Starting next month, Ontario hunters will have a shot at sandhill cranes — for the first time in a century.

The long-legged, grey birds with a nearly two-metre wingspan are widespread across Ontario from the Great Lakes as far north as southern James Bay — nesting in wetlands and swampy areas after migrating up from the southern United States and Mexico in the spring.

Mark Peck recalls waking up at 4 a.m. to see thousands of sandhill cranes fly over the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, where 80 per cent of the species migrate to rest and eat before flying back south for the winter. 

Like Peck, many of them travel from Canada, while others make the journey from Alaska and Siberia.

“It was an incredible experience. … There were about 10,000 sandhill cranes, all on the river,” Peck, president of Ontario Field Ornithologists, said. “As the sun was coming up, the birds were slowly leaving, but they were dancing and bugling, and it was just an awesome experience. … I think it would be hard to hunt after witnessing that.”

Sandhill cranes have a distinct, rattling bugle call that can be heard up to four kilometres away. To Peck, it’s akin to the call of a common loon or the howl of a wolf, a “beautiful sound of nature.” Their distinctive mating dance — wings flapping, beak pecking and legs strutting — have been widely captured and shared online.

While birders love them, sandhill cranes have a long and complex history in Ontario. 

In the early 20th century, the species was hunted to near-extirpation in the province, meaning they were almost locally extinct. In the last few decades, thanks to increased protection from unregulated hunting and more sources of food from agriculture, they have surpassed population expectations. To some, this is a huge success.

“It really is a wonderful, good news story,” Peck said. “They’ve made a remarkable comeback. I’m 67. When I was growing up, it was unusual to see a sandhill crane in southern Ontario. Now, they breed across the province.”

Not everyone sees it as good news, though. Farmers in Algoma, Timmins and as far as Thunder Bay have advocated for an open hunting season in northern Ontario. They say sandhill cranes have caused extensive damage to their crops, wreaking havoc in the spring by pulling up freshly planted seedlings, and again in the fall before harvest.

“It is very discouraging to certain farmers that they’re planting their spring crops, and these birds are coming in and just annihilating it,” Bill Groenheide, Northern Ontario director of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, said. “Farmers are having an increase of up to 30 per cent loss in their crops.”

Birgit Martin, who farms on Manitoulin Island, told Ontario Grain Farmer Magazine she has had to replant 25 per cent of her corn acres due to sandhill crane damage. 

Sandhill cranes are omnivores and eat a wide variety of food including insects, plant roots, small animals like rodents and frogs, berries, seeds and even other small birds. But when they find themselves in agricultural areas during the fall migration, the crops hit the hardest are corn, soybeans and potatoes, Groenheide said — some of the most common, and profitable, crops for Ontario farmers.

“When so many birds come into one area and totally destroy your livelihood, there’s got to be compensation somewhere,” Groenheide said. The province’s wildlife damage compensation program focuses on livestock, and doesn’t cover crop losses to migratory birds. “There’s got to be something done about it.”

Ontario sandhill crane hunt allows for one bird per hunter per day

Ontario farmers have been asking the government to open a hunt for years. Environment and Climate Change Canada assessed the status of sandhill cranes earlier this year and found that a “conservative” hunt would have a “minimal impact” on the population of sandhill cranes — which is currently more than 103,000 strong, and considered to have a large, increasing population size. It proposed a hunt running for 14 days, with a “small bag limit” of one bird per day that will allow the federal government to carefully monitor the harvest in the first four years of implementation.

While Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources determines harvesting regulations for most wildlife in the province, the federal environment department oversees migratory birds, like sandhill cranes.

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s population objective for the cranes sits between 30,000 and 60,000, and explains on its website that a “managed harvest” could slow or stabilize population growth and potentially minimize crop damage.

The federal agency told The Narwhal in an email that the primary goal of this open season is to provide additional hunting opportunity, adding that “while the intent of the season is not to significantly decrease the sandhill crane population in Ontario and Quebec,” the season may also provide “some direct relief of conflicts.” They also said there may be some indirect reduction of conflicts as hunted sandhill cranes may respond better to scare techniques used by farmers to protect their crops, such as propane cannons that make loud noises.

“Obviously that’s great from a recovery perspective … that this population was able to rebound to that extent,” Matthew Robbins, a fish and wildlife biologist at Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, said. “It also means that, based on the modelling that exists, they can certainly handle some sustainable use.” 

The current hunt will allow Canadian residents to hunt one sandhill crane per person per day in the area around Hudson and James Bay, from Sept. 1 through 14, and on farmland only in other parts of northern and central Ontario including Algoma, Nipissing and Temiskaming, on Sept. 12 through 25. A similarly limited hunt is being opened in Quebec this September as well. 

This new season creates opportunity for hunters and gourmets — sandhill cranes are known to some as “ribeye of the sky” for their rich, red meat — that the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters says is appropriately limited to start.

“The proposal is a very conservative approach,” Robbins said. He doesn’t anticipate a significant hit to the population as a result of the hunt, but says slowing the population growth by some amount may help those farm conflicts.

“It would be worth exploring expanding it in some capacity as long as we can ensure that that’s going to be sustainable,” Robbins said. “From a conservation perspective, it definitely makes sense to start this off from a fairly cautious position, and then go from there.”

Peck is also optimistic about the conservative nature of the hunt’s parameters. But conservation organizations like Ontario Nature have argued reinstating a sandhill crane hunt is a “controversial and concerning proposal.” The birds can live up to 30 years in the wild, meaning they take a long time to mature, while very few of their young survive to adulthood. This makes it more difficult for populations to replenish quickly if adults are killed off.  

The federal government said it received opposing comments from an animal welfare organization, ornithology and naturalist groups, birdwatchers, an unnamed First Nation and individuals during the public comment period last winter.

Environment and Climate Change Canada says on its website that the current strategy accounts for sandhill crane life history and low productivity by allowing only a very limited harvest. It argues the “daily bag limit is intentionally set below” the level the population can sustainably support, and that the population is still expected to grow, though more slowly than if there were no hunt.

At the same time, Groenheide from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture worries the plan for the hunt is not enough to protect farmers, but Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal it does not anticipate making changes to the proposed harvest framework until the end of the 2029-30 hunting season.

“In Canada, they want to regulate it because they want to drop the amount of birds [killed], and I do understand that,” Groenheide said. “But on the flip side, how do we protect the farmers?”

Farmers organization wants higher sandhill crane harvest and in more areas

In early 2024, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture released a statement recommending Environment and Climate Change Canada alter its plans. The organization wants farmers to be allowed to defend their crops from sandhill cranes at any point during the year, as well as increased hunting limits, more hunting areas and an earlier season. 

While changes have not been reflected in the final regulations, Groenheide said this year’s hunt is a good first step.

“It’s great to see these birds in great numbers. Don’t get me wrong,” Groenheide said. “But there has to be a playing field. Farmers are out there and the value of their crops is in big demand. There’s a lot of money put into this. They’re losing it all. They’re getting nothing for it. So there has to be a trade-off somewhere.”

He said the way this species is managed represents part of a larger picture related to expanding agriculture in northern Ontario, proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness in April 2026.

“We have ministers now wanting to expand the north, wanting the great clay belt to be opened up and all that,” Groenheide said. “I always call it the great frontier of the north.”

“It’s great land,” Groenheide said, but farming new areas comes with new challenges. Wildlife like deer, bear, moose and elk can conflict with agriculture as farming expands northward, he said.

“It’s their territory, so how do we work around it? How do we compensate farmers if we are inviting them out there?” Groenheide said. “There’s got to be a plan.”

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Assar Grinde is the kind of man whose calm is infectious, even as he rattles off an encyclopedic knowledge of facts about drought, water and the impacts of fracking on the region he calls home. A cattle rancher by trade who studied geology at the University of Alberta, you get the sense he’d rather be tending his herd than fighting with regulators and oil and gas companies.

But on a Sunday in early July after a morning on the ranch, he sits in the back of his friend Daniel Iseli-Otto’s truck, sporting a sweater knit by Iseli-Otto’s mom, and talks about the reasons he can’t just walk away.

It started three years ago when Lloyd Creek — a tributary of the Blindman River, which runs through the land Grinde’s family has ranched for generations — dried up. It was something he’d never seen before and he says the oil and gas companies were still pulling water from the river.

“We wanted to make sure that the river didn’t dry up because we thought that was crazy,” Grinde says.

He and Iseli-Otto helped found the Blindman River Watershed Society and dove into the labyrinth of data used by the Alberta Energy Regulator and the equally bewildering bureaucratic divisions of the provincial government.

It’s a funny time to be talking about the stress on the Blindman River watershed and the concerns he and Iseli-Otto have when it comes to the vast quantities of fresh water being used by oil and gas companies for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

The fields around Rimbey, Alta., about 200 kilometres north of Calgary, are saturated in surreal hues of green, stark against the grey skies of an abnormally wet July that has brought much-needed rain.

It’s a far cry from the drought-like conditions of May and June, conditions that have become all too common in a region suffering through a decade-long dry spell.

