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Look for us at the Islands Agriculture Show at the Cowichan Exhibition Park in Duncan today and tomorrow (February 1 &2)! “Speaker topics range from Organic Certification, Starting a Vineyard, Weather patterns, and Water drainage to selling your products to the retails markets or perhaps you would like to know more about getting started with Social Media, this year there is conference session for everyone. The show itself will feature over 60 trade show exhibits, innovative new equipment, the latest in farming technology, and a walk down memory lane with the Antiques Tractor society displays.” www.iashow.ca

Continue reading »]]> By Farmer Bob, Past President, Island Farmer’s Alliance.

The Minister of Agriculture under Gordon Campbell informed the farmers of British Columbia that once the province had finished working over the meat regulations, it had every intention of moving in on fruit and vegetables. Governmental spokespeople tell us that all this must be done in order to ensure public safety. I was talking to them at the time and asked for the evidence of risk under the traditional system. They had none. They had none because years before they had discontinued collecting the information that would enable that risk to be quantified. In other words, they were blowing smoke. The Province of British Columbia had terminated so many of the people entrusted with ensuring the safety of our food supply that when it came to setting the standards for the new abattoirs to meet all the new regulations there was no one left in the Department of Agriculture capable of doing so. So what did it do? It turned the problem over to the Department of Health. The people responsible for setting the standards for operating rooms in our hospitals were tasked with coming up with those for slaughterhouses. Did they want the work? No, they did not. They thought it was some kind bureaucratic craziness but they had to do it in order to keep their jobs. The government did find the money to hire some public relations spokespeople to keep the public in the dark about what was going on.

You would think that our schools would do something about the situation. After all, they have the task of educating children in what’s going on but they just reiterate the party line as set by the Department of Education. They are also supposed to be training students for jobs that society finds necessary. You’d think that making something to eat would fall into that category, but apparently not. An agricultural program could be put in place in every elementary school so that children start learning about growing plants and animals. This is looked on as frippery. Why?  When such experiments are occasionally performed, even the kids find it fun. They can see how to get something for themselves from their own labour. Why it might even help them to become a little more independent! Oh no! We can’t have that! If our schools do nothing else, they demotivate students and create dependency. Over and over and over again, I hear important public officials going on about how people have to get educated in order to find work. It is a lie. Do not believe them. The best jobs are made by people who figure them out for themselves.

After observing the situation for a lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that it is all about social class. Hoity-toity people—the people who think they should be the ones to run everything—don’t like getting their hands dirty. For some reason, it makes them feel uncomfortable. It is hard to farm without getting your hands dirty and maybe even working up a sweat, too. Consequently, our movers and shakers look down on farmers as lesser beings. Our leaders have to go to fitness parlours and golf links to keep their bodies from shutting down due to sloth. If all the resources squandered on fitness salons and golf courses were allocated to farming, the present situation would vanish and there would be plenty of good, nutritious food for all. It won’t happen, however, and so society will eventually suffer the consequences for its stupidity. We are walking into the most god-awful world food crisis with our eyes wide open.

Meanwhile, agricultural output on Vancouver Island has declined and is bouncing along the bottom. It won’t be a farm crisis—we already have that—but a social crisis. Lots of people see it coming and have become concerned. They hold meetings about food security and try to figure out how to buck the trend. A lot of money has been spent on that. Some years ago, Van City Credit Union decided that it wanted to expand onto Vancouver Island and set up a few branches around the Capital Region. I talked with the Van City people directly concerned and they informed me that they were spending over half a million dollars on raising the issue of food security with the public. Other people kicked in a bit more cash. There was lots of talk about food security, but nothing of significance to farmers happened. Van City intended to get its money back from providing loans to people who wanted to get into the local food production business. It didn’t find them and so the project failed. Large amounts of money have been raised, millions of dollars, supposedly to promote local agriculture, but the vast bulk of it has gone into buying real estate and so served to worsen the problem by putting yet more upward pressure on land values.

Meanwhile, one of the largest impediments to farming is the inability of people willing to do the work to get the kind of access to the land they need in order to run a productive operation on a sustainable basis. Realtors and property owners work directly against them since a viable response to the problem can only reduce land liquidity. Farming is a long-term business that needs security of tenure to attract the investment needed to succeed, yet most all the land regulations are written so as to ease flipping. Folks willing and eager to farm are left out in the cold. The only real solution to this problem is to recast the rules governing title and occupation of land and that isn’t about to happen any time soon. As it is, land owners have the ability to sell out viable farm operations and frequently use it. The folks responsible for putting the operation together are screwed. They have made a very bad investment. And that is why agriculture has declined on Vancouver Island.

Continue reading »]]> By Farmer Bob, Past President, Island Farmer’s Alliance.

