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Originally published:

MARCH 2022
Vol. 108 Issue 3

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Stories In This Edition

Lucky chickens

$227m rebuild fund

Glyphosate shortage looms

Province opens ALR to agritech development

Editorial: Divorced from the earth

Back 40: Broken supply chain weakens food system

Viewpoint: BC’s emergency response needs improvement

Building back better means avoiding past mistakes

Sidebar: Grand Forks initiative protects farms

Rural, urban areas prepare for extreme weather

Ag Briefs: Property owner appeals BC SPCA seizure

Ag Briefs: Province sued over mind ban

Farm income projected to reach new heights

Potato growers brace for higher input costs

Keeping cranberries cool a hot topic

Rewarding farmers for enhancing riparian areas

Sidebar: Farmers need not apply

Diversification drives growth of organic farm

Leadership skills can help farmers cope with disaster

Winter rainbow

Compost facilities facing pushback

Cheese leads the way as BC dairies seek capacity

Island yogurt producer boosting production

Grape growers prepare for climate change

The perfect solution for farmers on the go

Small-lot egg producer awarded quota

Sidebar: Future quota draws likely limited

Broiler health in spotlight for small-lot farmers

Pest data helps with management decisions

Research: Researchers discover a world of apple microbiomes

Farms meet the demand for local food

Better berry harvester meets growers’ needs

Farm Story: Spring demands the old heave-ho

Safety in the spotlight as farms recover

Woodshed: Henderson style has chins wagging

Chilliwack teams plow past the century mark

Jude’s Kitchen: Spring has sprung! Time to make bread!

 

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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

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Rewarding farmers for enhancing riparian areas

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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...
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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

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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

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

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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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The perfect solution for farmers on the go

Shipping container offers packing facilities and cold storage

Matthew Kyriakides, director of land management at the Sandown Centre for Regenerative Agriculture in North Saanich, standing in front of the centre’s new GAP Can vegetable packing cube. SUBMITTED

March 1, 2022 bySandra Tretick

NORTH SAANICH – Out in the fields of the Sandown Centre for Regenerative Agriculture in North Saanich, something innovative is happening.

If you drive by the 83-acre site on Glamorgan Road, once home to the Sandown Racetrack, you’d be hard-pressed to see anything out of the ordinary. Sure, there are two new 10-foot shipping containers sitting out there, but those are just used to store tools, aren’t they?

But according to Ty James, the man behind the containers, they’re a game-changer for small farmers that produce field crops, especially those who want to avoid sinking cash into costly infrastructure on leased properties.

James, a 35-year-old market gardener who grows produce on leased farmland in North Saanich and sells to grocery stores like Country Grocer and Red Barn Market, knows what it’s like to move his operations from one farm to another. He used to lease two acres in Central Saanich before outgrowing that space three years ago. He now farms five acres in field production and 20,000 square feet of greenhouses.

“I quickly realized that farming is a business of economies of scale and that I needed more land in order to make a living, and I also needed better infrastructure,” says James. “I was packing in a greenhouse in the summertime that was getting up to 40 degrees. I had a couple little household fridges strapped together, packing into clamshells, just trying to make the most of it.”

It was insufficient for what he needed to do to meet his buyers’ exacting specifications.

James says the CanadaGAP program is one of the must-haves for farmers today, because that’s what larger grocery chains demand. Even though there are about 1,000 farms in BC with GAP certification – the highest rate of participation in the country – James notes that most farmers don’t have it yet, especially smaller growers.

GAP stands for good agricultural practices and James wanted to design infrastructure that would give farmers access to affordable GAP and HACCP-compliant infrastructure. He says CanadaGAP certification is important because it provides assurance to retailers that fresh produce growers are following appropriate food safety procedures.

James believes having access to post-harvest infrastructure is just as important as having fields and fencing. By infrastructure, he means packinghouses and walk-in coolers; a dry place to store labels and packing materials and a cool place to store product during hot weather.

Several companies, like Freight Farms out of the US, sell vertical farming and hydroponic farming systems in shipping containers but through his own company, GAP Can, James is planning something entirely different.

“We’re providing infrastructure for field-growing operations,” says James. “With the heat dome we had last year, it would be virtually impossible to grow successfully without this type of infrastructure. You need access to a shady cold spot to keep your produce fresh as you pack it and get it ready to go to market.”

Two summers ago, he built an early prototype on the farm he is currently leasing with a grant from the BC On-Farm Food Safety Program.

To further develop the concept, James obtained $32,000 through the Canada-BC Agri-Innovation Program and entered into contracts last summer with Sandown Centre and Lytton First Nation to build what he calls “version two prototypes.” James worked with Keith Hayton of K. Hayton Construction Ltd. on the build.

Each unit – built from a shipping container sold off after a one-way trip from China – is custom-built to meet the customer’s needs. That means a lot of discussions on layout and design. They are built to allow producers to achieve CanadaGAP certification, are Canada Safety Association-approved and inspected for road transportation.

“We wanted to design something around CanadaGAP because I get audited on my farm every year,” says James. “We’re trying to service the area of the market that’s like myself, leasehold farmers, people that want to farm but need infrastructure and don’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build it.”

The prototype at Sandown was built using two 10-foot shipping containers, avoiding the need for a building permit. One unit is set up for packing and the other is cold storage. Another unit – in a standard 20-foot container – was in the process of being delivered to the Lytton First Nation last month for a large-scale market garden project. Delivery was delayed by wildfires, flooding and mudslides last year.

The little cubes, which arrived at Sandown in January, still need an electrical hookup. Sandown Centre has a 10-year lease on the land from North Saanich and it in turn subleases small plots to farmers. What the centre offers its growers is a cross between land-leasing and farm school that includes learning about horticulture and business.

Sandown director of community and partner engagement Jen Rashleigh says the GAP cubes, as she likes to call them, are a complete and utter game-changer.

Growers will be able to use Sandown’s units this spring to weigh, bunch, pack and store produce, giving them the option to achieve CanadaGAP certification if they want to enter bigger markets.

“If we don’t have a processing unit it’s a major setback,” says Rashleigh. “[With it] they can get the audit and they can get into the bigger retailers.”

Having the units on site means they can also serve as a demonstration for other growers.

The cubes, sold through James’ company GAP Can, come in different sizes and configurations – what James terms modular infrastructure. The company’s flagship unit is a 20-foot container with a vegetable processing area and a walk-in cooler starting around $35,000. Forty-foot containers are also possible for larger applications.

With these prototypes complete, James is now in discussions on two bigger projects, including a multi-unit food hub for Lytton First Nation and a three-unit prototype for a poultry processing plant at Glassen Farms near Nanaimo. He’s also looking for a new yard in Langford for the upcoming builds.

 

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