But the sudden rush of water isn’t enough to quell the concerns of area ranchers and residents who watched that creek run dry and their drinking wells drop. They say the rain isn’t enough to make up for how much has been lost from the aquifers — the deep underground natural reservoirs that feed those wells.

And then there’s the issue of oil and gas companies using billions of litres of water to crack open the earth beneath those green fields and exploit one of the hottest gas fields going, the Duvernay. They take surface water when there isn’t any to spare, and a fleeting moment of plenty might only make it worse, according to landowners who met with The Narwhal.

Grinde says promises were made by those companies, but rarely kept.

“ ‘We’re going to be taking the water at high flows when there’s too much of it, and we’ll store it and then use it when we need it.’ That was the industry’s sales pitch,” he says, driving through the region southwest of Edmonton along with Iseli-Otto. “But then we’ve been in a drought eight of the last 10 years, and they are still pulling water down.”

Dana Kreil, the chair of the nearby Medicine River Watershed Society, and a councillor for Lacombe County, says there’s no trust in the province to monitor the water and to intervene. Her society has bought its own monitoring equipment and is pressuring the government for solutions.

“You can’t fool the locals,” she says, making it clear she’s speaking for the watershed society and not the county. “There are people telling me the top of their runners wouldn’t get wet in that river. So you can’t tell me that those are acceptable levels for pumping from there.”

‘You only get conflict when there’s scarcity’

The Blindman River, as well as the Medicine, aren’t among the great waterways of the world. With enough momentum, it wouldn’t be hard to leap from one bank to the other. They are slow and meandering, but they are critical to ranchers and farmers.

They are also tenuous.

Neither river is fed by the mountain glaciers to the west. They rely instead on spring runoff and underground aquifers to keep water flowing. This year’s early-summer drenching is an indication of the feast and famine cycles expected to be the norm as the climate shifts — droughts with sudden onslaughts of rain. Grinde says his ranch received almost as much rain in June as it did the entire year previous.

For decades, fracking companies here have been injecting water deep into the ground to break up rock holding gaseous wealth in tight crevasses. That water, vast quantities of it, is almost entirely permanently lost to the water cycle as it remains trapped in the reservoirs that previously held gas. The practice was largely accepted by area landowners, but then water became scarce and drilling activity increased.

“We haven’t had to care about fresh water because we never had this issue before,” Grinde says. “You only get conflict when there’s scarcity, and you have that imbalance between supply and demand, and that’s really what’s happened in the last few years.”

Once Grinde and others started paying attention, they discovered a system of what they say is weak oversight, weak data and regulatory capitulation.

Water use is overseen by both Alberta’s Environment Ministry and the energy regulator — depending on who’s using the resource — and Grinde says it leads to a lot of plausible deniability. Water monitoring in the area is based on a federal government sensor 50 kilometres away in Blackfalds, Alta., but Grinde says it doesn’t actually measure the flow of the river, just the water pressure. Even if it did, Grinde thinks the minimum flows established by the province to determine when a company can pull river water for fracking are too low.

The Alberta Energy Regulator did not answer a question about the monitoring situation on Blindman River, but said monitoring is used to inform when a company can divert water. It noted that monitoring can be seen on the Alberta Rivers site.

The regulator says companies are responsible for measuring flow if there is no station nearby.

“So then that kind of led us down this path of trying to figure out: ‘Do you guys have rules around it?’ ” asked Grinde.

For some in the area, the answer is more uncertain than they’re comfortable with.

Company wants to pull billions of litres from critical freshwater aquifer

In March, Spartan Delta, a fracking company operating in the area, applied for a water licence to pump a maximum of 475 million litres of water per year — about 2.4 million bathtubs’ worth — from the Paskapoo Formation, a vast underground freshwater reservoir that stretches south past Calgary and north past the Athabasca River near Fox Creek.

That raised red flags for those in the region already worried about a strained system.

Grinde wants the government to prevent oil and gas companies from accessing shallow fresh groundwater for fracking, implementing a ban now so that it doesn’t have to draft new rules in the midst of a full-blown crisis.

“Right now [the companies] say, ‘Well, we don’t have any more surface water available to get licensed, we’re just going to start drilling shallow groundwater wells,’ which is really concerning because we don’t know enough about the groundwater, and it’s so vital to everybody who’s living here,” he says.

Tens of thousands of wells tap into the aquifer for drinking water, as do towns across Alberta. According to a report by the federal government, the Paskapoo “supports more groundwater wells than any other aquifer system in the Canadian Prairies,” making it “the most significant supply of groundwater” in the whole region.

That same federal report — published almost 20 years ago — also cautioned the aquifer is slow to recharge and the amount of water that can be pulled from the aquifer might be limited and may have already been exceeded in 2008.

Spartan Delta already pumps water from the Medicine River, with hoses stretching along ditches and culverts throughout the region pulling water into massive reservoirs. It also uses recycled water from its operations, but that only accounts for approximately 10 per cent of its use.

In 2024, the latest year of data from the Alberta Energy Regulator, Spartan Delta used approximately 171 million litres of fresh water for fracking. Its latest application shows the company estimates it will need much more than this, around 1.5 billion litres per year for the next 10 years.

The company did not answer emailed questions but sent a statement instead, saying it is focused on “responsible, sustainable development of oil and gas.”

Spartan Delta said it adheres to all rules and regulations set out by the regulator, Alberta’s Environment Ministry and local bylaws.

“All of our water use is determined by Alberta Environment,” reads a portion of its statement. “The company receives temporary diversion approvals, term licences and has undergone several audits to validate we are in compliance with all of the terms of the water approvals. All resident concerns are evaluated by the appropriate regulating body of our activities during the approval process.”

The regulator also did not directly answer questions emailed by The Narwhal, but did provide information on water use. An unidentified spokesperson said the regulator reviews all water licence applications and considers risks to individuals and the environment. The spokesperson added there are restrictions on water use if levels drop below prescribed thresholds and that restrictions can also be implemented in response to “landowner concerns.”

Analysis on aquifers is conducted by hydrogeology experts, the email said.

Though landowners are concerned about Spartan Delta’s water use, the company is a small player compared to others.

Parallax Energy Operations used almost one billion litres in 2024, while Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., one of the largest oil and gas companies in Canada, used 2.9 billion litres of fresh water for operations across the province. Overall, fracking consumed 20 billion litres of fresh water in 2024, up sharply from the seven billion litres consumed in 2013.

Grinde’s goal is to prove to the province and the regulator that the aquifer is dropping, realizing that officials could just turn around and say, well, it’s a drought.

“But even if it is a drought, the volume of water that the companies are using for fracking is accelerating that,” he says. “It could be that if there’s only a certain amount of water, you have to justify the use for certain things, right? So maybe you have to talk about hierarchy of use.”

Time and again, Grinde, Kreil and Iseli-Otto talk about the amount of work required to collect information, to get in touch with provincial officials, to make someone listen. Without decades of data, the response from officials and companies is: prove it.

“It’s the province’s job,” Kreil says. “It’s not the watershed society’s job. We’re volunteers.”

The provincial government did not respond to questions emailed by The Narwhal.

Alberta ranchers say their bison herd collapsed when a fracking company moved in

It’s easy to look out across the fields and patches of trees and imagine the landscape in central Alberta is largely unchanged, but Iseli-Otto, who works as a carpenter and has lived here his whole life, looks out his truck window and remembers bush where fields now stretch — a child’s wilderness transformed into cropland. It’s a reminder of how quickly things can change. How the immutable becomes a memory.

The change can be slow, or it can come on in a relative blink.

Tucked into a secluded corner of the countryside, is the home of Butch and Nicole Smith, two bison ranchers who have lived and worked in the area for decades, with the dream — shared by one of their daughters — of passing their ranch to the next generation.

Inside the home, a stuffed cougar looks down from its final perch above the kitchen, and the walls are covered in framed rodeo photos showing the victories of the family’s horses. Tail Light was the “team roping heading horse of the year.” Hickory, the “2011 pole bending horse of the year.” Their daughters have won an astonishing number of championship rodeo belts and saddles, all of which are on display.

A hint of the Smiths’ directness, and their frustration, comes in the form of a small sign by the kitchen table: “What (and I can’t stress this enough) the f*ck,” it reads.

Over bison burgers and sausages, the Smiths talk about how Spartan Delta cleared the land across from their feedlot and built two massive reservoirs two years ago to store the vast quantities of water the company pumps. They talk about how construction and pumping for the reservoirs, which bisect a wetland, led to startling changes in their bison herd.

“We started seeing the wildest behaviour from them,” Nicole says. “They’re very habitual animals.”

The herd was refusing to move to the areas they usually feed, and there was a sudden drop in their herd.

Nicole says they had 240 pregnant cows in the fall of 2024, but only 194 live births.

“We had many dead calves, aborted calves and calves that starved as stressed mothers produce not enough milk,” she says.

The Smiths blame the stress of the industrial activity and the disruption to stubborn routines.

The Smiths, however, aren’t the types to sit back and watch. They say they’ve spoken with their MLA, Jason Nixon, with the premier, with two environment ministers — Rebecca Schulz and RJ Sigurdson — and Energy Minister Brian Jean. They are working with Ecojustice, an environmental legal outfit, and were invited by the Alberta NDP to sit in the legislature last spring after speaking with MLA Nagwan Al-Guneid.

