The Heart of a Regenerative Food System With community members leading the way, Makoce Agriculture Development launches the creation of the Pine Ridge Reservation’s first food hub.
When Nick Hernandez founded Makoce Agriculture Development in 2019, his vision wove together two interconnected components: an abundance of nourishing, locally-grown foods and a healthy, thriving, deeply connected community.
Three years later, Makoce is in the midst of realizing that vision through the development of its Food Hub–set to become the beating heart of the Pine Ridge Reservation’s local, regenerative, community-led food system.
“There is so much knowledge, commitment, and untapped innovation on Pine Ridge. At the same time, there’s a deep desire among community members to have fresh, nourishing, traditionally Indigenous foods accessible here on our homeland, and to move away from the highly processed diets that have harmed us,” explained Nick. “The Food Hub will become a central gathering space for local producers, chefs, educators, and community members to offer products, share ideas, and spark inspiration around building a collaborative, regenerative food system.”
Nick fought for over two years to gain access to the 24 acres of land that will serve as the Hub’s physical location, which will include a commercial kitchen, coffee shop, deli, and meeting and coworking spaces. Given the reality that colonial policies still actively restrict land use on the reservation, it wasn’t easy–but Makoce was able to secure the largest business lease of tribally allotted land to date. With that lease in place, Nick and his team are moving at full speed to bring the Food Hub to life.
Community Insight Leads the Way
To ensure that the Hub reflects the community’s collective vision for a local food system, Makoce created a Community Advisory Committee, including cultural food leaders, business leaders, youth, educators, and advocates, to help guide the development of the Hub from start to finish. The group first came together this winter to develop a shared vision for the Hub–defining why a Food Hub is so urgently needed and how it will serve diverse individuals and families across the reservation.
An illustration capturing the Hub’s mission and vision as defined by the Makoce’s community advisory group.
Advisory Committee member Randilynn Boucher felt drawn to Makoce’s work because of its intentional focus on engaging youth in the process of building a sustainable local food system. As an educator and as a parent, Randilynn has focused on awakening childrens’ deep connection to and relationship with the land. She has integrated science-based learning with traditional practices of growing, nurturing, and harvesting nutritious foods to inspire her students and her own four daughters.
“Both my grandmothers in Arizona and Nebraska were gardeners and planters. Harvesting was a very big part of our family life on both sides. We knew that what we were bringing in from the garden, or the game that we were hunting, would sustain us through the coming year. I wanted to instill that mentality in my own children as well as my students–so that they would understand the importance of our traditional foods, how they were used by our ancestors, and what it means to be able to sustain ourselves by caring for the land,” said Randi.
Randi and her fellow community advisors each bring a unique lens and perspective to Makoce’s work. But all of them share a deep belief in the need for a local food system that is grounded in Lakota culture and that can support the health and wellbeing of community members.
“When we look around us in our community, we see the lack of access to nutritious food and the toll it has taken on the health of our relatives. When you go into the grocery store here in Pine Ridge, there's only a very small selection of produce, and it’s either picked too early–so it doesn't have the nutrient content that it needs in order to really give you what you need–or it’s covered in chemicals like pesticides or wax. All these things add up to the challenges we face today,” said Randi. She believes that non western, land-based learning–providing students with opportunities to study topics like soil health, land management, and prairie restoration through reintroduction of buffalo–will awaken a new generation of traditional knowledge carriers. For Randi, the Hub’s educational components will provide essential support to young people as they emerge as leaders in the work of achieving food sovereignty.
Randi’s fellow advisor Kim Tilsen Brave Heart–a prominent Indigenous chef and entrepreneur who is focused on supporting the empowerment and wellbeing of her community–agrees that food is central to renewing physical, social, and cultural health.
“People are literally sick from the dominant culture's foods, from diabetes and heart disease to cancer. Our Indigenous foods are sacred, and when we reclaim them, and return to using food once again as medicine, our bodies and brains work better. We’re able to thrive,” shared Kim. “Once a woman I cooked for told me that my food–traditionally Indigenous food–-felt like love. Returning to those foods, and to the experiences of harvesting and preparing traditional foods, isn’t taking a step backwards in time. It’s about renewing and reclaiming who we are as Indigenous people.”
Daniel Clifford, the owner of a barbecue catering company on Pine Ridge and another member of the Community Advisory Committee, believes the Food Hub lays the groundwork for reaching the crucial goal of food sovereignty.
“We’re been dependent for so long–from historical government food rations to today’s outsourced food being trucked into the reservation,” he said. “I’ve always believed that having our own food sources will put power back into our own hands. The Hub will support that in so many ways, whether it’s through learning how to plant a garden, or start your own food-related business. I believe it will bring people together, from our youngest kids to our elders, as we push toward food sovereignty.”
