Lower Sioux Indian Community in Minnesota turns to hemp for sustainable housing solutions
The Lower Sioux Indian Community in southwest Minnesota is using hempcrete to address the community's housing and job needs.
After a decade of research and consulting some of the best hempcrete industry experts in the world, the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Minnesota is providing jobs and addressing the community’s need for housing through the Lower Sioux Hemp Program and Housing Project.
The program is the first in Minnesota to provide a “seed-to-wall” experience. Initially starting out with the license to grow around 62 acres of hemp in total, the program has expanded to grow 120 total acres of hemp in 2022. With the hope to continue expansion, the program began construction on a 2,000 acre hemp processing facility in 2023. The program grows, processes and builds the homes through the employment of local community members.
The Lower Sioux Indian community in Southwest Minnesota is using a unique product for sustainable housing solutions. As Kennedy Tesch reports, they are growing hemp to make materials for building their own homes.
“We have a fully integrated, circular economy, if you will, here with the hemp program where we are the growers, the processors and the builders. We are also our own customers,” said Danny Desjarlais, project manager for the Lower Sioux Hemp Program and Housing Project.
Desjarlais grew up tagging along with his dad on different building projects starting at the age of just 10 years old. After attending carpentry school and then a hemp building summit in Austin, Texas, he was able to learn about the hempcrete building industry, something he says he was skeptical about at first, but he can now attest to its benefits.
“If you just were to replace your wall insulation with the hempcrete and take out all of the other toxic products that you use that the hempcrete replaces, you're dropping your carbon footprint quite a bit on that building,” Desjarlais said. “Your total embodied carbon drops by a lot. You're using an all-natural building product that is mold resistant, fire resistant and pest resistant as well.”
Along with sequestering carbon, the hempcrete buildings also boast being 100% recyclable.
“For conventional builds, if we were to tear down a house or remodel a house, all of that waste is going to landfills whereas hempcrete, none of it is going to go to a landfill,” Desjarlais said. “All of that can get ground backup and put into the next mix, put into the next wall, your next build or your next block, whatever you're going to make. I think that's really big, is the 100% recyclable part of them.”
Desjarlais points out that the word hempcrete can be somewhat misleading as it can make people think it is like concrete, but that’s not the case. Hempcrete is non-load bearing, so there still must be some type of structure such as wood or steel in the wall assembly. The hempcrete mainly acts as the insulation.
“It also is a lot cleaner because the wall assemblies that we do now, it's all petrochemicals, plastics and different toxic materials, whereas hempcrete is just the inside of the stem of a hemp plant, a line based binder and water, so it's all-natural building material,” Desjarlais said. “It’s like a win, win, win across the board.”
Joseph Goodthunder, agriculture coordinator for the Lower Sioux Hemp Program and Housing Project, grew up farming corn, soybeans and cattle with his grandpa. He is now in charge of raising the program’s hemp supply.
Goodthunder farms a corn, soybeans and hemp rotation and has seen a significant yield bump of almost 20 bushels per acre in one field after implementing hemp into the rotation.
“It’s a great crop to grow. You plant it, then in 90 days it's done. We bail it up and then we take it to processing. We take it through a tug grinder, and then we run it through a hammer mill that separates the fiber and hurd. Then we put it on a shaker table and take them away from each other even more. The fiber goes into one bag and the hurd goes in the other,” Good Thunder said. “There's 25,000 different ways to use a hemp plant, and we're just kind of using it for one right now but we're hoping to get into more opportunities.”
One aspect of hemp farming Goodthunder had to get used to that differs from his background is the low maintenance required to grow the crop.
“We're so used to cutting it, bailing it and getting it dried. Or cut it, rake it, get it dried or whatever, and then bail it. With hemp, it sits out in the field after you cut it for about four weeks, so then the fiber pulls away from the hurd,” Goodthunder said. “That was kind of a struggle for me because coming from a cattle farm, getting that bailed up before a snow storm is what I am used to.”
Like many rural areas, the Lower Sioux Indian Community is in need of housing. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the community at the time of the census had 154 total housing units, and only one was vacant.
With three house builds completed and one still in construction, the program hopes to continue to grow.
“We still have a lot to learn. We're learning along the way. We built three houses in seven months and so we really haven't had a chance to stop and take it all in,” Desjarlais said. “Each one of the guys on the crew could go start their own crew now, and we need a lot of houses here in the community. Where I would hope it would go is expanding the crew and having more crews going and more builds going at once.”
While Desjarlais says there has been some interest for the crew to do builds outside of the community, the impact this program has on their own community is the main focus.
“A lot of people have been reaching out but we keep saying we have to take care of home first,” he said. “I think what we're going to offer is a workforce development type of thing where we offer people to come in and help us build some houses, and then they can take that back to their communities. In the future, I think we'll be able to go out to other communities and help them too, but we have to take care of home first.”