Now, after two years of fighting, they’re losing faith and plan to move.

“Neither one of us is a — how do I say it — a sitter arounder. I’m not gonna sit here and be miserable. I can’t even walk anymore because both ways just reminds you of all of it,” Nicole says.

“I’m raging when I hit the end of my driveway — every single time.”

‘There’s very little oversight right now’

Tensions are high in the region where fracking butts up against homes and ranches. In early July, a rumour spread that some of the hoses that pump water from ponds and rivers were shot at, but the Alberta RCMP said there were no reports of an incident on that day. Perhaps most telling was that none of the people who spoke with The Narwhal seemed surprised, although no one supported the idea and warned of the danger of puncturing the high-pressure lines.

There is a real sense that landowners have been abandoned in favour of oil and gas.

Kreil, whose society includes representatives from eight municipalities, including Red Deer, Lacombe County and Sylvan Lake, said the group recently met with the minister of Environment and Protected Areas and the CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator to talk about the stress on the watershed. In its presentation, the society noted more than half of all fresh water in their watershed is allocated for oil and gas. Temporary water licences are almost entirely for fracking.

She says the minister told them to write a resolution calling for policy changes through the Rural Municipalities of Alberta — an organization which represents towns and districts across the province.

“I think he felt that he had dealt with us enough to say: ‘Write a resolution,’ ” she says.

Kreil stresses she’s not opposed to oil and gas, or to fracking in particular, but there has to be a balance.

“When we went to the minister, we said we want some solutions,” she says. “We’re not just coming here to bellyache and complain.”

Her organization wants to see more wastewater treated and reused, including municipal wastewater, to reduce or eliminate fresh water use. It wants better data on the state of the watersheds and a better understanding of drought and its impacts. And it wants new regulations governing use by agriculture, oil and gas and municipalities.

But those critical of the way fracking companies are operating all point their finger at the regulator when asked what the biggest problem is. The rules are weak and out of touch, responsibility is passed on and there’s no enforcement, they say.

“The problem with the Alberta Energy Regulator is there’s very little oversight right now,” Kreil says.

Iseli-Otto says he tried alerting a contact at the regulator about companies pumping from the Blindman River in May when the water levels were worryingly low, but nothing came of it.

Two days later, he was driving home and the pumps were running.

“So I texted him and I said, ‘Hey man, pumps are running, what’s going on? Why is this happening?,’ ” he says. In screenshots of the text messages shared with The Narwhal, Iseli-Otto then asks if someone from the regulator had checked to see if the pumps had stopped.

“That’s the point at which I got the automated text message saying this number is not monitored.”

Alberta pushes to double production, build pipelines

The regulator is an arms-length government body, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely independent. The government sets the overall policy direction for the regulator to follow, for example, and the government appoints the regulator’s board of directors.

Recently, it appointed David Yager to the board, a long-time friend of Premier Danielle Smith who also acts as one of her special advisors, and tasked him with overseeing a revamp of the organization.

There have also been revelations of direct intervention from the provincial government into regulatory decisions.

And the direction from the government is clear: it wants to double oil and gas production and it’s willing to incentivize companies to do so, even as it helps finance a new pipeline to the West Coast.

With the push for more production and without more stringent rules on water use, the problems in the area are likely to continue, or increase.

“We’ve had companies tell us ‘We’re not doing anything differently until the government tells us to,’ because it’s a competitive industry,” Grinde says.

“We said to the minister, as long as this is free, they will never change,” Kreil adds.

But in the end, something has to give, she says.

“You can’t be running the people out of water for oil.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

As you bite into a juicy peach this summer, thank Niagara. The southern Ontario region grows more than half of Canada’s tender fruits: more than 70 per cent of our peaches, plus many fragrant baskets of nectarines, plums, pears, cherries, grapes and apricots. 

Despite the bounty, climate change is taking a toll. Sour cherries took the hit this year, the industry group Ontario Tender Fruit says, with the crop all but wiped out by a cold winter and late frost. A summer of extreme heat and smoky skies have made farm work difficult, even dangerous. As weather becomes more intense and erratic, harvests across the country become unpredictable, too. 

Jay Subramanian’s job is to tackle that uncertainty. The University of Guelph professor works at the Vineland Research & Innovation Centre in Niagara, combining modern genetics and age-old techniques to develop futuristic tender fruit. Right now, he’s trying to breed peaches that last longer, both before and after being picked. In the orchard, growers could spare workers a day of harvest during extreme heat. At home, we’d have an extra day to enjoy them, reducing food waste. 

The process for breeding flowering plants is centuries old. First, you identify varieties with different desirable qualities. Then, you take pollen from “variety X,” as Subramanian puts it, and paste it onto the stigma — the sticky tip of the flower — of “variety Y.” Then, you see what grows. If the fruits of his labour bear the desired qualities, he consults a panel to make sure the new variety also has the right “colour, shape, taste, everything that is appealing.” 

Bringing a new variety to the public takes years. 

The market value of Ontario’s tender fruit was more than $94 million in 2025, and that figure doesn’t account for the wider industry around it. Yet Subramanian says finding money to protect it isn’t easy. The only recent government funding for developing climate-resilient tender fruit varieties in the province — from data collection and research to education and breeding — was slightly more than $1 million from the federal government. And that was two years ago. 

This lack of support, he says, is one reason the country’s crop of fruit breeders is shrinking.

“We used to have like 10 people or 12 people in Canada when I joined,” Subramanian, who was born in India, says. “Now it has gone down to four. And if any of us retire, the writing is on the wall. That has to change. That has to come not from us, not from the university. It has to come from somewhere above.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How are Ontario’s peach crops being affected by climate change? 

Jay Subramanian: I joined this job not too long ago — 24 years, but it’s not a very long period in crop evolution and things like that. Then, the first peaches here were harvested in the last week of July. [This year], we are already starting to see peaches ripen on July 10 — almost a three-week advancement within three decades.

That tells you how alarming the situation is in terms of climate change. Neither the breeder nor the marketing people nor the consumer can put something on the calendar like our parents or grandparents used to do — ‘Okay, this week I am going to get peaches from the farmers’ market and then do canning in my home.’ That’s all out of whack. 

[This July] we had temperatures crossing almost 33 C, 34 C, and that’s also not good. When you go and look at the fruits, they are all burnt, as if they were just taken out of a barbecue on the top. It is that bad.

When I say the effects of climate change, I mean unpredictable and extreme weather, such as early or late frost, extreme heat, drought or too much rain. Today in mid-July in Toronto, it’s incredibly smoky because of fires up north. Is there anything I’m missing?

Another thing is our winters are not predictable anymore. Sometimes we have enough snow on the ground so that the groundwater is all filled up and the plants kind of muscle up during the winter. Sometimes we don’t get that. We just get a smattering of snow here and there and then we don’t have enough groundwater. That is also causing decline and unpredictability to the tender fruit crops.

What does this mean for you, as a breeder and a scientist? What is your day-to-day when you’re trying to make these fruits as climate-resilient as you can?

Just to back up, tender fruit breeding is a very long process. The varieties that we release now were bred 25 years ago. So I have to have a vision or a crystal ball to know what is going to happen — 25 years from now, what is going to happen? That is just not possible. 

Looking at what is going to happen, how we are going to breed, that is going to be challenging. But we are also contributing to global warming and climate change. When you have produce like tender fruits going to a landfill, they emanate quite a bit of methane and nitrous oxide when they are rotting. Nitrous oxide takes six times longer than a carbon molecule to get settled down back in the earth, so it is going to be up there in the atmosphere for much longer.  

We are trying to breed varieties that would stay better so that it doesn’t go to the landfill, varieties of tender fruits that will remain on the shelf and in the consumer’s house for two or three days extra. Twenty to 30 per cent of produce is wasted by the consumer. That is the part that I can control within my career, within my lifetime. 

On the front end, an early peach that is ripening now, or a late peach that’s going to ripen in September, they all flower at the same time. They all flower within that two-week window in May. But then, from flowering to fruit maturity, that time for some is short. For some, it is long. 

So we are trying to work on that one: if it flowers on day X, it is going to ripen 70 days after flowering. This part as a geneticist, as a breeder, we can control. It’s a long process, but that is doable by using modern genetics. It is a slow and patient study, but I’d be more than happy to take the initiative on that because I’m the only one left in Canada.

You’re the only what left in Canada?

Only tender fruit breeder, only peach breeder left in Canada. If I retire, R.I.P. for this position.

How did that happen?

That’s a good question. Almost all through the world, for any publicly funded research program, they are looking at the industry to support this breeding. If you take a place like California, yes, their industry is huge — by even getting something like five cents from an agricultural check-off fund, they can support like five scientists. Certain crops, like corn, soybean, canola, wheat, these are huge industries. It’s easy. It’s possible. 

But our industry here is just very, very tiny. It is a very vital industry because we supply more than 50 per cent of tender fruits for Canada from this tiny little bowl in the south corner of Ontario. So that value is something people in power have to recognize.