Back in the 1970s, the Province created the Agricultural Land Reserve, the purpose of which was to reserve land for agricultural purposes through the zoning process. Immediately, all the land zoned for agriculture lost about 50% of its market value. This was anticipated. The government created four programs to reduce costs to farmers so as to offset those losses. In the subsequent years, all those programs were discontinued in the name of fiscal efficiency. No one worried about the farmers. There were so few of them that their votes didn’t really matter. Breach of trust, so what? Farming continued to decline.

According to the BC Assessment Authority, there are only about 3000 farms on the Island and the Sunshine Coast. Back in the 1990s, it was 3500. Admittedly, over half of them are not even bone fide farms, but hobby enterprises run by affluent people who like to have a bit of acreage on which to graze their horses. Go to a realtors’ or Urban Development League meeting and you will hear about how we farmers are screwing everyone else and need to be blocked. These are powerful and focused lobbies. Here in the Capital Region, realtors outnumber farmers by more than three to one and they are much better organized. Practically every single one of them salivates at the thought of being able to shut down a farm and carve it up so as to make a bundle of cash to pay for a Hawaiian condo. They make a profit over 50% on the capital cost of the ALR land just by rezoning it even before building anything. It isn’t hard to figure out why some farmers see the only way to stay in farming is to sell condos on part of their land. How else can they put together a retirement fund? The ALR has turned out to be a sort of land trust to benefit real estate speculators. A sensible government would claw back some of those windfall gains to finance farming, but ours hasn’t taken a nickel.

When the provincial support programs went, they took most all the businesses that supplied agricultural infrastructure with them. Farmers were stripped of the agriculture extension agents who could advise them on opportunities and strategies. The universities removed major parts of their agricultural programs. UBC shut down its farm on the island. Comprehensive soil testing went so that farmers cannot even keep track of the condition of their land. They now have to go to private labs at two or three times the cost and they find that because of the lack of quality assurance different labs give different results. Feed, fertilizer, and equipment dealers soon followed. I have just lost my machinery dealer again. This is for the third time in twenty years. None of them could maintain a viable business. Even getting the basic stuff needed to run a farm is more and more problematic. As the decline continued, regulations created to enhance international trade resulted in the closure of most of the abattoirs on the Island. If a local resident wants to raise a chicken and sell it to his next door neighbour, he now has to produce a bird that qualifies for the Tokyo market. It is a Federal offence for which he can be fined $200,000, maybe even go to jail, to sell a bird that doesn’t meet the Tokyo standard. The Japanese pay out around $50 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. We are supposed to compete with that?

The decline steepened with the BSE crisis and the closure of the American border to our cattle. It was a big shock to major producers, many of whom went bankrupt. Those remaining decided to access the local market so as to have somewhere to sell their output. Up until then, there was a local market, sort of, for beef that amounted to about 10% of Canada’s production. The major producers were all set up for export and so didn’t care about the limited local market. BSE changed all that. The biggest producers pressured government to change the regulations so as to drive the small, local producers out of business so that they could move in on that little weenie market. Now most everyone in Canada is dependent upon a few major operations such as XL. The local producers predicted disaster and it has happened but there is nothing they can do about it.

After the Langford Lilydale processing plant closed in the 1990s, there are now practically no major chicken producers left on the Island. The couple remaining are run by dedicated souls who insist on raising chickens even though it costs them money. They intend to keep on doing it until they go broke. Some years later, a plant much smaller than Lilydale was built by Island Farmhouse Poultry. This plant was constructed in accord with all the regulations that ensued from the BSE crisis. Although it was designed to process only 30,000 birds a month, it requires fifteen or sixteen workers to operate it. So egregious were the new regulations that even the government decided it was being silly and scaled its onerous new standards back. The standards had nothing whatever to do with food safety and everything to do with raising the costs of production so as to drive smaller operators out of the market and give the large operations a monopoly. The biggest problem Island Farmhouse Poultry faces is getting enough chickens to kill to keep its plant operating. Because of its extraordinary high overhead, it has to run at full capacity and it’s not managing to do it. Whether the operation turns out to be sustainable remains to be determined.

Continued next week – Part III will be posted on November 9, 2012

Continue reading »]]> By Farmer Bob, Past President, Island Farmer’s Alliance.

Farming on Vancouver Island has been broken for some decades. Those few people still in the game do what they can to stem the decline, but overall their efforts are insufficient to reverse the trend. The primary difficulty is a lack of infrastructure to support agriculture. A secondary difficulty is a misallocation of what resources are available to rectify the situation.

Presently, less than five percent of the food consumed on Vancouver Island is produced here. Back in the 1920s and ‘30s, this island was a major food producer and exporter. The vast bulk of the food consumed here was produced here, and why not? The natural growing conditions here are as good as or better than anywhere else in the world. When Francis Drake dropped by in the sixteenth century, he called this place New Albion and touted it as possibly the most desirable real estate in the whole world. Now our island has either been logged, built over, or lays fallow. Fish have all but disappeared from our streams. Some of the best land is just hay fields. Taking a cut of hay off a field in the spring and leaving it as pasture for the rest of the year isn’t really farming. Such property is usually being held for real estate development. Investment in basic agriculture here on this island is all but non-existent. Anyone with money to invest can get three or four times the return in other fields, so why farm? Even if they want to farm, there are other areas in British Columbia where the return on investment is much better. Why? Firstly because of land costs, and secondly because of ferry fares.

