• Menu
  • Skip to right header navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Country Life In BC Logo

The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915

  • Headlines
  • Calendar
  • Subscribe
  • Advertise
  • About
  • Archives
  • Contact
  • Search
  • Headlines
  • Calendar
  • Subscribe
  • Advertise
  • About
  • Archives
  • Contact
  • Search

Primary Sidebar

Originally published:

January 2019
Vol. 105 Issue 1

Subscribe Now!

Sign up for free weekly FARM NEWS UPDATES

Select list(s) to subscribe to


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: Country Life in BC, 36 Dale Road, Enderby, BC, V0E1V4. You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact
Your information will not be
shared or sold ever

Stories In This Edition

Victoria tweaks ALR rules

Ranch must allow anglers

Grappling with challenges

Editorial: Learning from leopards

Back forty: Livestock protection is a grey matter

Viewpoint: One zone shows foresight as BC ag evolves

Popham pursues ambitious agenda as 2019 arrives

Milk stocks rebuild but skimmed milk an issue

Holstein spring show grows, moves to Chilliwack

Dairy producers withhold national levies

Wave of retirements sweeps through dairy associations

Fund aims to give BC fruit growers a competitive edge

Ag Brief: New chair for Farm Industry Review Board

Ag Brief: BC Tree Fruits shake-up

Ag Brief: Thompson retires from dairy centre

New trap set to reduce Okanagan starling flocks

Consumer prices could buoy farm cash receipts

BC potatoes yield increase in 2018

‘Green rush’ overwhelms OK planning staff

Show, gala showcases BC agriculture

Hort show covers buds to spuds

Sidebar: Budding interest

Spotlight on dairy, innovation

Popular dairy tour showcases diversity

Overseas markets demand top quality

Sidebar: Gerbrandt coordinates berry research

Local seed initiative shifts focus to economics

Big dreams for small pepper growers

Cattle feeders bullish on packing plant

Research: Increasing green fodder could decrease allergies

Beekeepers learn to defend against wildlife

Online platform connects producers, consumers

Public trust programming to expand in 2019

Farmers institutes meet to forge connections

The rock road of water buffalo in BC

Wannabe: Pulling together

Woodshed: Deborah finds it’s better to give than receive

Jude’s Kitchen: Start healthy

More Headlines

Follow us on Facebook

Comments Box SVG iconsUsed for the like, share, comment, and reaction icons

7 days ago

Farmland Advantage is receiving a $445,000 grant from the federal government. The program, the “brainchild” of Invermere cattle rancher Dave Zehnder, provides compensation to farmers for their conservation efforts to protect BC’s grasslands, riparian areas and wildlife habitat. The funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada under the Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL) and Priority Places programs, will be administered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC. Rewarding farmers for enhancing riparian areas appeared in our March 2022 edition and you can view it at ... See MoreSee Less

Link thumbnail

Rewarding farmers for enhancing riparian areas

buff.ly

INVERMERE – Farmers and ranchers in the Columbia Valley will continue to see rewards for taking action to conserve and enhance important riparian areas on their farms. The Windermere District Farmer...
View Comments
  • Likes: 1
  • Shares: 0
  • Comments: 0

Comment on Facebook

2 weeks 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

Link thumbnail

Your weekly farm news update

web-extract.constantcontact.com

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
View Comments
  • Likes: 2
  • Shares: 0
  • Comments: 1

Comment on Facebook

Mike Manion Pitt Meadows City Councillor

2 months 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

Link thumbnail

Christmas trees in demand

buff.ly

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…
View Comments
  • Likes: 2
  • Shares: 0
  • Comments: 0

Comment on Facebook

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.
View Comments
  • Likes: 2
  • Shares: 3
  • Comments: 1

Comment on Facebook

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
View Comments
  • Likes: 10
  • Shares: 8
  • Comments: 8

Comment on Facebook

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..

View more comments

Subscribe | Advertise

Popham pursues ambitious agenda as 2019 arrives

Positive changes outweigh pushback

December 31, 2018 byPeter Mitham

VANCOUVER – Becoming agriculture minister was a dream come true, Lana Popham said during her initial interviews as BC’s top farmer.

But making her dreams a reality has continued as she’s worked to give attention to underserved farm sectors and advance a mandate designed to Grow, Feed and Buy BC – and, above all, keep farmland productive.

“There’s so much the ministry has been doing,” she said during an in-person conversation in Richmond on November 30, a day focused on BC’s farmers’ institutes. “I had tons and tons of ideas that maybe weren’t necessarily part of the mandate but were able to be fit into the mandate – smaller scale things and larger scale things – and just to see some of them come into action is pretty incredible.”