In terms of the science, can you say a bit more? You want more control over the ripening process?

Well, ripening is a very long scientific process. Over the past 75 years, there’s quite a bit of study that has gone into the ripening process, how it is managed, what are all the genes involved and all those things. Using genetics, we can either accelerate it or we can delay it. That part we can do by breeding.

We know the genetics, we know what variety X can do, what variety Y can do, what we expect when we hybridize X and Y, things like that. If we take varieties that are ripening early, and if we put that pollen on the flowers that are ripening late, can we get something in-between? 

Along with ripening, I assume you’re also working, for example, on trees that are more resilient if there’s too much rain, or not enough rain.

To some extent, we can control that part by genetics. Another thing that we are working on is to make sure the varieties that we develop are resistant to some of the diseases. We are in Niagara, and the place is normally rainy and humid, and this is a heaven for pathogens like fungus and bacteria to grow. Especially when they see the fruits — fruit is full of sugar — and then they just go kaboom after that. 

By breeding varieties that are naturally resistant, we are also reducing the number of sprays that a farmer has to do. In that way, you can also help reduce climate change effects, because the operation of the machine, the pesticides themselves, all those things contribute to climate change. 

Is there a success that you’ve had in your career worth highlighting?

It’s a little bit early, but I think I have enough conviction to say that we are now developing a new series of peaches that can stay a little longer on the tree, on the shelf, as well as on the consumer table. Significantly longer, and they still taste very much like the normal peach. In fact, some of them are much sweeter. 

Probably in the next five, six years, we will be releasing varieties belonging to that particular group. Some of the press people call them the ‘neat peach.’

I personally really love a messy peach, though. I feel like that’s part of the peach experience. 

That is because we are here [in southern Ontario]. We are spoiled with the good stuff.

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Summary

• While Black and racialized farm workers make up a large chunk of the country’s agricultural workforce, Black farm owners are still a slim minority in Canada.
• This wasn’t always the case, and historical Black Canadian settlements, like the Black Settlement in Oro Township near Barrie, Ont., provided land and housing for Black farmers in the early 19th century.
• One of the primary barriers to farm access and ownership is the high cost of land; programs like farm rentals and urban farms are trying to bridge the gap.

Along a dusty bike trail of crushed gravel, the blue-grey waters of Kempenfelt Bay shimmer through large trees with leafy branches overhead. On one side stands an Ontario Heritage Trust plaque, recognizing the historic Black community of Oro, Ont. 

On bicycle rides along the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail, I ride for fun and adventure and to find the Black history hidden in the countryside. As a scholar and writer, I research how race intersects with nature. In this case, it is how farming and farmlands — a part of nature we can all connect with — criss-cross with race.

In southwestern Ontario, I’ve taken detours to visit the former Black villages known as the Buxton Settlement and the Puce River Community, near the border with Detroit. In other places I look for Ontario Heritage plaques, old churches and fading headstones in unregistered cemeteries. These are often the only indicators that Black communities once thrived in rural Ontario and that Black farmers owned their farms.

In the 19th century, the area around Lake Simcoe, including Oro (now Oro-Medonte), was filled with Black farmers and their families. There are similar heritage plaques scattered across rural areas and small towns in Ontario such as Fergus, Cainsville, Lucan and Dresden. Once a common sight, today Black farm owners are rare, while Black farm workers are a backbone of agricultural labour in Canada. Each year, some 36,000 Black and brown farm workers come to Canada for the farming season.

The average age of a farmer is 56 years in Canada. They are getting old and tired, greying out of the years of dawn-to-dusk work on the farm. While there has been an increase in the number of female farmers, one statistic has barely changed — the tiny number of Black, Indigenous and racialized farmers. In Ontario, only five per cent of farmers are from diverse ethnocultural groups, which includes racialized groups.

Yet, in Toronto, some 56 per cent of the population is racialized, according to Statistics Canada. This demographic drift is not reflected in farming. So, where will the next generation of young farmers come from in Ontario? Who will grow the food that we all need to eat and live?

Farmland is precious to both farmers and non-farmers, but the competition for farmland is fierce. Data from Ontario Farmland Trust shows Ontario has lost 18 per cent of its farmland in recent decades to urban development and aggregate mining. Each day, Ontario is losing 319 acres, or 129 hectares, of farmland to development. Once the farmland is paved over, it is lost forever.

“The number one issue is access to land for Black farmers,” Claire Perttula, president of the BIPOC caucus of the National Farmers Union, said. “Land is so expensive. To put together a down payment you need millions. Working in agriculture you won’t make that down payment.” 

Created in 2021, the caucus represents racialized farmers, land stewards and farm workers from across the country. It builds community and advocates for their interests.

“Farmland should be treated as a public good and not just as a private one for profit,” Perttula said. “We need a different system of farm ownership and use that would prioritize the people farming the land. This helps them make a go of it and earn a living.”

No Black farmers but lots of Black farm workers

Cycling along the backroads of the Niagara Wine Route in Ontario, I passed scores of Black men tending to grapevines in vineyards, apples in orchards and peas and beans in fields. I stopped to chat with them as they were the only other Black people I had seen so far that summer in the countryside. The men were Jamaican and migrant farm workers. 

Farm workers till the land, plant the seeds and harvest the crops. In Canada, those farm workers are most likely to be Black or brown. The labourers are migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America who are hired under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Each year, they arrive in Canada in the spring, and must leave in autumn when their contracts end. Nearly half of all agricultural workers in Canada are hired under this program. They labour in every province where there are farms. Some farm workers have been coming to Canada for decades. As temporary foreign workers, they are mostly ineligible for citizenship.

On the other side of the country, Jamaican migrant workers also labour in the wineries and orchards of the Okanagan Valley, B.C. I now expect to see them everywhere in my travels in rural areas or small towns. So why the stark racial divide in farming in Canada, where white farmers reap the profits and Black and brown farm workers sweat under the sun? 

Free farmland for some

In the United States, Black farmers were proverbially promised “40 acres and a mule” — immortalized in the name of Spike Lee’s film production company — a reparation of sorts, at the end of slavery. No such promises were made to formerly enslaved people in Canada, when slavery was abolished here in 1834. 

White homesteaders, however, got their free acres of land under various land grant schemes. In Ontario, for instance, the 1868 Free Grants and Homestead Act gave free land to farmers, who got the title and legal ownership if they cleared the forested land and built a farmhouse within five years. Roads to support colonization were constructed across the province to make it easier for the settlers to arrive and claim their free land. The railways did the same across the country a few decades later. The free farmland was, and still is, all Indigenous land.

The only land scheme in southern Ontario that was specifically for Black people was the Black Settlement in Oro Township, near Barrie, Ont. The free land grants were in part a reward for the Black veterans who fought to protect Canada in the War of 1812 when the United States invaded. However, over time the settlement faded as the land was poor for farming, and it was too far from major roads and thus difficult to reach markets to sell the produce. 

“The problem is not just for Black farmers alone, but it’s worst for them,” Bamidele Adekunle said. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph, and co-editor of the book Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches Our Tables.

“It’s the commodification of land,” Adekunle said. “There is a serious competition between real estate and agriculture for land. When land is commodified, its use moves to things that are more profitable. It moves out of the reach of most farmers.”

Access to modern farmland is a massive challenge for any new farmer. Those that don’t inherit the family farm can buy their own, but only if they have the money, and prices are increasing each year. In 2024 the price for a hectare of farmland and buildings in Ontario was $20,782.

Consider an average city block is roughly one hectare in size. The average size of a farm in Ontario is now 249 acres, or 100 hectares. That means an average commercial farm in Ontario costs about $5 million. This means that small family-owned farms are fading into the past along with milk pails, churning butter by hand and Anne of Green Gables. 

Buying traditional farmland is out of reach for many Black farmers, without some form of financial help. The FarmStart program was supposed to kickstart that help. Started in 2005, the program was an incubator for potential farmers, providing them with mentoring, and teaching farming and technical skills. One thing the now-shuttered program struggled to provide was access to land to grow food. 

New solutions for an old farmland problem

“There are some alternative and affordable pathways into farming,” Martin Straathof, the executive director of the Ontario Farmland Trust, said. The non-profit was set up to keep farmers farming by protecting farmland from non-agricultural uses. The trust has advocated for solutions to make farming accessible, such as a conservation easement agreement, which guarantees land will continue to be used for farming.

“The easement creates stability for tenant farmers who can rent the farmland,” Straathof said. “It gives new farmers access to land and the security that they need to keep farming.” 

The farmland is still the private property of the owners under the conservation easement agreement, but it can only be used for farming. Similarly, farmland trusts keep agricultural land protected for that use, even after farming families move on. Some farmers may not have anyone to inherit the family farm or want to leave farmland as their legacy. They can donate the land to a farmland trust, which in turn can lease the land to tenant farmers.

