Delegates attending the first ever Indigenous agriculture summit heard about some of the current First Nations ventures on Wednesday.
The summit is being held as part of this year’s Agribition in Regina.
The Cowesses First Nation is trying to establish a 500-head cow/calf operation specializing in high-grade Black Angus beef.
The band’s resource manager Denise Pelltier says Cowesses currently has about 180-head of cattle and has already positioned itself as a top breeder.
“We want to go into the genetics of the Black Angus because we have done our research on that it was the best choice to go with the Black Angus and we do have buyer interest,” she says. “We don’t have to come out and market them, the buyers come to us.”
The Little Black Bear Nation has its own orchard and has been growing Saskatoon berries since 2004.
Dan Bellegarde says the band recently doubled the size of the orchard, bought automated equipment to improve yields and wants to get into processing as well.
“We intend to do it within the next several years,” he says. “We now have a freezer truck that we can transport berries with, we have a mechanical harvester now that we just bought last fall and we expanded from a 10,000-tree orchard to a 20,000-tree orchard this past fall.”
This is the first summit of its kind in Canada and it is a first for the Western Canadian Agribition.
Organizers expect the Indigenous agriculture summit to be an annual event.
Summit chair Elmer Eashappie says hosting the event is a dream that took years to realize.
He adds he wants to make Indigenous people a key part of Agribition.
In 2011, Eashappie helped establish a First Nations pavilion at Agribition, which was also a first.