Paving the way to help reclaim former industrial sites with native plants, Nupqu Resource Limited has recently launched its operation out of Cranbrook, making it the largest Indigenous-owned plant nursery in Canada.
“Over the last four years, we have built up that capacity at our site on the Aq’am First Nation Community Lands, where we grow up to 700,000 seedlings a year,” said Aaron Higgs, president Nupqu Resource Limited Partnership
The company has recently invested in a state-of-the-art lab facility to expand the native plant industry. It also operates eight greenhouses to meet growing demand.
“We have the eight greenhouses that we grow grasses, shrubs, some conifer species, and some deciduous trees- any of the 55 different species we work with in any given year,” said Higgs.
“We have a shop facility on site where we do a lot of our production of mixing trays and getting soil in trays and wrapping plugs. From there, we have a large storage facility for our materials and inputs.”
Higgs said most of the plants are used for reclaiming disturbed land, with Elk Valley Resources being their largest buyer.
“This current year, their order was about 2.5 million seedlings, which we grew 700,000 of them, and then we provided the rest through subcontractors, and provide oversight of the whole program.”
“We collect all the seed by hand in the wild, for that program, which this year was around 10 to 12 million seeds that we collected.”
“We clean all the seed, we prep it all, and then we distribute it to the different nurseries for growing.”
Other projects the company has supplied seedlings for include the Kicking Horse Canyon road project and the TC Energy West pipeline.
“Our goal is to create an Indigenous-led native plant cooperative in B.C. We have spent the last five years building our expertise, experience and knowledge, and we are ready to share that with the province.”
Be the first to know! Don’t miss out on breaking news and daily updates in your area. Sign up to MyEastKootenayNow News Alerts.