Around the Greater Toronto Area, nature is protected from urban sprawl by the Greenbelt Act. There are calls for similar legislation to shelter prime farmland from development, known as a foodbelt. Bill 21, the Protect Our Food Act, passed first reading in parliament in 2025 and proposes to protect the fertile agricultural lands of southern Ontario from non-agricultural uses. Put forward by Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner and Independent MPP Bobbi Ann Brady, the act could help curve the rapid loss of farmland across southern Ontario.

Additionally, climate change is affecting agriculture in Canada. It is uprooting assumptions about what can and can’t be grown in the land of the “Great White North.” The warming climate impacts crops, farm animals, the soil, insects and diseases. Some traditional crops such as wheat and canola don’t do well when stressed by heat. 

The warmer and longer growing season caused by climate change means that some tropical crops can be farmed in Canada, though. Sweet potatoes are now grown in Ontario as a commercial crop. If the climate change even further, it might be possible to grow other tropical staples such as yam, rice and bananas. However, you need farmers who know how to do so. These are familiar crops for Black and other racialized farmers. They already have the skill and knowledge to grow them. But they can’t use the skills or meet the potential demand for the crops if they have no access to farmland.

“You need a minimum of five acres to be a commercial farmer,” said Jacqueline Dwyer, the farmer and co-founder of Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective. “The system is against us. The lack of finance. The lack of resources. The lack of land. The system won’t change without pressure.”

Urban farms are another accessible route into farming for Black farmers. There are quite a few Black urban farmers or farm organizations in the Toronto area such as Afri-Can Food Basket, Black Creek Community Farm, Adinkra Farm and Zawadi Farm. Each of these play an important role in reconnecting people to the source of their food and provide culturally appropriate foods for the Black community. These foods include yam, callaloo and okra. However, urban farms have their limits as there is no pathway from there to owning or operating a rural farm for Black farmers. 

“Youth are not getting into agriculture because there is no land,” Dwyer said. “Young people are pushed out of farming. They call themselves landless farmers.”

In many ways, farming is at a crossroads in Ontario. The pipeline into farming is leaking, due to a mismatch between old and new farmers, and it will worsen in the future unless things change. The majority of farmers are old, White and near retirement. They own farmland. The province is multiracial due to demographic shifts and so the next generation of young farmers are most likely to be Black and racialized. They do not own farmland. 

The gap between those who have and do not have farmland must close if we are all going to eat. 

Spring is here and fresh joy fills the air. The birds and butterflies are returning from the tropics. So too are the Black and brown migrant farmer workers. The farmland is awake and it is time to sow. We need Black farmers now, and they too need to reap, if we are all to eat.

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Summary

• B.C. is a world-leading mushroom producer with much of the provincial crop being exported to the United States.
• Recently, the United States Department of Commerce added tariffs to Canadian-grown mushrooms on the grounds they receive unfair government subsidies.
• One B.C.-based mushroom farm is fighting the tariffs, but more could be coming by the end of the year.

Mushrooms may not be the first crop that comes to mind when you think of high-tech agriculture. But in B.C., Agaricus bisporus — the fungal species sold in grocery stores as button mushrooms, creminis and portobellos — are grown using cutting-edge techniques.

“If you go back 10 or 15 years, you would travel to Holland to find the most productive, leading-edge mushroom facilities in the world,” Lewis Macleod, CEO of South Mill Champs Mushrooms, said in an interview with The Narwhal. “Today, you travel to Holland and British Columbia.”

In 2017, Pennsylvania-based South Mill merged with Aldergrove-based Champ’s Mushrooms to form South Mill Champs. The company now supplies more B.C-grown mushrooms to the U.S. market than any other, around 22,675 tonnes per year. 

Before B.C.’s mushroom tech boom, farms often mimicked more natural growing conditions. Modern B.C. farms use what’s called the Dutch method: metal shelves heaped with a mixture of manure and straw to cultivate their crops. The mushrooms are grown in air-tight facilities that are closely controlled for temperature and humidity. Unlike other indoor crops, mushrooms don’t need much light to grow. The buildings are dim, the opposite of brightly lit commercial greenhouses. This method results in faster growing, better quality mushrooms and fewer pests, according to Macleod. But it’s not as common in the U.S.

Nearly all Canadian mushroom exports — 98 per cent in 2024 — are sold in the U.S. As B.C.’s technologically advanced mushroom industry has grown into a global leader, some American producers have accused Canadian growers of benefiting from unfair government subsidies. It’s set off a trade dispute that could reshape the cross-border market.

B.C. mushroom trade sparks U.S. concerns

If you ask B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, mushrooms are among the most unique of the province’s commercial crops.

“They have to be harvested 24 hours a day and they grow in the dark,” Popham said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of technology that’s been coming around, a lot of innovation that is allowing for different types of harvesting [and] different types of lighting conditions.”

This innovation may be part of what sparked a trade complaint from a group of U.S. mushroom producers last year.

A September 2025 petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce from the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition argued fresh Canadian mushrooms are being “unfairly” subsidized by government programs.

“Canadian producers are exporting fresh mushrooms to the United States at prices below fair value and are benefiting from countervailable subsidies provided by the government of Canada,” the petition says. “These practices have resulted in significant negative impacts on U.S. mushroom growers and packers, including lost sales, depressed prices and declining profitability.” 

In fact, none of the subsidies provided by Canadian governments specifically target the mushroom industry and are instead directed at farmers generally.

But in May, the Commerce Department agreed with the U.S. petitioners and applied duties on some Canadian mushroom producers. The preliminary decision concluded Canadian governments do unfairly subsidize mushroom production. 

For now, about two dozen Canadian mushroom producers are facing a 2.84 per cent tariff on the mushrooms they sell in the U.S.

South Mill Champs is contesting the Commerce Department’s decision, which Mushrooms Canada, the national trade association representing Canadian mushroom growers, called “deeply flawed.”

“It’s using regulatory tactics to stifle healthy competition,” Macleod said.

Champ’s Mushrooms was handed a 1.62 per cent tariff by the Commerce Department. 

The Commerce Department has yet to decide on whether to hit Canadian mushrooms with anti-dumping duties, a type of tariff applied to imported goods that are being sold at lower prices, as a way to protect domestic producers.

Government subsidies aren’t specific to mushrooms — and U.S. growers get them too

There’s no denying Canadian mushroom growers receive support from the government. B.C. producers do not have to pay provincial sales tax on equipment for their businesses and can also access grant programs that support agricultural operations.

The province also offers funding to help farms cover the cost of adopting new technologies, but Popham pointed out none of the province’s programs are targeted specifically at bolstering B.C. mushrooms.

“It’s not specific at all to the mushroom industry,” Popham said. “It’s just the way we support farmers in B.C.”

And that means the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition’s complaint lacks merit under U.S. trade law, according to Mushrooms Canada CEO Ryan Koeslag.

“It is difficult to reconcile Commerce’s preliminary approach with the fact that comparable agricultural tax treatment exists in the United States,” Koeslag said in a statement after the Commerce Department’s preliminary duties were announced. “Canadian mushroom growers are not receiving special treatment. They are operating under ordinary rules that apply to farmers.”

The Commerce Department did not respond to questions about these criticisms of its decision and whether it will assess tax exemptions available to U.S. mushroom farmers before reaching its final decision on the tariffs. The Narwhal also contacted Giorgio Fresh Co., one of the U.S. companies that formed the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition, for comment but did not receive a response.

Macleod doesn’t believe the trade complaint is really about subsidy programs at all.

“This case is not about the U.S. versus Canada — it’s about companies who have invested in new infrastructure and those who haven’t invested in new infrastructure,” he said.

Most Canadian-grown mushrooms are grown using the Dutch method, Macleod explained. This technique gives growers large, reliable yields quickly, he added, while also reducing pest pressures and creating mushrooms that consumers prefer.

In the U.S., the majority of mushrooms are grown on wood shelves, an older technique that isn’t as efficient as the Dutch method.

Growing mushrooms on wood makes it “very hard to consistently produce a fine-looking mushroom and ensure disease doesn’t at times of the year really damage the crop,” Macleod said.

South Mill Champs’ U.S. operations have learned a lot about the benefits of modern mushroom growing from their Canadian counterparts, he added.

Switching from wood-based cultivation to the Dutch method isn’t cheap, though government grant programs and tax exemptions can help take the edge off the costs. Macleod said it takes years for a mushroom farm to see a return on investment into a whole new cultivation set-up. But the new technology can reduce ongoing costs, increase revenue and open the door to further technological innovation, he added. 

With new cultivation systems in place, Popham said some B.C. farms are introducing robots to harvest their mushrooms.

“Technology is taking over what I would call mundane tasks,” she said, adding human workers are still needed to oversee the machines.

“They don’t expect, as they bring in technology, to see displacement of labour. It’s adding to a better quality of workplace, which is really cool.”

Robots can’t harvest mushrooms grown using wood-based shelving, Macleod said, potentially putting old-style producers at even more of a disadvantage.

“If you don’t have new infrastructure, you have to build from scratch,” he said.

Final decision on additional cross-border costs for B.C. mushroom growers could take months

While additional duties on Canadian mushrooms could be announced within weeks, a final determination by the U.S. Department of Commerce may not come for months. Macleod is hopeful the final determination will be that Canadian-grown mushrooms do not harm U.S. producers.

