and pumpkin seeds to make these bars for our community and the protein/puffed bar retail market.

Unfortunately, Enbridge's Line 3 is only twelve (12) miles from the farm. We made it a priority in our five (5) year plan in case there is an oil leak to develop an absorbent out of the hemp stalks to absorb any oil that may leak into the ground water. We plan to achieve United States Department of Agriculture Bio-preferred certification for our farming business to market this oil absorbent to the surrounding state and national parks by year 2024.

As part of our plan, we are researching various other bio-based products to diversify our hemp division. We recently traveled to Oregon State University to tour the Global Hemp Innovation Center. They are researching different ways of utilizing the hemp plant to replace products that are made out of fossil fuel. We also toured a bio-based plant that uses Hemp pellets to make eating utensils and containers that will disintegrate in a matter of months versus years that it takes to breakdown styrofoam and plastic. One of the caveats of hemp is its ability to biodegrade in the natural environment. There are so many uses for this plant and so much more to learn. We want Red Lake to utilize and diversify hemp to support our food sovereignty for future generations.

I would like to take this time to thank the staff: Fred Auginash, our Buffalo Manager has been a huge asset to the buffalo program and its success along with James Kingbird. Dell Perkins is the Agriculture Coordinator, who has been overseeing our Gitigaan Acres and the growing of our test garden last year. This year, she will be sharing her gardening techniques that have been handed down by her family. She has also been a huge asset to the Agriculture Department. We would also like to thank Mr. Kade Ferris who assists with our grant writing for the Buffalo and gave me the courage to go for it. Marcus Grignon is our hemp consultant, who has been guiding us on our path to create a solid foundation for our hemp program. He also helps write our grants. A huge thank you to the Native American Agriculture Fund for getting us started on our path to food sovereignty with funding, thank you so much for your patience in understanding during the Covid-19 year(s). NDN Collective has provided us with much needed funds so we can train our members and along with Honor the Earth provided us funds for our solar trailers so we can make our farm not entirely dependent on electricity. First Nation Development Institute has been providing the department with technical assistance funds and infrastructure. They started us off with our first food grant called, "Seeds of Native Health." Shakopee Mdewankanton Sioux Community donated some farming equipment last summer, chi-miigwetch Shakopee. The Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council has provided the funds for our fencing, water source, supplemental feed and technical assistance. Thank you also to Red Lake Inc. for allowing to utilize some of the Red lake Farms land for these projects. Last and certainly not least, we thank the Red Lake Tribal Council and Joe Plumer for believing and making a dream come true for the citizens of the Red Lake Nation. Chi-miigwetch! If I forgot anyone, you will be recognized as I intend on keeping everyone updated on our progress out at the ranch.

Please take time to watch our video when our old buffalo herd met our new buffalo herd. The link is: http://www.youtube.com and search for Red Lake Buffalo.

Miigwetch, Cherilyn Spears, Project Coordinator