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Originally published:

APRIL 2023
Vol. 109 Issue 4

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Stories In This Edition

Back to business
$200 million draws fire
Farmland values ease
Delta farmland gets new lease on life
Editorial: Genuine connection
Back 40: Different worldviews, common ground
Viewpoint: Unlocking an unsustainable trajectory
Crossroads ahead for BC farmland
Ag industry hub sparks regional interest in OK
Show offs
Ag Briefs: New “underused” home tax has a wide impact
Ag Briefs: Richard Ranch hosts bull sale
Ag Briefs: Canadian Foodgrains Bank supproted
Ag Briefs: Poultry leaders recognized
Province steps up surveillance after sting operation
Watershed strategy coulg hang ag out to dry
Flood victims struggle with recovery deadline
Sidebar: Disaster Financial Assistance funds inconsequential for producers
Rising ferry fares sink producer profits
Sidebar: Ferry traffic another hurdle for island producers
Fruit growers keep calm, carry on at convention
Signs of spring
Producers at a loss with elk damages
New AI insights shared at poultry conference
Birds of a feather
Sidebar: Vaccination under discussion
Potato growers buoyed by strong markets
Rising cost of dairy production drives agenda
Export markets focus of upbeat cherry meeting
Sidebar: Provincial survey tracks spread of Little Cherry Disease
Cranberry crop dips in 2022 but growers optimistic
New rules for pesticide applications
Sidebar: Spraying tips
Rodenticide restrictions now permanent
Homemade food rules are too restrictive
Sunflowers are multi-purpose helpers
Boosting value with great apples
Farm Story: Heavy lifting not a retirement plan
New soil assessment tool in development
Woodshed Chronicless: Just when things start going right, stuff happens
BC breeder wins national Jersey award
Jude’s Kitchen: Celebratory foods for friends and family

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4 weeks ago

It’s been four years since the last tulip festival was held in Abbotsford, but this year’s event promises to be an even bigger spectacle than ever. Spanning 27 acres along Marion Road, Lakeland Flowers will display more than 70 varieties of the spring blossom, including fringe tulips and double tulips, the first of six months of flower festivals hosted by the farm. Writer Sandra Tretick spoke with Lakeland Flowers owner Nick Warmerdam this spring to find out how the floods on Sumas Prairie in 2021 have had an impact on his business plan as he transitions from wholesale cut flower grower to agri-tourism. We've posted the story to our website this month. It's a good read.

#CLBC #countrylifeinbc #tulipfestival
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Tulip grower makes the shift to agritourism

www.countrylifeinbc.com

ABBOTSFORD – On a bright sunny day in early April, Nick Warmerdam points out his office window at No. 4 and Marion roads to a spot about half a kilometre away across the Trans-Canada Highway.
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Omg 🥹 Jared Huston let’s go pls

1 month ago

Farming, like any other job.. only you punch in at age 5 and never punch out 🚜 ... See MoreSee Less

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Easton Roseboom Levi Roseboom🚜

1 month ago

The province is allocating $15 million to be administered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC. for a perennial crop replant program benefitting tree fruit, hazelnut, berry and grape growers. The program aims to cover 100% of plant removal costs and 75% of replanting costs. Funds are also available for sector development. The new program replaces a suite of sector-specific replant programs and recognizes the importance of sector adaptation in the face of market, disease and weather challenges. ... See MoreSee Less

The province is allocating $15 million to be administered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC. for a perennial crop replant program benefitting tree fruit, hazelnut, berry and grape growers. The program aims to cover 100% of plant removal costs and 75% of replanting costs. Funds are also available for sector development. The new program replaces a suite of sector-specific replant programs and recognizes the importance of sector adaptation in the face of market, disease and weather challenges.
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1 month ago

Just a week after the Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials revoked the last primary control zones established in the Fraser Valley to control last fall’s outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, a new detection on April 29 at a commercial premises in Chilliwack underscored the risk of a spring wave. This is the first new detection since January 22, also in Chilliwack, and brings to 104 the number of premises affected since the current outbreak began April 13, 2022. The disease has impacted 3.7 million birds in BC over the past year. ... See MoreSee Less

