Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.
On a warm September evening nearly 15 years ago, Katie Sardinha had her first real glimpse of what life as a farmer could be. It was harvesting season in Summerland, B.C., where she’d grown up on her parents’ 10-acre apple orchard. Though she’d spent her summers picking cherries on other Okanagan farms and had watched her parents pick apples and run the farm her whole life, they had never recruited her or her brother for the harvest. They didn’t want to pressure them into farming. Sardinha had just finished her undergraduate degree and was preparing to pursue a career in academia.
“Back then, we had a lot more big trees on the orchards,” she recalls. “We used wooden ladders with stakes on the end. With wooden ladders and stakes, you can do things on hills that you can’t quite do with the metal ladders that are more standard now. You can angle them in just these insane ways. I remember I turned around and my parents were picking apples into their bags, and I thought, ‘Wow, my parents are ladder acrobats!’ I was so impressed. They were so nimble.” Though it would be several more years before Sardinha decided to go into farming herself, she remembers that evening as pivotal.
Sardinha’s reality as a farmer has been quite different from that of her parents. Though her love for the job remains, she’s faced economic, climate and other challenges on a much greater scale than her parents did. She is farming in a new paradigm.
B.C.’s agriculture industry — which is still mostly comprised of small-scale farms like Sardinha’s — has been suffering for years. Mounting costs for essentials like animal feed and fertilizer, high land prices, labour shortages, extreme weather events and a retail market dominated by large grocery stores have made farming an increasingly difficult endeavour. And while slogans like “Buy Canadian” and “Shop Local” are gaining momentum because of U.S. tariffs, buying apples from Washington or spinach from California is not only cheaper but also easier than buying local for many B.C. residents.
Compounding these issues, B.C.’s agriculture industry is the lowest-funded in the country. Only 2.5 per cent of the province’s agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is funnelled back into the industry, compared to a historical national reinvestment figure closer to 12 per cent. “We’re kind of the lost child of federation in agriculture,” Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, and a leading researcher in agricultural innovation and food policy, tells The Narwhal. “It’s frustrating that we could be an agricultural superpower and agriculture does not get the respect that, say, the oil and gas industry does.”
As the Canada-U.S. trade war drags on, the impact on B.C.’s food system will be significant. The challenge may provide an opportunity to remake the system, but a rehaul won’t come without struggle — and thorny questions already litter its path forward. Can a new food system succeed without leaving farmers like Sardinha behind?
In a large, warm, airtight room that looks like the inside of a spaceship, rows of lettuce grow stacked on top of each other at Avery Farms, a vertical lettuce operation in Okanagan Falls, B.C. People wearing white hazmat suits patrol the rows, making sure the lettuce heads are properly watered and lit. They aren’t wearing the suits to protect themselves from hazardous materials, but to protect the plants from contaminants. This is a farm of the future — and it’s already arrived in B.C.
“In one acre, we can [produce] 12,000 heads of lettuce a day, every single day of the year,” Avery Farms owner Garry Peters says. In 2020, Peters and his wife Victoria, retired entrepreneurs, witnessed the panic and fears about food scarcity created by the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to invest in something that would contribute to B.C.’s future food security and give back to the community they’d grown up in.
The farm starts lettuce plants as seedlings grown in water. They are lit and heated by electric sources and moved to new rows as they grow. It takes about 45 days for the lettuce heads to grow to market size. Avery Farms can produce 100 to 150 times the amount of lettuce grown in field farming on much less land, while the crops don’t require pesticides and use about 90 per cent less water than traditional agriculture.
When the lettuce plants are ready for market, Peters says they’re sold exclusively within B.C. to a mix of small and larger retailers, for about $3.90 a head. Pioneered in Singapore and Japan, vertical farm technology presents one potential option to scale up B.C.’s food production and grow imported produce year-round.
But there are significant challenges to implementation. After a year-and-a-half in operation, Avery Farms is only just breaking even. The upfront investment required for vertical farming — in the tens of millions of dollars — is unfathomable for most farmers.
Peters says they’re currently working at scale — producing at an industrial capacity while reducing their input cost per item — because of U.S. tariff threats and increased consumer demand for local produce. “We have an opportunity now,” he says. “If you’re not going to try and make something better because you can’t make a profit on it right away, you’ll never be able to make a profit on it. You need those people who will go in there and pioneer the industry and go, ‘Okay, this isn’t working, so what about this?’ ”
B.C.’s agriculture industry is small compared to other Canadian provinces, even though the province has some of the richest agricultural land in the country, favourable growing conditions and the country’s most diverse food production profile — producing everything from meat and dairy products to grains, oil seeds, fresh fruit and a wide variety of vegetables. But expanding the province’s food production has proved a challenge in recent years.
