By Winona LaDuke
During one of the colder, iciest and foggiest days on the Lower Sioux Reservation in southwest Minnesota in mid-January, a team of four Anishinaabe men from the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota created an ideal green marriage of hemp and solar. There, 8th Fire Solar brought a solar thermal panel to install on a recently built hempcrete house – perhaps the perfect housing material of the future.
According to Danny Dejarlais, the Project Manager for the Morton, Minnesota-based Lower Sioux Hemp Program and Housing Project, “Hempcrete is resilient, flame retardant, and energy efficient. And now with a newly installed solar thermal panel from 8th Fire Solar, it can be pretty toasty, too. That’s the dream.”
For the past few years, the crew at Lower Sioux have been putting up hempcrete houses in their community and are way finders for tribal sustainable housing. Their latest set of houses includes some tiny homes, and there’s a lot of interest in hemp mixed with lime to create the hempcrete product. Dejarlais says that “after some initial skepticism from tribal leaders, interest remains high in using the natural material for a number of reasons:
“First, the hemphouse can be energy efficient, at least with a l4-inch wall that can both keep a place warm and keep a place cool.
“Second, the house is for the most part, fireproof: Hempcrete doesn’t burn easily and in this day and age of raging fires, that’s a bonus.
“Third, the house can be grown and built in a year. Think of it this way, it takes 40 years for a tree to get big enough to harvest for timber framing, but it takes100 days or so, for the fiber hemp to grow into something usable.
“Fourth, hemp sequesters carbon at the highest rate of any field crop, while concrete produces it. That means in a time when climate chaos is upon us, one of the main things we want to do is cut the amount of carbon we spew into the environment. Think of it this way, if concrete were a country, it would be the third largest source of C02 emissions in the world!”
Dejarlais says the Lower Sioux folks have been looking forward to working with the 8th Fire Solar team “to make this dream happen on our reservation for a while. Some of the folks from 8th fire came down last year, and we thought about doing a hempcrete solar thermal place. I was looking at those guys when they came in, and it was like looking in a mirror: those guys from 8th fire remind me of us and what we’re trying to with naturally-made products for homes.”
Led by 8th Fire Solar Program Coordinator, Gwe Gasco, the four-man team installed two small base heaters where it was 64 degrees in the house. “The thermal solar and hempcrete are going to provide enough warmth the with that new solar in there,” he says. “Hempcrete has its own thermal mass; those walls are going to hold that solar heat in. An electric heater might have to turn on in the middle of the night when it’s really cold, but that thermal mass is going to hold.”
Gasco noted that the project came to fruition when 8th Fire Solar discovered it had some funding left from a grant from the CERTS program and rural Development Sustasinability Partnerships for some workforce development installation. “We had already installed and trained at our location in Pine Point and had done an install at Battle Lake. But Danny had a hemphouse, and we checked it out to see if it was right for our solar thermal panels. It was.”
The visiting team picked the smallest house — a simple one bedroom — and did a simple installation of a 5-by-8-foot panel. It was a little different from our other installs,” Gasco said. “But those hempcrete walls were l4- inches thick, which makes for really good warming conditions. We had to take out some of the hempcrete for the panel, but we made it work.
”Next time, the best thing would be to provide the house with a pre-made set up for the solar panel. Overall though, we were really happy to be part of this project. For housing projects like this one on the Lower Sioux – or anywhere else for that matter – solar thermal and hempcrete are an efficient and cost-effective use of natural, sustainable products that are good for everyone and the environment.”