Just a week after the Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials revoked the last primary control zones established in the Fraser Valley to control last fall’s outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, a new detection on April 29 at a commercial premises in Chilliwack underscored the risk of a spring wave. This is the first new detection since January 22, also in Chilliwack, and brings to 104 the number of premises affected since the current outbreak began April 13, 2022. The disease has impacted 3.7 million birds in BC over the past year.
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Any other details for FVN and chillTV please? radiodon11@gmail.com

1 month ago

The province is contributing $3.2 million for upgrades to the Barrowtown pump station in Abbotsford that was overwhelmed during the November 2021 flooding on Sumas Prairie, part of a collaborative approach to flood mitigation in the region. During a press conference at the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Food offices in Abbotsford today, the province said a collaborative approach that includes First Nations is needed as Abbotsford pursues a comprehensive flood mitigation strategy due to the potential impacts on Indigenous lands. Agriculture's interests will be represented by technical teams within the agriculture ministry. ... See MoreSee Less

The province is contributing $3.2 million for upgrades to the Barrowtown pump station in Abbotsford that was overwhelmed during the November 2021 flooding on Sumas Prairie, part of a collaborative approach to flood mitigation in the region. During a press conference at the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Food offices in Abbotsford today, the province said a collaborative approach that includes First Nations is needed as Abbotsford pursues a comprehensive flood mitigation strategy due to the potential impacts on Indigenous lands. Agricultures interests will be represented by technical teams within the agriculture ministry.
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I sure hope part of that money is to educate the people in charge of the pumps and drainage system! They just relayed on computers and weren’t even physically monitoring the water levels. I’ve lived in the Fraser Valley my whole life and the old guys managing that system know how to do it. The new generation just sit behind computer screens and don’t physically watch the water levels. That system works very well when you do it right. The Fraser river levels are very important. The system is designed to drain the Sumas Canal (the part that runs thru the valley) into the Fraser. When they let it get backed up it put pressure on the dyke and the weak part burst. Simple science. And yes, the dykes need to be worked on too. Abbotsford has not been maintaining properly for years.

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Crossroads ahead for BC farmland

The Agricultural Land Reserve remains vulnerable as it turns 50

Delta South MLA Ian Paton wants to see the province make good on a pledge to protect farmland at Brunswick Point in Delta in perpetuity as the ALR marks its 50th anniversary. RONDA PAYNE

March 29, 2023 byPeter Mitham

DELTA – Jutting out into the Strait of Georgia, the rich soils of Brunswick Point are a gift of the Fraser River’s run south from its headwaters in the Fraser Pass of the Rockies. The longest river in BC, the deposits here encapsulate the wealth of the province – a wealth fundamental to the most valuable farmland in Canada.

But others see a different kind of wealth. In 1968, the province expropriated thousands of acres as backup lands for port development at Roberts Bank.

When the lands weren’t needed, most were leased back to the previous owners for farming and 43 were eventually sold with the original families having right of first refusal. But the four families at Brunswick Point – the Swensons, Montgomerys, McKims and Gilmours – didn’t enjoy this privilege.

The province’s treaty settlement with Tsawwassen First Nation allowed the families to continue farming and gave them the right to buy the properties, totalling about 600 acres. But if the families declined to purchase the properties, TFN would be first in line. The families reached an agreement with the province in 2011 that would see the lands remain in the Agricultural Land Reserve and covenants put in place preserving them for soil-based agriculture and migratory bird habitat, but that never happened.

This prompted Delta South MLA Ian Paton to introduce a private member’s bill in March to ensure this takes place, his third bid to ensure lasting protection for the properties.

“People are just crazily adamant about preserving our good-quality pieces of farmland,” he says, noting the headline-grabbing fight over the potential loss of 305 acres of federally owned land in Surrey where the Heppell family grows vegetables.