The gathering of farmers’ and women’s institutes was one example, as was the Every Chef Needs a Farmer, Every Farmer Needs a Chef event earlier in the month, both of which focused on building connections aimed at growing the province’s farm sector.

“A lot of it is just about communicating,” she says. “You’re really trying to support the farm base – not just the land base, but the farmer base.”

The institutes conference brought together 45 people from around the province for less than $14,000, a small drop of her ministry’s $93.1 million annual budget.

“I’ve got a bigger budget than there’s ever been, historically, in the province, so I’m able to put money into bringing people together in ways that haven’t happened before,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been able to connect urban BC and rural BC in a way that hasn’t happened for a really long time.”

Those connections are important, and not something that happens in every jurisdiction. With the federal election approaching later this year, Canadian Federation of Agriculture staff want to make sure that urban politicians recognize the importance of rural issues.

A former organic farmer herself, Popham gets it, and she thinks many others in BC do, too.

“This is the moment for food. There’s a will of the public to revisit food culture as well as sustenance,” she says. “I don’t think you could have had my mandate 15 years ago and been successful with it. It would have been much harder.”

But those consumers don’t always have it right, as public trust initiatives the BC Agriculture Council is pursuing show. Consumers may trust farmers, but they don’t always trust farming systems.

BCAC executive director Reg Ens notes that whatever concerns some consumers have about domestic practices doesn’t stop them opting for cheaper products from less-regulated jurisdictions.

Meanwhile, the regulations in BC mount. Whether around wages, farm labour, animal welfare, farmland protections, water management or the new Agricultural Waste Control Regulation, farmers have a full-time job keeping abreast of regulations on top of the business of growing food.

While the province wants to grow production, that’s not always how farmers experience it.

“There’s a perception that this government is not instilling a lot of confidence in business investment,” Ens says. “They see some really exciting things that could happen, but they see a lot of challenges [and] they’re not convinced that this government is on their side.”

Ens quickly adds that Popham “is very much on industry’s side,” noting that the challenges are coming from beyond her ministry.

“We definitely don’t want to blame her for some of these challenges,” he says.

Popham cherishes her close working relationship with the ministries of health and rural development but the environment and labour ministries are leading the charge on water management, wages and farm worker protection.

Ens expresses particular concern about the new agricultural waste regulation, widely expected to take effect this spring.

“We want to encourage good stewardship – that’s good for all of us. But how do we do that in a way that doesn’t put farms out of business?” he asks. “Are we considering the economic factors that all these changes are going to have?”

Dairy producers have felt themselves in the crosshairs of the new regulation, and are also grappling with the loss of market opportunities thanks to federal trade deals. Regulatory costs and a smaller market are hardly a recipe to grow BC in their books.

“Government is able to play a role in supporting,” says Popham, with winsome optimism.

She says consumers need to be told about the high quality of BC milk, and encouraged to support local producers who – on the grocery store shelf – are largely anonymous, with most milk lacking even the Dairy Farmers of Canada logo.

“Supply management hasn’t really needed a provincial marketing program before,” she says. “Consumers … want to support that, but there’s absolutely no way when they walk into a shelf of milk of figuring out what’s BC milk.”

She’s wants a BuyBC logo on milk to boost awareness and connect with consumer concerns.

Similarly, she points to the dairy sector to illustrate how industry is onside with some regulations.

While poultry groups have expressed concern at plans to entrench industry codes of practice in animal welfare legislation, Popham says dairy is on board because farmers know it’s what consumers want.

“Five years ago, there was resistance. Now they understand that consumers are looking for that assurance,” she says. “Maybe they’re not super-enthusiastic, but they certainly have embraced it and they’re willing to work with it.”

Popham is also clear that she wants to keep working with farmers.

“I’ve got a lot more to accomplish in my ministry,” she says. “I thrive on getting stuff done so when we get one thing done, I just move on to the next.”

Although not a big fan of flying, she makes an effort to visit rural BC as often as possible, keeping her ear to the ground for what she can do next.

“I get to sit down with people one-on-one often, and that inspires me,” she says. “Agriculture’s pretty fun that way. You can make changes that help people in a big way.”

 

Related Posts

You may be interested in these posts from the same category.

Throne speech foregrounds land protection

Previous Post: « Wave of retirements sweeps through dairy associations
Next Post: Farm assessments decline »

Copyright © 2023 Country Life in BC · All Rights Reserved