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Originally published:

July 2018
Vol. 104 Issue 7

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Stories In This Edition

Sweet basil

Committee cancels meetings

Sidebar: Greater co-ordination; less conflict

Prince George packing plant gets further study

Sidebar: Co-op model lets producers pocket profits

Editorial: Buy the billions

Back Forty: Canada isn’t the cure for what ails US dairy

OpEd: Dairy industry will endure current trade issues

ALC allegations nix Delta farmer’s vision

Letters: Elk know no boundaries

Precautions taken against Japanese beetle

Great spring for nurseries

Chicken pricing formula isn’t right

Pitt crew

Criteria for Crown tenure still unclear

McClary’s leased to Aquilinis

Strawberries kick berry season off to good start

Food advocates grapple with rural-urban interface

Research updates presented to cherry growers

New farmers need to research livestock needs

Time for tea

Ag Brief: Farmers still waiting on new ag waste regs

Ag Brief: Drought watch

AgBrief: Good to meet ewe

Ag Brief: Staff change at FF/CF

Ag Brief: Market trail

Riparian restorations benefit from farm funding

Young Farmers network at Okanagan tour

Salmon Arm fleece brings top dollar

Perseverance, ingenuity aid haskap harvest

BC ranchers praised for wildfire response

Committee work pinpoints rancher priorities

Mentorship program helps expand horizons

Tour gives public insight to dairy farming

Island welcomes Angus breeders

Experts weigh in on future of raspberry cultivars

Preparation, customer service key to market success

Top 10 list for market success

UVF ag curriculum continues to diversify

Research: Going green

Buy BC relaunched

Farm camps for kids

Henderson continues on crash course

Jude’s Kitchen: It’s easy to make July veggie month

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4 days ago

A standing-room only crowd of more than 250 people attended a public hearing the Agricultural Land Commission hosted in Langley Monday night regarding a proposal to include 305 acres controlled by the federal government in the Agricultural Land Reserve. More than 76,000 people have signed an online petition asking municipal and provincial governments to protect the land from development, and for the federal government to grant a long-term lease to the Heppells. Read more in this morning's Farm News Update from Country Life in BC. conta.cc/3XYXw6k ... See MoreSee Less

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Your weekly farm news update

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The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915 January 25 2023 Surrey ALR inclusion cheered A standing-room only crowd of more than 250 people attended a public hearing the Agricultural L
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Mike Manion Pitt Meadows City Councillor

1 month ago

Christmas tree growers in BC are seeing strong demand this season and prices remain comparable to last year. But the number of tree farms has decreased dramatically over the past five years and the province will increasingly need to look elsewhere if it wants to meet local demand. More in this week's Farm News Update from Country Life in BC. ... See MoreSee Less

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Christmas trees in demand

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Christmas tree growers in BC are seeing strong demand, with high quality trees making it to market. “The market is good. We’ll probably outdo last year and last year was one of our best years…
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2 months ago

Another four poultry flocks in the Fraser Valley have tested positive for avian influenza over the weekend -- 15 in the last week alone. There are 60 farms currently under quarantine in BC, more than any other province in Canada and three times that of Alberta, which ranks second. Officials maintain the virus is being spread by dust and groundwater and not farm-to-farm transmission. No farms in the Interior have tested positive this fall. ... See MoreSee Less

Another four poultry flocks in the Fraser Valley have tested positive for avian influenza over the weekend -- 15 in the last week alone. There are 60 farms currently under quarantine in BC, more than any other province in Canada and three times that of Alberta, which ranks second. Officials maintain the virus is being spread by dust and groundwater and not farm-to-farm transmission. No farms in the Interior have tested positive this fall.
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Avian influenza virus can be killed by chlorine at no higher a concentration than is present in drinking water, so unless farms are using untreated groundwater in their barns I don't see how it could be a source of transmission. www.researchgate.net/publication/5594208_Chlorine_Inactivation_of_Highly_Pathogenic_Avian_Influen...

2 months ago

In a surprise move, Lana Popham -- hailed at the recent BC Dairy Industry Conference as a key ally of the agriculture sector -- has been replaced by Abbotsford-Mission MLA Pam Alexis as part of a cabinet overhaul today by new BC premier David Eby. Popham will now oversee Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport. The two ministers worked closely together following the atmospheric river events last fall. ... See MoreSee Less

In a surprise move, Lana Popham -- hailed at the recent BC Dairy Industry Conference as a key ally of the agriculture sector -- has been replaced by Abbotsford-Mission MLA Pam Alexis as part of a cabinet overhaul today by new BC premier David Eby. Popham will now oversee Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport. The two ministers worked closely together following the atmospheric river events last fall.Image attachment
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Goes to show how far-removed our current government is from the agricultural sector. To put someone in this position who has no farming background is a slap in the face to all of our hard-working producers.

Going to be a heck of a learning curve. Helping the agricultural community recover from the biggest natural disasters in history, handling the avian influenza outbreak that is threatening our poultry industry, dealing with a crisis in meat processing, managing ongoing threats from climate change, supporting producers who are facing unprecedented inflation in an industry with very slim margins to begin with..... to name a few of the challenges our new Minister will have to face all with one of the lowest budgets of any ministry. I wish her the best of luck but I hope she's got a lot of support around her.

Best of wishes in your new position

Congrats to Pam, cool to see a Fraser Valley based ag minister but also so sad to see Lana reassigned . I have no doubt she will do an amazing job in her new role.

Will be missed by #meiernation

Bryce Rashleigh

Nooooooo!

Lana did a shit job and now we have a minister with no farming background at all. Aren’t we lucky..