According to Farm Credit Canada, a Crown corporation supporting the food industry, farmland values in B.C. rose more than 10 per cent between 2023 and 2024 — part of a 30-year unbroken upwards trend. In B.C.’s South Coast region, which includes important agricultural hubs like Richmond, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Langley and Pitt Meadows, an acre of farmland costs between $72,000 and $255,000.
In the Okanagan, where growers like Sardinha produce the majority of the province’s tree fruits and wine grapes, Farm Credit Canada reports average acreage prices up to $120,000. The high cost of land makes getting into the business difficult for new farmers. And for those already in the industry, like Sardinha, other challenges abound.
While the pandemic and its aftermath led to labour shortages, inflation and disruptions in supply chains, farmers in B.C. have also faced climate issues and extreme weather events in recent years that weren’t present even a decade ago. Last year, a January cold snap in the Okanagan damaged more than 90 per cent of tree fruits in the valley, wiping out acres of apples, peaches, pears, nectarines, cherries and wine grapes. It followed a similarly destructive cold event the previous winter.
In the summer of 2021, the heat dome that hit B.C. cooked fruit on trees and berries on bushes. It was followed only a few months later by an atmospheric river that flooded the Fraser Valley, killing more than 600,000 livestock, affecting more than 1,100 farms and 37,000 acres of land and costing farmers and government millions. In a warming world, where our weather seems increasingly unpredictable, growing food off the land is a bigger gamble than it’s ever been.
And for a domestic industry competing with an influx of cheap produce from other countries, including the U.S., while grappling with increased production costs and low returns, the cards were stacked even before the threat of U.S. tariffs.
B.C. consumes only one-third of the food it produces. The rest is exported to international markets, including to the U.S. Nearly 40 per cent of the province’s food supply comes from other countries. While B.C. is self-sufficient in supply-managed commodities like dairy, poultry and eggs — which means the milk in your coffee this morning likely came from a local producer — the province relies heavily on international imports of most fresh produce (roughly $2-billion worth in 2021).
According to research from the University of British Columbia, in 2022, B.C. sourced more than 80 per cent of its lettuce and spinach from California and Arizona. The province imported more than a quarter of its tomatoes from California and nearly 60 per cent of its onions from Washington state.
B.C. also depends heavily on fruit imports from the U.S., even though it produces many of the same things. In 2022, the province imported 75 per cent of its strawberry supply from California. Though B.C. farmers like Sardinha grow some of the most beautiful heritage apple varieties in North America, the province sourced nearly 60 per cent of its apples from Washington state — where producers benefit from larger-scale operations, more government support and cheaper land — and 17 per cent from China.
“Ultimately, we’ve got a food system that is designed for and responding to consumer preferences,” Tyler McCann, managing director of the Canadian AgriFood Policy Institute, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, tells The Narwhal. “Increasingly, consumer preferences relate to being able to go to one place to buy products, to be able to buy the most affordable products possible. And that was true before we saw significant food inflation. In my mind, that’s often the starting point for understanding what’s happening all along the food system.”
McCann says this has encouraged the proliferation of big box stores, where people do all their grocery shopping at once and buy in bulk (think Costco, Walmart and Loblaws). It’s known as retail consolidation. The impacts have trickle-down effects on the rest of the food system, making it hard for smaller farms and operations to get their products onto grocery shelves at a fair price.
This has also played a role in B.C.’s dependence on international imports, which offer consumers choice, availability and affordability. “Canadian consumers and Canadian agriculture have both benefited from predictable and reliable trade and market access,” McCann says. “We do export a lot of things, like canola, but we also import a lot of fruit and vegetables that we can’t produce here and can’t produce year-round.”
In addition to exporting high-value commodities like Okanagan cherries to markets in Asia, or Fraser Valley blueberries and mushrooms to the U.S., B.C. farmers also send their raw products to the U.S. to be sorted, stored and processed into other food items like baked goods, cereals, freeze-dried items, nutritional bars and meat products, which are then sold back to Canadian consumers.
Goods included in the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement weren’t part of the latest round of U.S. tariffs, announced in early April, but agricultural products could eventually fall under this category. If they do, Canada could respond through retaliatory tariffs.
McCann says the impacts would be felt on multiple fronts. “It’s important to think about it in the two ways that those flows happen,” he says. “It’s the American tariffs that will hurt Canadian farmers and food producers, and Canada’s retaliatory tariffs that are likely to impact Canadian consumers. The impacts could be quite significant.”
For many in the food industry, the threat is also an opportunity for innovation and investment. For McCann, the stakes could not be clearer: “The question is really, ‘How do we produce affordable, accessible food in a way that is environmentally, economically and socially sustainable?’ And do that at a time when the risks that people in the food production system are facing are increasing in ways we would not have thought possible a few short years ago.”
