Walipini impacts food insecurity in Logan

Just one mile off Utah State University’s Logan campus is Walipini Impact, an underground greenhouse growing fresh produce to donate to the community.

Jessie Miller, president and chief executive officer of Walipini Impact, created the organization because of experiences he had growing up.

“I grew up in a food-insecure household. My father was disabled, and my mother never had the opportunity to get an education, so she was always working low-wage jobs,” Miller said. “That meant that there weren’t a lot of resources to go around in the house.”

Miller said his family ended up relying on the food pantry a lot growing up, and he began to notice things about the food they picked up.

“There were a lot of cupcakes and donuts and birthday cakes that had been expired for maybe a few weeks, and other than that, you might get canned food that most of the time expired,” Miller said. “Sometimes, you would find some cans of ravioli that weren’t expired, and those were the highlights of the visits.”

Tifiny Mills, secretary and chief impact officer of the organization said she had similar experiences growing up on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation in Southwest Colorado.

“My community also relied on commodities, which is similar to the food pantry,” Mills said. “A lot of it was canned food as well as non-perishables, so fresh food wasn’t accessible.”

As an adult, Miller wanted to help others so they wouldn’t have to go through the same things.

“At first, I started growing food and putting it on the sidewalk so people could grab it as they would walk past,” Miller said. “We live on a pretty busy street, so all the food would always get taken, but I wanted to donate more, so we started doing more donations to the food pantry.”

Miller said after he started donating, he realized he couldn’t grow fresh foods during winter, and there weren’t many solutions to make them accessible for people.

“I started researching and exploring this walipini system down in Peru a tribe was using to help grow food through the winter,” Miller said. “I thought that maybe that would work here and maybe we could use it as a system so that we could grow food year round just for the purpose of donating it.”

Walipini greenhouses are a type of low-cost, underground greenhouse that offer year-round growing potential by leveraging geothermal heat and solar radiation. After doing some research, Miller began building one in 2020. 

“We finished the structure last year,” Miller said. “We didn’t have a lot of access to resources, so it kind of took a while to build it all by hand. This has been our first year growing food through the winter.” 

Samuel Kelley, chief marketing officer, said the project is now helping to provide nutritious fresh food to the community, specifically through USU’s Student Nutrition Access Center. 

“We actually did a test recently and found that we could harvest the food at our greenhouse and get it to SNAC within 38 minutes,” Miller said. “We really like donating to SNAC because they currently have no reliable avenues for fresh foods. The need is great, and that is our community, so we want to do what we can to support and work with them.”

Miller said it is important fresh foods are consumed quickly after they have been harvested, and the project helps people in need get access to these locally-grown fresh foods while they are still nutrient-rich. 

“Within five days, some fresh foods can lose up to 95% of their nutritional value,” Miller said. “A lot of our fresh foods are grown in places like California, South America and Florida, and by the time those foods reach us, they are already at least one to two weeks old. Sometimes, you’re eating an apple that’s over six months old.”

Going forward, the organization has many goals to make the world a better place. 

“Long term, we want to essentially feed the world,” Miller said. “We want to take the walipini project as far as we can in that sense. For more short-term goals, by 2030, we want to build 10 of these systems outside of the United States.”

Mills said they will be building a walipini system in Uganda soon, which will function within their environment.

If students want to get involved with or donate to Walipini Impact, they can visit walipiniimpact.com or their Instagram profile at @walipini_company.