Politicians are not much help. A person doesn’t have to be in politics very long to find out that in return for their votes the public demands low food prices. Food is different from other commodities since if its price goes up, there can be rioting in the streets. It also just happens to be a necessity of life. Food is a national security matter, so why doesn’t it get national security attention? Politicians prefer to depress food prices to get votes, which beggars farmers. They do this by negotiating trade deals with foreign nations like China, nations with lots of workers who are willing to work for less than a dollar an hour to keep our supermarket shelves stocked. If Chinese people starve as a result, our glorious leaders don’t care.

When our local farmers complain about the unfair competition, our accommodating government comes up with programs in which farmers can access low paid immigrant labour supposedly to compete—compete against the local unemployed. Even farmers who jump through all the hoops to get the ‘cheap’ foreign labour find they have to pay around $15 an hour, everything included, most of which goes to middlemen, deal makers, and bureaucrats. The actual laborers, the ones doing the work, are being exploited. They come up here to work because Free Trade Agreements have destroyed their farms in Mexico. It would be nice if modern free-enterprise capitalists were to think up a way of making money from farms other than by destroying them, but they haven’t. They consider farmers, like all our other resources, to be capital awaiting liquidation.

The primary competition to our local farmers comes from the United States. That country is laying out about $20 billion yearly in direct agricultural subsidies. In Canada, it is zero. On top of the up front American subsidies are many, many billions more in hidden subsidies. For instance, the Army Corps of engineers provides waterworks to supply cheap water to American farmers. There is nothing like that in Canada. When Canada negotiated the Columbia River Treaties, British Columbia got screwed. Our Columbia River water was delivered to farmers in eastern Washington and Oregon by the Corps so that they could set up a whole new apple growing industry with it. Those American farmers were paying $20 an acre-foot for that subsidized water whereas Canadian farmers drawing water out of the very same streams had to pay $160 an acre-foot. Not only did our farmers have to pay many times the cost for the same water, but the US apples ripened a couple of weeks before our apples and creamed off the gravy in our market. The result was an extremely heavy hit to Okanagan Apple growers. They did not recover and tore out most of their orchards. The land went out of food production into vineyards to produce a luxury product not noted for its nutritional value. No one seems to care…

Continued next week – Part II will be posted on November 2, 2012

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This year’s IFA Annual General Meeting will be held on Saturday, November 17, 2012, at the Cedar Community Hall , 2388 Cedar Road, Cedar (visit www.cedarcommunityhall.ca for directions). Doors open at 12 noon – AGM begins at 1 pm. Highlights include: A Tribute to John Wilcox, Brenda Dumont:  Social Media Made Simple, and a report from District A. For more information, email info@islandfarmersalliance.org.

Continue reading »]]> Take a photo of an IFA Rooster farm sign (must include farm name) on location (attached to a post or tree or building, for example) and send us your photo as an entry in our Summer 2012 Photo Contest!  Each unique sign (each different farm) is a unique entry. Deadline for receiving entries is 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, September 5, 2012.

Email address for entries and information: ifacontest@islandfarmersalliance.org

Regional prizes (more to follow):

• Capital Regional District – two tickets to the annual Saanich Peninsula Harvest Feast (Saturday, September 22, 2012)

Continue reading »]]> DISTRICT “A” FARMERS INSTITUTES & COMMUNITY AGRICULTURE ASSOCIATIONS OF BC’s COAST ISLANDS REGION
c/o 2731 Gray Road, Gabriola, BC, V0R 1X7
Tel: 250-247-9601 | Email: hughjenny@shaw.ca

Annual General Meeting
MARCH 31, 2012
1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
NANOOSE PLACE
2925 Northwest Bay Road
FROM NORTH of Nanoose (Turn left at Petro Canada on Northwest Bay Road)
FROM SOUTH of Nanoose (Turn right at Petro Canada on Northwest Bay Road)

Speakers:
• Colleen Ross – NFU Women’s Vice-President – Policy
• Candice Appleby – Small Scale Food Processors Association
• Scott Fleenor – TerraTek Energy Solutions Inc.

Alberni Farmers Institute,Cobble Hill Farmers Institute, Comox Farmers Institute, Coombs Farmers Institute, Cowichan Farmers Institute, Islands Natural Growers – Salt Spring, Lasqueti Farmers Institute, Mayne Island Ag Society, Metchosin Farmers Institute, Nanaimo-Cedar Farmers Institute, Pender Islands Farmers Institute, Powell River Farmers Institute, Salt Spring Farmers Institute, Sayward Farmers Institute, South Island Women’s Institutes, Islands Farmers Alliance, Inter Island Sheep Breeders Association
REPRESENTING MORE THAN 600 FAMILY FARM CITIZENS