Bringing the Hub to Life: Makoce’s Innovative Community-Led Planning Process
With community leaders engaged in outlining a vision for the Hub, the next step was beginning a meaningful, community-centered planning process that would translate ideas and concepts into a blueprint for a Hub’s physical space. Makoce reached out to reconnect and partner with a group of planners and architects who brought deep experience working with Indigenous-led organizations on Pine Ridge. This past January, the full group–including staff, architects, planners, and community advisors–came together to imagine a site that would integrate Lakota culture, language, spirituality, and community into innovative physical, environmental, land-based systems.
Christina Hoxie, a regional and community planner who first met Nick while supporting Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation in developing a comprehensive, sustainable regional plan for the reservation, was thrilled to learn about Makoce’s vision for the Food Hub. She could immediately see the impact that this community-centered facility could have in supporting renewal and wellbeing.
“This work will drive major systems change to bring about better economic circumstances, environmental health, and just a higher level of community resilience on Pine Ridge,” said Christina. “I think what Makoce is creating can serve as a real model for the rest of the world in lifting up Indigenous wisdom and innovation to support our communities and strengthen our relationship to the earth.”
Through the Community Advisory Committee’s initial meeting, Christina and her project partner, architect Josh Hemberger, gathered “an enormous amount of raw data” around the Hub’s purpose and the community needs it must address. From there, they began the process of distilling those ideas into a core framework for the Hub’s conceptual design.
“We set out to create a site plan that reflects priorities as they were defined by the community,” said Josh. “We wanted to do more than just identify where each building would go, and how different physical spaces would be used. We wanted to be able to illustrate how the facility’s design would support the community’s goals for the Hub–creating unique spaces to support operations, spark innovation, encourage learning, and celebrate in a shared space.”
After creating seven different iterations of a site plan, the Community Advisory Committee came together for its second strategy meeting with Josh and Christina. Through continued reflection, the full group was able to identify one approach for a site plan that reflected the community’s specific objectives and overall vision. With that set of key schematics in mind, Josh and Christina’s teams have begun the work of determining how the Hub’s many components–from land and water-based systems to the engineering of various structures–can all work together in harmony to support community members and the land itself.
“We’re working now to imagine how all these systems connect with one another to support community members while being as sustainable, as light on the earth as possible,” said Christina. “With inspiration from Makoce’s team, we’re focused on using our best conservation practices, during construction and after, to heal the land and bring it back to its most highly productive state. We want to protect its diverse ecosystems and species, and to encourage the community to engage with its vibrancy.”
With a plan for the Hub taking shape, Josh and his team are beginning to create more specific renderings of what the Hub various components will offer the community. Ron Batcher, an architect with the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, is working alongside Josh and Christina to provide additional technical assistance on how to develop effective systems for providing wholesome, high-quality food for consumers.
Ron and his team first worked first to understand Makoce’s vision and the community’s unique needs around food–and then began to drill down into the technical details.
“Every food hub is different, so we needed to define the specific components Nick and his team were visualizing. We start at the 30,000 foot level, and then work down to the nitty gritty of what a facility will need to meet community needs,” said Ron. “Through our conversations, we were able to ask key questions that revealed how the space could be designed–about the capacity of the kitchen, storage space for produce and chicken, about the loading dock and how trucks will access the facility.”
But it wasn’t until Ron was on the ground in Pine Ridge during a site visit when Makoce’s expansive vision for the Hub became clear. From a USDA-certified poultry processing and storage facility to expanded capacity for vegetable and traditional plant farming, the Hub will drive the availability of sustainable food across the reservation through a truly multifaceted approach.
“Once we were able to understand how many people the Hub will serve, the number of farmers and producers involved, and how the community will engage with them, it became clear how comprehensive this Hub will really be,” said Ron. “All of that data allows us to make sure we’re designing a facility that truly aligns with the community’s vision and the changes community members want to see.”
Both Christina and Josh agree that the Hub will have a profound effect on community wellbeing.
“With the passion of Nick’s team, including the Advisory Committee members, this is going to have such a powerful impact on the community,” Josh shared. “Their mission is so clear, and it’s so rewarding to help turn their vision into something that will serve the community for generations to come.”
Now, as the Hub begins to take shape, Randi is also beginning to imagine what building the Food Hub will mean for Pine Ridge communities. Her hopes are centered on the ways that nourishing foods can deepen community connections and support a new sense of wellness across the reservation.
“Through the creation of this Food Hub, I hope we can inspire others to plant gardens, and to create more Food Hubs in our communities across the reservation,” she said. “I hope our community will start to recognize their own capability to grow and harvest nourishing food–and that being connected back to the land, and to our own traditional foods, can restore our balance and support us physically, mentally and emotionally. I think we’re really on the way to that happening.”
