BC residents consider themselves proud supporters of local agriculture but a new survey for Farm Credit Canada indicates that they’re also the least likely to buy Canadian food whenever possible. Despite significant provincial investment over the past three years in local purchasing programs such as Buy BC and Feed BC, which was recently expanded to …
Farm Credit Canada
New year, new openness
Growers in BC need to be willing to challenge conventional thinking and practices if they want to take farming to the next level. That’s the message Farm Credit Canada industry relations director Marty Seymour delivered at the Agriculture Excellence conference Farm Management Canada hosted December 8-10. Two of the easiest ways the sector can do this …
Strengthening connections
Strengthening and expanding rural Internet access is a key objective of the federal government, which recently launched a rural broadband fund to support development and connectivity. But sometimes, farmers need to take matters into their own hands, said Jesse Hirsh, who has added to his experience in the tech sector by becoming a small-scale grower …
Women farmers receive double
Farm Credit Canada’s Women Entrepreneur Program has delivered nearly twice as much support to female agri-food entrepreneurs than expected. During a virtual roundtable to address the challenges women agri-food entrepreneurs face, Marie-Claude Bibeau, in her capacity as the first-ever female minister of agriculture and agri-food, announced that 1,391 women across the country had received more …
Cranberry outlook brightens
BC cranberry growers are expecting a crop closer to usual volumes this year after cold weather in 2019 cut the harvest in half. The province typically produces about a million barrels a year, but in 2019 marketed production as reported by Statistics Canada was just 672,100 barrels. Per-acre yields also fell, dropping from 211 barrels …