“I really do not think less mushrooms will be exported from Canada into the U.S.,” he said. “Duties paid will mean ultimately the consumer pays more for mushrooms, which is bad for the consumer and the industry.”

Popham believes that B.C.-grown mushrooms are popular because of the industry’s embrace of innovation and its proximity to the U.S. market.

“I hope that what results from this most recent challenge is that there’s an acknowledgement that we’re just doing it really, really well,” she said.

At a time when many British Columbians want to support locally grown food, mushrooms are a perfect choice, she added.

“When we talk about being more resilient and growing more at home, mushrooms have been there the whole time,”Popham said. “I think that when consumers understand how big of an industry it is here and I think that this is another feather in our cap.”

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When 27-year-old Kaitlyn Kitzan was a kid, farmland near her parents’ farm in southeast Saskatchewan cost about $400 an acre.

Today, in that same region, it’s almost ten times as valuable: $3,500 an acre.

Across Saskatchewan, farmland prices increased by an average of 11 per cent annually from 2005 to 2024.

As the value of farmland rises — alongside the costs of everything from fertilizer to fuel and more — Prairies farmers now face the harsh reality that the better business decision might be just to sell their land, rather than farm it. Alongside the pressures running capital-intensive businesses, climate change and volatile markets, the price of farmland is a major stressor for young farmers like Kitzan, who is trying to take over the family farm.

“We’ve seen [a] steady increase in farmland values to the point where [it has] outstripped the productive value of the land” Bill Prybylski, a veteran farmer from east-central Saskatchewan, says, noting high costs and low prices for crops aren’t helping.  

Financial woes aren’t only affecting small family farms. In April, Monette Farms — one of the largest privately owned farming operations in North America with hundreds of thousands of acres across Canada and the United States  — filed for creditor protection, illustrating the challenging financial situations agricultural operators of all sizes are facing.

“Why is land selling for more than its productive value? The only obvious answer would be speculative ownership,” Prybylski says.

Indeed, hedge funds, pensions and other investors have been interested in farmland in recent years, with farm groups like the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan (APAS) expressing concerns about foreign investment. Although provinces like Saskatchewan and Manitoba — which together are home to about half of Canada’s farmland — have regulations limiting farmland ownership primarily to Canadians and Canadian-controlled entities, the Saskatchewan government recently launched a review of its policies, saying it would take a closer look at farmland ownership, though it noted there is no evidence of foreign ownership of farmland in the province right now. Meanwhile, Ontario announced in April it will introduce legislation to limit foreign acquisition of farmland.

But that’s little comfort to those currently struggling with the price of farmland. “So much land is owned by people who aren’t farming it [themselves],” Kitzan says. “It is almost impossible to buy farmland from those people who are using it as an investment.”

Canada’s largest private farmland owner is an investor who owns 250,000 acres

There’s been a consistent, long-term shift in Canada toward fewer — and larger — farms. Between 2001 and 2021, the number of farms declined from about 250,000 to 190,000, with the average farm size increasing from 676 acres to 809 acres.

At the same time, investor interest in farmland has risen dramatically in recent decades. Investor ownership of farmland in Saskatchewan was negligible in 2002, but climbed to nearly one million acres by 2018 — almost 18 times the size of Saskatoon. An update to that research suggests the trend may be plateauing, but investors continue to be interested in farmland.

One of them is Robert Andjelic. He left a successful career in commercial real estate in Winnipeg in 2007 and turned his attention to Canadian farmland, an asset he believed was undervalued at the time, even though prices were already trending upward in the previous decade.

A few years later, he began purchasing Saskatchewan farmland at around $345 an acre. Today, land values in Saskatchewan have climbed to roughly $1,500 to $5,000 per acre, depending on the region. With more than 250,000 acres in his portfolio, primarily in Saskatchewan, Andjelic is considered Canada’s largest private farmland owner.

“I used to trade gold, silver, oil, other commodities. Today I have zero in anything else other than farmland. I’m 100 per cent invested in farmland.”

For Andjelic, there’s no doubt that Canadian farmland values will continue to rise. He sees farmland as a resilient, long-term, wealth-preserving investment — particularly during economic downturns.

“The world needs Canada and Canada’s production,” he says, adding food is not an optional consumer good.”

As the global population rises, so too does the demand for food. At the same time, farmland globally is becoming scarcer. Each year, an estimated 22 billion tonnes of fertile soil is lost to erosion, while millions more acres are degraded or converted to urban and industrial uses. 

As a result, there are simply fewer parcels of land available than there are buyers, Justin Shepherd, senior economist at Farm Credit Canada (FCC), says.

“Overall, it’s a really tight supply of land, and there’s been consistent and strong demand from producers looking to grow,” he says, adding there’s limited land for sale.

At the same time, advances in technology and larger equipment mean farmers can manage more acres with the same workforce, incentivizing them to keep expanding and increasing competition for land, which pushes prices higher, he says.

But that creates challenges in terms of access, he says, particularly for younger farmers trying to enter the market.

“We’ve looked at the affordability of farmland and recognize that we’re near historical records for many regions.”

And while Canadian farmland values have experienced growth periods before, all these recent factors have combined to create a longer and more sustained period of land price increases than at any other time in recent history.

A mega farm that wants to feed a billion people a day files for creditor protection

High land prices, and the financial challenges in agriculture, are creating a squeeze for farmers big and small. This was made even clearer in late April when Monette Farms — one of the largest private farming operations active in North America — filed for creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act.

The company reportedly farms approximately 475,000 acres of owned and leased land across Canada and the U.S. The business, a collection of companies that originated from a family farm in Swift Current, Sask., had a goal to “feed a billion people for a day.”

In a note to stakeholders, the company said it was attempting to restructure its debt after rising interest rates and mounting costs strained its finances.

In a court document, Darrel Monette, the head of Monette Farms, said “the real property alone had a valuation exceeding the value of the group’s consolidated liabilities,” suggesting land value alone is more than its total debts. The document states Monette Farms holds about $900 million in secured debt.

Though the company didn’t specifically cite farmland prices as a reason it was facing strain, Monette Farms’ situation drew significant attention from Canadian farmers, reflecting tensions that had been building for years. 

In light of this, many say it’s now critical to confront whether farmland values have outpaced what is financially sustainable to actually farm. Prybylski, who is also the president of APAS, says the current system not only limits expansion for young farmers like Kitzan, it also threatens the very future of the family farm. (Approximately 97 per cent of Canadian farm businesses are family-owned and operated.)

Prybylski welcomes the Saskatchewan government’s move in April to launch a comprehensive review of its farmland ownership rules, examining ownership verification, enforcement and transparency, particularly around corporate ownership.

“Whenever we’ve talked to farmers,” he says, ”the conversation always comes around to stories of foreign ownership.”

Many farmers believe farmland simply shouldn’t be an investment strategy. But Andjelic thinks concerns about a disconnect between profitability and land stewardship miss the mark. 

He argues the two are closely linked — and that long-term investor returns depend on how well the land is managed.

He says he only rents his land to farmers he considers leaders in soil and crop management, requiring them to demonstrate their practices through an application process. He says his team also regularly visits farms, reviewing crop rotations, soil practices and overall land management.

“Soil is both of our bread and butter,” he says. “We’re only as good as the soil and the way we treat that soil. If somebody is mining the land, I don’t care if he pays me two times more than what the market is, he’s not going to get it.”

Eight billion people need to eat

The growth in Saskatchewan farmland values has begun to slow in recent years, but prices still increased by 9.4 per cent in 2025. At the same time, interest rates, farm profitability and regional climate pressures are predicted to play a larger role in affecting farmers’ bottom lines.

Ted Cawkwell, a farmland realtor based in Saskatoon, says some drought-affected areas — particularly in the southwest — have been under pressure as crops have failed or brought in low prices.

“Some of those areas… have had no crop for five, six years,” he says. “Grain prices are low and input costs are high and machinery costs are high. It’s tricky.”

As a result, real estate listings for farmland are increasing in some regions and taking longer to sell, not because values have dropped sharply, but, Cawkwell says, because buyers lack cash.

“The listings that are there just aren’t selling because the farmers don’t have cash,” he says.

But Cawkwell remains optimistic about the long-term outlook, pointing to the big picture.

“We have eight billion people … and people need to eat. You can do without the new house, you can do without the new shoes, you can do without the new car — but you can’t do without food.”

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An investigation by The Narwhal published earlier this week details how the Alberta government allows millions of dollars of taxpayer money to wind up in the hands of ranchers grazing cattle on public land. 

It’s a complicated issue, involving ranchers, oil and gas companies, a broken regulatory system and — in many cases — taxpayers. 

Here’s the gist. In Alberta, ranchers can lease public land at below-market rates to graze their cattle. At the same time, oil and gas companies with wells on that public land must pay for yearly compensation for loss of the land and impacts from their operations. The catch? In Alberta, that money doesn’t go to the provincial government, which owns the public land, but to the rancher who leases it. 

There’s no cap on how much ranchers can receive in this way, and some receive compensation for hundreds of oil and gas wells. That means some ranchers are making a windfall — and not from raising cattle.