But the long-standing and lingering issue of Brunswick Point, double the size and equally important given the thousands of tonnes of potatoes harvested there each year and its national importance as a site of variety trials, has simmered under the radar.

The concern underscores the importance of the Agricultural Land Reserve as it turns 50 years old this month. Brunswick Point was included from the beginning, but the ongoing threat to its future means vigilance remains essential for the long-term protection of it and other key properties.

Land freeze

The invocation of the land reserve is a shift from 1972, when the newly elected NDP government of Dave Barrett moved to head off a rush of subdivision applications with a land freeze, followed by the imposition of a reserve for farming with a suite of measures that were supposed to ensure farmers – whose right to develop their properties as they saw fit was immediately curtailed – could remain profitable independent of capital gains on their real estate.

Described by this paper as “one of the greatest uproars in BC history,” even farmers who had initially supported the idea were outraged when the government began sharing details for the land reserve in January 1973.

Many growers remain bitter, even as they’ve continued to farm in spite or as a result of the restrictions.

Ken Ellison, a former dairy farmer who now raises beef in the Cowichan Valley, describes the ALR as “the biggest hit the government’s ever dumped on the farmers.”

“Over the years, we’ve dealt with that reduction in assets. We’ve moved forward,” he says. “And we made a decision to continue farming, but guess why we made that decision? Because the government told us we had to farm it.”

But the legislation, known as Bill 42, passed, and on April 18, 1973, the ALR was born.

Setting boundaries

Joan Sawicki joined the new Agricultural Land Commission as a technician that summer, spending 18 months working to finalize the reserve’s boundaries. Proposals submitted by the regional districts provided a starting point, and ALC staff ultimately designated 11.6 million acres for inclusion, or about 5% of the province.

“It was an exhaustive project,” says Sawicki, now in her late 70s. “Historically, agriculture was always seen as the poor cousin of resource ministries, and there was always a so-called higher and best use. The ALR said no, in this zone, growing food is the highest and best use.”

Unlike recent moves to manage groundwater, land use wasn’t bound to a particular crop. A grower’s options were kept open to allow farms to adapt to changing circumstances.

“The title of our first public brochure was Keeping the Options Open, and to me that’s what this is all about, for the whole 50 years,” she says. “It was never intended … that every hectare of the ALR needs to be farmed. But it’s the options. … As long as we have the land, farmers have the option to adjust.”

But those options shouldn’t be taken for granted, something she feels government is prone to doing.

“Most decision-makers have never known British Columbia without the ALR. They take it for granted,” she says. “We can’t take it for granted because it is vulnerable. Not only from landowners.”

Recent reports show that other government priorities continue to trump agriculture. Just last year, an order in council authorized the “temporary exclusion” of 251 acres for gravel extraction to supply the Site C dam project, following on the exclusion of nearly 6,860 acres in 2015 for the dam’s headpond.

In 2016, 2,065 acres were excluded under the terms of the province’s treaty with the Tla’amin First Nation.

Last month, the province ordered 150 acres in Richmond excluded for a private composting facility, reducing the area protected by the ALR to less than 11.4 million acres

Sawicki says attention also needs to be given to safeguarding the province’s foodlands as the province moves to address reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

“We saw what happened in Tsawwassen,” she says, referring to the development of malls and warehouses on hundreds of acres of farmland removed from the ALR as part of the treaty struck with TFN. “Class 1 farmland is now one of the biggest shopping malls in North America.”

She sees a way forward in broadening the public understanding of how the land provides food.

“In our culture we tend to think of agriculture as crops that we plant,” she says. “But if part of our concept of meeting the challenge of reconciliation is ourselves expanding the concept of food … to embrace the other ways that the land produces food for humans, I think that’s a good thing.”

This is where Paton wants to see definitive protections for Brunswick Point, not to mention the 305 acres in Surrey currently subject to federal discussions with local First Nations.

“It would be fitting this year … that we make absolutely sure that these two prime pieces of agricultural land in Surrey and in Delta have a covenant put on them, that they remain agricultural land in perpetuity,” he says.

—With files from Kate Ayers

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