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2 months ago

The scale of this year's avian flu outbreak now rivals the massive outbreak of 2004. An additional 13 commercial farms in the Fraser Valley have tested positive in the last week. To date, 49 commercial farms and 1.2 million birds have been impacted. CFIA is struggling to keep up with depopulation of sick birds. ... See MoreSee Less

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AI outbreak rivals 2004

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The scale of this year’s outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza now rivals the massive outbreak of 2004 that saw farms throughout the Fraser Valley depopulated. An additional 13 commercial…
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Commercial operations need to reevaluate their stocking densities and overall health and welfare of the animals within their systems if they are ever going to have a fighting chance against this virus.

Yup cause food shortage

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ALC allegations nix Delta farmer’s vision

Cranberry venture bogged down in legal wrangling

July 1, 2018 bySean Hitrec

DELTA – Don Malenstyn has all but given up on his career and passion after losing an appeal of a remediation and stop-work order from the Agricultural Land Commission.

“I didn’t think I’d ever say it, but I’m done. This is ridiculous. This is 54 years of my life completely wasted,” he says, surveying the 80-acre property where he was raised.

The property now hangs in a state of limbo, eight years after his efforts to work with the local water table incurred the wrath of neighbours and the ALC.

Years of losing his potato crop to summer flooding prompted Malenstyn to take matters into his own hands and begin filling the property with a view to growing cranberries and leaving his son an arable property.

The water woes started more than 20 years ago when Delta began pumping water from the Fraser River into irrigation ditches along 104th Street. Malenstyn’s property is one of the lowest in Delta; some areas dip below sea level.

“I’ve had 89% of my [potato] crop lost. That was 2001, the year my son was born, and I worked three other jobs to support the farm. I didn’t see money till 2005 from Delta,” he says, referring to an out-of-court settlement.

Malenstyn adds that salinity from the Fraser River salt wedge and leaks in his neighbour’s septic tank flow into his ditch. To solve the problem, he created a four-metre-deep, above-ground reservoir, with plans to have his own closed-loop filtration system for his cranberry bogs (which need fresh water all-year round).

Malenstyn, who had accepted fill from Delta to help fix his water problem since 1996 without issue, began accepting fill in larger quantities from local developers in 2009 to complete the work.

But the new deliveries attracted greater scrutiny than in the past, thanks to concerns over illegal fill operations. With booming development in the Lower Mainland, it was often cheaper for companies to pay landowners to take fill than to transport it to designated fill sites. But the Agricultural Land Commission Act says landowners need to seek approval before accepting fill.

“There’s a lot of fill looking for a place to land,” says ALC director of policy and planning Martin Collins. “The reality is … the money you can get for [taking fill] can ruin a property forever for agriculture, yet pay for the property.”

In 2010, the ALC ordered Malenstyn to stop receiving fill because it didn’t see how it was for farm use. He gave the ALC a farm plan made with agrologist Danny Grant a month later and says he stopped receiving fill in 2011.

He built his reservoir and two cranberry cells (by stripping the land, putting fill down and then placing the original soil on top) before he was stopped again.

The ALC issued a stop-work and remediation order to Malenstyn in May 2017, instructing him to remove all the material, save his cranberry bogs, from the property and appropriately dispose of it at an “authorized disposal site.”

Malenstyn says he made enough from fill deliveries to cover most of the costs of converting his property to cranberry bogs. Yet after consulting a second agrologist, Gordon Butt, creating a farm plan, having WCB inspect the safety of his reservoir and hiring a lawyer for help, he appealed the order and was rejected in late January 2018.

The appeal panel of four representatives from the ALC suspected he was taking the fill for profit. Among other things, they charged him with the task of proving he was not guilty of this by revealing the income he made.

“The Appeal Panel considers that the motivation for the above ground reservoir may have been the income that could be received from fees,” the panel’s decision says.

Malenstyn did not, nor was he required, to share his income with the ALC according to his lawyer, Alastair Wade.

This wasn’t the only aspect of the appeal process that struck Wade as abnormal.

Wade specializes in litigation with nonjudicial bodies such as the ALC and says he had just two hours to present Malenstyn’s case, where the norm is “as much time as you need.” Nor was Malenstyn given a chance to respond to points the ALC raised in the final ruling.

“Under the Farm Practices Act, you have the right to make dikes and you have the right to make roads on your property and you have the right to farm it in accordance with appropriate farm practices. Mr. Malenstyn produced not one, but two different agrologists which supported his plan to make this a productive cranberry bog,” Wade says.

But what about seeking approval for taking fill?

“The appellant didn’t seem to think that he had to have any approval at all,” Collins says. “We have a decade or more of filling [on Malenstyn’s property]. [He’s] not really growing any substantive amount of cranberries and yet we have this infrastructure that’s beyond typical; in fact it’s the only one of its kind in the Fraser Valley.”

Malenstyn says his farm plan shows that he was using the fill for farm use and he can’t farm a “substantive amount” of cranberries because he’s unable to complete construction.

“In the end it’s a difficult call,” says Collins, referring to the ALC’s speculation about Malenstyn’s plans. “Ascribing motivations is very chancy. When we said ‘may,’ we don’t really know, but we just are going by normal farm practice and procedure that is followed by everybody else and he’s outside of those bounds.”

Wade says that ignores how farming works in the real world.

“The mere fact that some people don’t grow cranberries the same way as other people grow cranberries doesn’t make one right and one wrong,” he says. “It’s just a different way of doing it.”

Malenstyn now grows cow corn and sells pigs and fresh eggs, which together barely pay his bills.

And it’s certainly not enough to fund compliance with the ALC’s order, or take further steps to transform his property into productive farmland in one of the most fertile parts of BC.

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