Piles of sawdust sit just downhill from the Peshawbestown Gitigaan, the farm of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, where local commercial fisheries drop off all the parts of a fish they don’t sell — heads, bones, organs, tails.
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A delicate, fishy smell emanates from the mounds; the few decomposing fish strewn on the ground are unusual, according to Will Derouin, the agricultural manager for the Grand Traverse Band.
“It's typically not even this messy,” he said. “We typically have it all covered up.”
Lots of material
Every week from April through October the tribe’s agriculture department accepts between 3,000 and 5,000 pounds of fish waste, delivered by local companies such as Carlson's Fishery in Leland, which dropped off about 3,000 pounds the day before.
The Grand Traverse Band is turning that waste into a compost and fertilizer called Gigook and Gitigaan, or Fish and Garden. They can be used to grow food and cut down on what it sends to the landfill, and are part of the Grand Traverse Band’s efforts to strengthen its food sovereignty.
In the field, Caleb Anderson is pulling weeds and tilling the soil. His family had used fish products to help fertilize their hemp farm in the past, but he wasn’t familiar with making the fertilizer until he started work with the tribe.
“Initially, a lot of people are pretty drawn back by just the smell, the look of it,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh, my God, it's a pile of guts.’ Okay, this is a pile of guts. But what can we do with this? What is it going to be and, like, what does it mean to us?”
The project is partly fueled by Michigan’s goals to reduce waste going to landfills and cut emissions. The state’s climate plan aims to boost its recycling rate to 45% and cut food waste going to landfills in half from 2005 levels by 2030.
The goal is to divert materials away from landfills, where they decompose and emit large amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. A few years ago, the tribe received a state grant for the fish fertilizer program of $400,000, and this year it got another for $205,000.
“Prior to this project, all of this waste was going to landfill, and this was a great way to utilize waste and create a pretty valuable product” in a region where compost can cost about $100 per yard, Derouin said. And while the tribe only just started selling the finished fertilizer this year, the project has saved them the work and money needed to bring the fish guts to the dump.
The process, and controlling the smell
To properly handle the fish, Derouin said, they use a tractor to make an indent in a heap of sawdust, put the fish waste inside, and then cap it with more sawdust. That sawdust acts as a filter, keeping the odor down, and is critical to addressing other concerns, such as animals like bears, raccoons and vultures.
Along with the more conventional compost, the tribe is working on a liquid fertilizer.
Next to the farm sits a warehouse funded largely through a state grant where Derouin points to big plastic jugs of brown liquid that sit along one side of the room.
For one batch, they grind up about 50 gallons of fish waste and mix it with molasses and water (one part fish, one part molasses, and three parts water). Those batches will sit for two to three months.
“We're standing next to probably about 1,200 pounds worth of rotting fish here in this barn,” Derouin said. “And it's amazing — you can't smell it.”
The project has led to a variety of collaborations. This summer, the agriculture department is working with a Michigan State University grad student, using both types of fertilizer at differing times and amounts to see how their squash plants will be affected. It’s also been informed by an international effort to use the entire fish.
Using the whole fish
The 100% Great Lakes Fish Initiative, run by the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors & Premiers, aims to grow the region’s economy and protect its environment. More than 40 companies have signed on to its pledge to use all of the commercially caught fish, including Treaty Fish Co., a local fishery that delivers its waste to the Grand Traverse Band.
The initiative invited officials from the Great Lakes, including Derouin, to Iceland to learn about what other places were doing with their fish waste and share their own efforts. It also connected Derouin with a biochemist in Canada to work out the process for creating the hydrolysate, called enzymatic fermentation.
“It will liquefy all of the bones, the scales,” Derouin said. “The enzymes that are actually present in the fish gut utilize the molasses as an energy source to chew through all those complex proteins and fats and try to break them down and turn it into a more bio-available fertilizer product.”
Concerns that the fish would introduce heavy metals like mercury into the soil led them to get samples tested at a lab in Texas. Those tests did detect mercury in the fertilizer, and while Derouin said the levels were relatively low — with averages less than .2 parts per million over — they’ll likely keep testing.
This work also draws on Anishinaabe traditions. The Grand Traverse Band’s food sovereignty program started in 2019. Tina Frankenberger, a tribal councilor, said the Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Department has grown since it started in 2019.
“We're there, we're providing food for us and for the local food pantries outside of [Grand Traverse Band] that the public also utilizes when people need food,” she said. “And that's huge, because it's that relationship of, we all live here together, and we need to work together to make big things happen,” including the fish fertilizer project.
Frankenberger, who worked as a fisheries biologist and has been growing food since she was a kid, said using fish to nurture plants is a longstanding practice. People’s grandparents would talk about planting corn when fish called suckers were running, taking the fish, “put them in the ground when they would plant their corn.” They also told her “how that was used to fertilize the ground and that relationship.”
Anderson, the farm hand, wants to see how projects like this can help Native farmers in the area, including his family. They plan to use the fish fertilizer on their hemp farm this year. Anderson thinks about it this way: ‘Okay, we made this, and now we can take it and feed it to our plants. And it’s just awesome.”