Ranchers say it’s fair compensation for the hassles of wells in a grazing area. But as the auditor general put it back in 2015, “current legislation allows an unquantified amount of personal financial benefit to some leaseholders over and above the benefits of grazing livestock on public land.” Some dubbed this “cowboy welfare,” when the report came out.

We set out to quantify it — and, crucially, to pinpoint how often taxpayers foot the bill.

You can read the full investigation here, but in the meantime here are five key takeaways about the broken regulatory system a former environment minister described as a “free-for-all.”

1. Ranchers leasing public land to graze cattle can earn six figures in compensation from oil and gas companies — every year

There are approximately 5,700 grazing leases across Alberta, covering roughly 5.2 million acres, or about five per cent of the province’s land base. 

The Narwhal drew on estimates and data gathered from public sources to estimate both the cost of leasing land to graze cattle and the amount ranchers are paid per oil and gas well on the public land where they graze.

The Narwhal’s analysis found some ranchers are earning well over $100,000 per year from oil and gas payments. 

According to The Narwhal’s analysis, one leaseholder with 233 wells spread across a grazing area is earning $349,500 each year in oil and gas leases alone. Another rancher, with 164 oil and gas wells, is earning $250,000.

2. $5 million in taxpayer money has been paid to grazing leaseholders in one region of Alberta — on behalf of delinquent oil and gas companies

Albertans cannot refuse oil and gas wells when a company comes knocking. In return, they’re owed compensation from the oil and gas company for the hassle. And — crucially — if the oil and gas company fails to pay, the Alberta government foots the bill on its behalf.

To get a clearer picture of the issues in 2026, The Narwhal focused on Cypress County, the County of Newell and the Special Areas in southeastern Alberta, sourcing public records, including leaseholder maps and government payments to landowners when oil and gas companies fail to pay what’s owed.

Data from the Land and Property Rights Tribunal, a government body that directs tax dollars to landowners and leaseholders when oil and gas companies don’t pay their rent, found that since 2021, $5 million in taxpayer money has been paid to grazing leaseholders in the region to cover company debts.

The Narwhal found one leaseholder received almost $600,000 in tribunal payments over that period. One grazing association was paid almost $1 million — all taxpayer money.

The government is supposed to recoup those funds from delinquent companies, but previous reporting from The Narwhal shows only a small fraction of tribunal payments, less than one per cent, is ever recovered.

3. For decades, the government has been called on to fix the system

Though successive governments have long known of the multi-million-dollar issue, none have acted to stop it. 

An auditor general report in 2015 castigated the province for allowing ranchers to earn undue profit off of public land. “Personal financial benefits are being derived from public assets,” the auditor general wrote.

In the report, the auditor general pointed to examples of ranchers receiving five times more oil and gas compensation than what they paid in rent.

In other jurisdictions, like Saskatchewan, compensation from oil and gas companies does not go to ranchers using public land to graze cattle. It goes to the government.

For decades, critics have called on the government to at least cap the revenue leaseholders can collect in compensation from oil and gas wells on public land. 

It has not.

4. Ranching associations have long argued against reforming the system

The issue of oil and gas compensation for grazing leaseholders has been controversial for decades, and includes a failed attempt by the Ralph Klein government to cap payments in the 1990s. 

That legislation was never proclaimed into law after intense backlash from ranchers and advocacy organizations. Among them was the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association.

Lindsye Murfin, with the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association, as well as the Western Stock Grower’s Association, told The Narwhal she takes issue with the idea that leaseholders are unduly benefiting from the current system.

When asked about leases where the density of wells would seem to make it impossible to actually ranch, Murfin said that just makes the job of the leaseholder more challenging and that compensation should be paid.

Compensation from oil and gas companies covers the hassle of oil and gas wells, including everything from chasing cattle after gates are left open, to weed control, loss of access to land as well as pollution and noise.

5. Alberta’s finance minister is among the recipients of taxpayer funds for compensation to his ranching on public land

Among the recipients of six-figure oil and gas compensation payments for grazing on public land is Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner. 

His ranching business receives between $100,000 to $124,000 per year through contracts with oil and gas companies that operate on public land which he leases to graze his cattle, according to estimates by The Narwhal. 

And, as The Narwhal reported this week, when those companies fail to pay their bills, taxpayers have been paying the finance minister on the delinquent companies’ behalf.

Data from the Land and Property Rights Tribunal, which pays landowners — and ranchers who lease government land —  when companies fail to do so, shows Horner has received $87,246  in compensation from the province since 2021 for wells on his private property and on grazing leases. Of that, $47,200 was paid for sites on his grazing leases — in other words, he’s receiving public money for oil and gas wells on public land. 

The payments to Horner are all legal under current Alberta legislation and his press secretary, Marisa Warner, said Horner’s compensation is above board. 

“All of Minister Horner’s agricultural business holdings have been put in a blind trust since entering cabinet,” she told The Narwhal.

This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by Arnold Ventures and the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

Updated on Apr. 30, 2026, at 10:32 a.m MT: This story has been updated to reflect that Lindsye Murfin is both the general manager of the Western Stock Growers’ Association as well as the manager of the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Summary

• Ranchers in some parts of Alberta can earn six figures from oil and gas sites on public land they lease from the government for below-market value — and when companies don’t pay, taxpayers foot the bill.
• The system is legal, but has been criticized by the auditor general, who called on the province in 2015 to stop allowing “personal financial benefit” from leasing public land.
• An investigation by The Narwhal reveals that one of those ranchers is Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner, whose family has a long history in politics — and in lobbying against reforms to the grazing lease system.

Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner’s ranching business likely receives between $100,000 to $124,000 per year through contracts with oil and gas companies that operate on public land which he leases to graze his cattle, according to estimates compiled by The Narwhal. 

And when those oil and gas companies fail to pay their bills, taxpayers have been paying the finance minister on the delinquent companies’ behalf, The Narwhal has learned.

Data from the Land and Property Rights Tribunal, which pays landowners — and ranchers who lease government land — when companies fail to do so, shows Horner’s ranching business has received $87,246 in compensation from the province since 2021 for wells on his private property and on grazing leases, according to The Narwhal’s analysis. Of that, $47,200 was paid for oil and gas sites on his grazing leases — in other words, he’s receiving public money for oil and gas wells on public land. 

The payments to Horner’s ranching business are all legal under current Alberta legislation, but the ability of ranchers leasing land from the government to collect all of the oil and gas compensation was criticized by the auditor general in 2015.

Nate Horner Ranches Ltd., located east of Calgary, holds vast stretches of grazing leases — public land that is rented to ranchers for what critics say are bargain prices. Horner’s family has operated in the area, and leased land from the province, for generations. 

The family is also a political dynasty, counting MPs and MLAs — including both provincial and federal cabinet ministers — in its tree. His cousin, Doug Horner, is a former provincial finance minister.

In Alberta, oil and gas companies must compensate landowners for the adverse impacts of their activity. The province’s current rules also allow leaseholders to retain all such money companies pay to operate on those publicly owned grazing leases.

It’s a controversial framework that, in 2015, the auditor general said was allowing some ranchers to derive undue “personal financial benefit” off public land.

The Narwhal set out to understand the scope of the problem, focusing on three regions east of Calgary with many ranchers grazing their cattle on public land. The Narwhal’s analysis found taxpayers have footed the bill for millions of dollars in payments on behalf of oil and gas companies to ranchers leasing public land at below-market rates. 

And one of the recipients of those payments is the finance minister’s ranching business.

His press secretary, Marisa Warner, said Horner’s compensation is above board. 

“All of Minister Horner’s agricultural business holdings have been put in a blind trust since entering cabinet,” she said by email, adding the “minister’s assets, property and business holdings have all been properly disclosed, and placed in a management arrangement, approved by the ethics commissioner.”

Each oil and gas well brings in an estimated $1,856. Horner’s business has 67

The Narwhal estimated how much Minister Horner’s ranching business receives from oil and gas companies by looking at property maps that list both grazing leaseholders and oil and gas sites and counting the number of oil and gas sites on leases he holds. Nate Horner Ranches Ltd. had 67 sites.

That number was multiplied by $1,500, a per site figure cited by the auditor general in 2015 as an average compensation amount. By this calculation, Nate Horner Ranches Ltd. could receive an estimated $100,500 per year.

Figures from Land and Property Rights compensation decisions, however, show that Horner’s ranching business might receive a higher price. Based on the 21 claims he has filed since 2021 for unpaid compensation, the average cost per site is $1,856, meaning he could be earning as much as $124,386.

It’s unclear if Horner has any other stakes in operations owned by family members near his own holdings. The minister’s office did not respond to specific questions sent by The Narwhal. 

Warner directed questions about the government’s position on the current system to the Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas, which oversees grazing leases.

The minister of environment and protected areas office did not respond to a list of emailed questions.

The finance minister’s grandfather was among the loud advocates against reforming the system that benefits ranchers

The issue of oil and gas compensation for grazing leaseholders has been controversial for decades, and includes a failed attempt by the Ralph Klein government to cap payments. 