Vertical farms like Avery Farms are only one example of the indoor, controlled-atmosphere growing already found in B.C.’s greenhouses, which produce everything from blueberries and strawberries to cucumbers and peppers. They are also part of a burgeoning global industry referred to as agricultural technology or “agritech,” which uses technological innovations to enhance and streamline agricultural production. According to many industry experts and a food-security task force initiated by the B.C. government that produced a 2020 report called “The Future of Food,” it’s part of what’s needed to strengthen the province’s food system.
“There’s so much potential,” Newman, the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, says. “Canada could really be an agricultural technology superpower.”
Newman, who participated in the task force, believes B.C. and Canada will need to rely on agritech over the next decades to feed a larger, more urban population and to weather the impacts of a changing climate.
By 2050, the United Nations predicts global agricultural yields will have decreased by as much as 25 per cent due to climate change. While Canada faces its own challenges, the countries from which it sources the bulk of its produce — the U.S. and Mexico — are at particular risk. Growing food indoors on vertical farms, incorporating Artificial Intelligence or computer-assisted technology like robotic machinery, sensor monitoring and drones and investing in seed genomics — selecting certain genes to improve plant hardiness — may help reduce those impacts.
Newman says agritech is one of two major focus areas needed to expand B.C.’s food production and make it more resilient in the long-term. “We really need to pull out all the stops and do these two things: radically increase our year-round production … because we have the technology, and if we don’t, we can develop it. And number two, radically grow our processing capacity,” she says. The latter won’t come without a fight, because of what it will require. “[We do this] by putting processing back on the Agricultural Land Reserve, where it was supposed to be in the first place.”
B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve was established in the early 1970s to protect valuable farmland in the province. The first legislation of its kind in Canada, it has kept some of B.C.’s most fertile agricultural areas out of the hands of private developers. But its powers are limited, and over the years the land reserve has been eroded. “When I look at the Agricultural Land Reserve — and I map it — what we’re seeing is every year, despite the need, more and more acres are falling out of farming,” Newman says. In Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, she says, only 50 per cent of the Agricultural Land Reserve is currently used for farming.
This is not only due to general under-use, but family farms being sold off by aging farmers whose children don’t want to continue farming, leaving the land to potentially be bought up for private residences. Because the land is zoned as agricultural, new owners can benefit from the tax exemptions that come with this designation even if they’re not farming. In recent decades, mega-mansions have appeared on agricultural reserve land in Richmond and Delta, pushing farmers out of the area and driving up farmland prices.
Newman helped alter the policy in 2017 to limit the size of residential developments, but she says it’s still a problem. “[The land] is being purchased by people who want a nice residential place to live. And it’s a great deal. If you sell a house in Vancouver for a few million dollars, you can go buy five acres. You can have a nice big green lawn and you get a tax break.”
Speculative investment is also an issue. In recent years, corporate developers have purchased portions of agricultural reserve land; many believe they are waiting to have it rezoned if a future B.C. government changes land reserve regulations. When it comes to B.C.’s food security, much hinges on the future of this hotly contested farmland.
Expanding both agritech and processing — making food into refined and value-added products — will require large, affordable swaths of land. Newman and others are advocating for B.C. to change the rules and allow food processing on agricultural reserve land.
“Originally, when the Agricultural Land Reserve was launched, it included a food processing zone,” Newman points out. “Dave Barrett (B.C.’s first NDP premier, whose government established the land reserve) famously said, ‘Why grow strawberries if you can’t make strawberry jam?’ ” In the early 2000s, the former B.C. Liberal Party government removed processing from land reserve regulations. Since then, B.C. has lost most of its processing industry.
Processing facilities can currently be built on agricultural reserve land only if at least 50 per cent of the processed product comes from the land the facility is on. “They made it so it was nearly impossible to build processing on the Agricultural Land Reserve … so we lost our green bean industry, we lost our green pea industry, we lost our strawberry industry,” Newman says. “Our potato industry is down about 70 per cent, because processors are moving elsewhere.”
Those who oppose building out large-scale processing and welcoming the Saputos and McCains of the world onto the Agricultural Land Reserve say they should instead build on industrial land. But, Newman says, it’s not so simple.
“I’ve worked with municipalities to try and site food processors on industrial land and the parcels just don’t exist because we didn’t protect our industrial land. Ironically, we were supposed to have an industrial land reserve that was supposed to come in the same legislation that created the Agricultural Land Reserve, but it never happened.” As a result, she says, Metro Vancouver has about a third to one-half the industrial land of equivalent-sized regions.
Welcoming industrial processing on the agricultural reserve could damage valuable topsoil and further displace B.C. farmers, opponents believe. But Newman says reserve regulations could be altered to include soil class, outlining which areas would be dedicated to field farming and not available to processors.
