Article content continued

The modular farm at Dene High School was made possible thanks to a $250,000 grant from President’s Choice Children’s Charity in 2018. PC already funded the school’s breakfast and lunch programs, but wanted to do something more to engage the students.

“We really fell in love with La Loche,” said executive director Lisa Battistelli.

“Most people don’t realize: we live in a prosperous, big, beautiful country called Canada but there are children here in our communities that they don’t have access to the basic necessity of healthy food every day.”

A modular farm is an indoor vertical growing system. The group in La Loche can adjust the temperature, amount of water and pH of the water, for example, to grow plants year-round. The $250,000 covered the farm itself, shipping, a year’s worth of growing supplies and installation costs.

Decaux has also been incorporating the farm into the high school science curriculum. She teaches her students the requirements for plants to grow and about things like photosynthesis. It has revived the school’s horticulture class, which hadn’t been offered for several years.

“It’s pretty cool to see how excited they are to put a seed into the soil and see it become a plant that we can eventually harvest and eat, so the biggest thing is seeing it from seed to plate,” she said.

“It’s been rejuvenating, or a burst of energy for me as an educator, to see how influential hands-on experiential learning can be for students. The ability to literally pick a leaf of kale off the wall and eat it is not something that really would have ever been possible where we live without this type of technology.”