If food processors — even small or medium-sized operations — were to get the green light to build on the land reserve, it still raises questions around whether farmland should be used for growing food outdoors or making industrial-scale food products indoors. But Newman says it shouldn’t be an either-or issue, especially with a trade war underway. “This is a giant problem and it’s easy to fix. We drive blueberry south, we drive cranberry south, we drive beef south. What do we do with the blueberry harvest this year if there’s a tariff? We should immediately be building processing in those industries.”
Newman thinks the time for stalling on the issue has long passed. “It’s frustrating,” she says. “It’s a political issue, definitely, and it’s one that’s felt in the heart. This [is a] philosophical fight over whether the Agricultural Land Reserve is an industrial food production zone or a greenbelt. And if it’s a greenbelt, just decide that, and I’ll move somewhere else and do my work.”
Questions surrounding use of the land reserve get at the heart of larger existential issues facing B.C.’s food system. It’s personal for many, including for Sardinha. Like many young people in the industry in B.C., she comes from multiple generations of farmers. Her grandparents worked the apple orchards before her parents did. Her farm, Kaleidoscope Fruit Ranch, produces four varieties of apples for the commercial market, and she and her husband perform almost all the farm labour and upkeep by hand.
While Sardinha supports expanding the province’s processing capacity, she isn’t sure agritech developments will prioritize her needs. “There’s certain things like drone technology that I could see working on my farm. [But] a lot of it is very capital intensive, so I’m never going to be able to afford it,” she says. “I worry that it presupposes a future where we don’t have farmer-operators like me on farms anymore; we have hedge fund owners from Washington state. It can be really great, but it needs to be done in a way that allows access for people like me. We’re happy to adopt technology if it’s friendly in that way.”
Like many others in the industry, Sardinha and her husband have taken off-farm jobs to make ends meet. If they were both working full time at minimum wage, she says they would be making more money than they are from farming. The only reason they’ve managed is because they own their land and house and produce most of their own food. At the end of the day, they don’t want to give up farming.
Sardinha and many others believe the most fundamental issue is that B.C. has lacked a vision for its agriculture industry for too long.
“Farmers end up needing to ask the government for money and then taxpayers are paying for it too. In a profound sense, we don’t really have agricultural policy here. We have sort of this background belief that the market will decide, and we’ll evolve a system that will work within the market. Making food a priority would change things.”
In February, the provincial government announced the creation of a new task force that will focus on food security and sector growth, uniting producers, retailers, advocacy groups and experts, who will weigh in on the industry’s future amid trade war threats. The group will meet quarterly over the next 12 to 18 months.
In the meantime, Sardinha and other farmers aren’t holding out hope for top-down solutions. They believe immediate action needs to be taken from the ground up to strengthen the province’s food system. “I imagine the best thing would be a connected system of non-profit, cooperative distributor-retailers that are basically working to make sure everybody gets paid and we still keep consumer prices down,” Sardinha says. “And I do think that’s possible.”
Grower-owned co-operatives have flourished in Quebec and other places in Canada. In countries like Italy, the entire agricultural system is built around co-ops, which produce both raw products and processed foods. Newman and other researchers at the University of the Fraser Valley support the co-op model as a way for small growers to stay in the business and to maintain a place for local, handcrafted foods and food products in the food system. Land reserve regulations also support the presence of co-ops as a way to build out processing capacity (the processing clause stipulates that 50 per cent of the processed food must come from the property or from a co-op the farm is part of), but experts say it’s a vastly underused tool.
Ultimately, Newman says, we need to find a middle way to resolve the tension between expanding the scale of our food system and maintaining local industries like B.C.’s tree fruit sector. An important component will be getting more young people involved in farming. “I think what I would see as success is more pathways for people to enter the industry if they weren’t born into it. If you don’t inherit a farm in B.C., it’s really hard to start farming. And I don’t know what we do about that.”
Sardinha believes the problems are solvable, and she thinks the trade war offers a good opportunity to begin — with consumer choices. “Consumers will understand what is happening. We are outsourcing our food production. We send all our best stuff abroad and our leftovers are for our market here.”
Her parents showed her that farming was a valuable pursuit. The money wasn’t always great, but they had time to pursue hobbies, volunteer and build a meaningful life. After converting her orchards to organic a few years ago, Sardinha was reminded of why she chose to follow in their steps, despite the hurdles she’s faced. “I saw and continue to see this huge increase in biodiversity. I love the insects. I love just seeing life everywhere. It’s fundamentally a beautiful thing. I like farmers and I like our culture. There’s a struggle to keep that culture,” she says. “But it’s worth fighting for.”
Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter. On a warm September evening nearly 15...
Continue reading
Climate change, geopolitics and business opportunities power a blue economy
10 billion litres of sewage are dumped into Winnipeg’s lakes and rivers each year. Some...
Court sides with Xatśūll First Nation, temporarily halting Mount Polley mine waste expansion