That legislation was passed quickly in 1999, but was never proclaimed into law after intense backlash from ranchers and advocacy organizations. Among them was the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association, which was led by Horner’s grandfather, Jack Horner, at the time.

The association formed to push back against the Klein government “directly attacking property rights of leaseholders.”

Those opposed to changing the system point out that while grazing leaseholders pay less than market price to use public land, the lease comes with responsibilities and costs. Ranchers using public land pay for all improvements and maintenance of the land, as well as paying property taxes.

“The leaseholder has purchased the right from the province to be the occupant of that land,” Lindsye Murfin, the manager for the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association and the general manager of the Western Stock Grower’s Assocation, said in an interview. “And with those rights come a lot of responsibilities.”

Her organizations argue against a cap on the amount of money a leaseholder can earn from oil and gas sites on their leases. As Murfin points out, the more wells there are in a grazing area, the more problems a rancher has to manage. 

The Land and Property Rights Tribunal payments are part of a grand bargain with Albertans. No one is allowed to deny access to an oil and gas company that wants to drill, and in exchange the government will cover compensation if a delinquent company stops paying. 

Those payments have exploded in recent years, as more and more companies walk away from their financial obligations — even as some continue to operate.

The total in 2024 was $30 million, which represents a 4,500 per cent increase in the amount of money the government is paying for these missed payments since 2010. The government says it works to recoup those costs from companies, but previous reporting from The Narwhal shows only a small fraction of tribunal payments, less than one per cent, is ever recovered.

Horner’s experience is a striking example of the impact of regulatory failure in the province.

Almost all of the tribunal payments to Nate Horner Ranches Ltd. cover unpaid leases by AlphaBow Energy, a company that was allowed to snap up thousands of wells it did not have the resources to manage or clean up.

Five years after the company was created through a complex series of transactions, the Alberta Energy Regulator suspended its licences. The regulator transferred supervision of the sites to the Orphan Well Association — a largely industry-funded organization that cleans up sites without a solvent owner.

This left thousands of wells without a viable owner. It also meant millions of taxpayer dollars were directed to landowners and leaseholders to cover unpaid compensation — Horner among them.

That’s just one example. The orphan well inventory increased more than 29 per cent in 2025, but the levy imposed on companies to cover those costs only increased by seven per cent this year.

In the past month, the orphan inventory nearly doubled with the transfer of wells from another troubled company, Long Run Exploration. Those wells are estimated to have added another $476 million in liabilities to the association’s expenses.

Methodology

The Narwhal’s Prairies reporter Drew Anderson and web developer Andrew Munroe created estimates for this story from data gathered from a public government database of decisions regarding compensation oil and gas companies are supposed to pay to landowners when they put infrastructure on their land. The database is called the Land and Property Rights Tribunal database and contains tens of thousands of records of rulings. Each ruling contains information on the oil and gas company that failed to pay its bill, the land or leaseholder to whom the debt was owed, the amount owed and more. It is an extensive database, with each individual ruling page containing data on company names and grazing leaseholders or landowners, the amount paid and whether or not the site is located on a grazing lease.

Information regarding well sites located on grazing leases was obtained by purchasing municipal land maps on an app named iHunter, which provides the names of grazing leaseholders, contact information and outlines oil and gas sites on those lands.

To estimate the average compensation for a site on Finance Minister Nate Horner’s land, each tribunal decision was cross-referenced with the number of years for which compensation was owed, and the number of sites tied to each claim. The number of sites was retrieved from albertawellfinder.com and based on the licence number attached to the tribunal decision.

Updated on Apr. 30, 2026, at 10:33 a.m. MT: This story has been updated to reflect that Lindsye Murfin is both the general manager of the Western Stock Growers’ Association as well as the manager of the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

After years of punishing drought that shrunk their herds, Canadian cattle farmers finally saw them growing at the start of 2026. It was a modest 2.5 per cent increase in the number of cows and calves, but after eight years of contraction — which also meant increased beef prices at the till — those in the industry are taking it as a win. 

Brenna Grant, executive director of CanFax, the research division of the Canadian Cattle Association, called this a “really modest” increase, urging patience for those hoping affordability will return soon. 

Canada’s beef prices are 23 per cent higher today than the national five-year average, and, in general, meat prices rose by the highest rate of any food category in 2025, according to research from Dalhousie University. 

The biggest concern driving beef prices high is weather, Grant said. Climate pressures on pasture conditions means less hay to feed animals and, consequently, smaller herds.

“All of the research would indicate that we are expected to see greater frequency and severity of extreme weather events, whether that be drought or flooding or even just greater volatility within the growing season,” Grant said. 

Ranchers are heading into summer with mounting uncertainty, given spotty and unpredictable rain and snow patterns in recent years. “That just means that this rebuild, in terms of increasing supplies, is going to take longer.”

Droughts in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where the country’s cattle farming is concentrated, have become regular and severe. Drought insurance payouts to Alberta farmers reached a record $326.5 million in 2023, more than tripling the payouts from the 2021 drought. 

Droughts also hit southern Ontario last summer, impacting Trenton, Belleville and Prince Edward Country farmers. Dry conditions present a host of challenges, from reducing the availability of local, affordable feed to farmers not having enough water available for their herds. 

At the same time, more northern areas of Canada that haven’t historically been seen as cattle country are starting to grow their local bovine populations, as more moderate temperatures become a welcome refuge for farmers. Warmer weather has been a boon in typically colder zones, making it easier to grow feed crops instead of importing them. 

Northern Ontario is one of those areas, including Sudbury, Nipissing and Cochrane, which had built up a herd 100,000 strong as of 2018. 

Grant said the Peace Region that straddles the Alberta-B.C. border is also seeing longer growing seasons, allowing for more crop varieties, including of animal feed. The same is true for northeast Saskatchewan, once considered too cold and wet, where warmer, drier conditions have improved growing.

“It’s the right use of that land for the right product,” said Jason Leblond, president of Beef Farmers of Ontario, and a cattle farmer himself in Chisholm, Ont. “Beef cattle do very well in the north.”

But, he says, while the shift may benefit local producers, it is unlikely to ease rising beef prices anytime soon.

“When we see the first signs of the herd rebuild, which is what we’re seeing currently, it normally takes two years for it to hit the store shelves — that price reduction,” Leblond said.

Building up northern herds, he said, is a big part of “how we can get the prices more in check.” He’s increasingly seeing farmers step up in these long-dormant farming regions.

Northern Ontario’s growing herd of cattle

In the early 2000s and 2010s, cattle farmer Mike Tulloch recalls driving roads in Algoma, Ont., and seeing derelict farms, growing back up to brush and weeds — signs of a dying industry. Tulloch grew up in the area with a lifelong ambition to take over his father’s farm and watched the landscape closely.

In the last decade, he’s seen a growing number of farmers revitalizing the area’s farms, many coming from southern Ontario or farther. His own land, he said, doubled in value since he bought it in 2018. Now, he owns a farm with about 1,300 head of cattle. 

“The face of agriculture in Algoma and Manitoulin has changed dramatically,” Tulloch said. “It’s driven out of the relatively inexpensive value of the land and is being bought up hand over fist and turned back into productive farmland.”

Tulloch has found himself in one of the most hospitable remaining areas for raising cows.

“No question that the climate change has been more conducive to farming in the near-north: Algoma, Manitou and Sudbury, Nipissing,” Tulloch said. “This is a case where climate change in our area has been good for the farmers.”

The Algoma area, at the cusp of lakes Huron and Superior, has the longest growing period across all of northern Ontario, from Nipissing up. By 2050, temperatures are predicted to increase between 1 C and 4 C, making that growing season even longer. 

“We have warmer winters. We get on the land sooner, and the ground in the north here warms up sooner,” Tulloch said, compared to previous years. “For our cattle operations, we grow about 750 acres of corn. And, ten years ago, there wasn’t 750 acres of corn in the whole district.”

While many Canadian cattle farmers are battling extreme weather events like drought, floods and wildfires, northern Ontario is emerging as somewhat of a sanctuary. 

Moving north won’t fix the challenges climate change presents farmers

Experts and polls have demonstrated the biggest challenge for cattle farming in Canada is the increased frequency of adverse weather events. While the northerly migration has eased the challenges for some cattle farmers, it’s not a silver bullet — and prices will continue to reflect that, especially as consumer demand for protein remains extremely high.

“In the last five years, we’ve actually seen beef demand jump twice, once in 2020 and we maintained those levels, and then again in 2025,” Grant said. “What that means is that consumers were willing to pay a higher price for the same amount of beef.”

The high demand and weather uncertainties are being experienced across the world, including in Canada and the U.S., leading to a global shortage of beef as production falls in traditional centres.

There are also no guarantees conditions will remain hospitable for cattle farming in northern climates. 

“In some regions of the country, certainly, there will be some increased opportunity,” Kim Ominski, University of Manitoba research scientist, said. “But the challenge about these extreme weather events is it just introduces increased risk.”

Unpredictable growing conditions might bring a year where farmers are unable to source enough feed locally. Since feed is one of the largest costs of raising cattle, Ominski said, having to import it — especially if that requires swapping the usual meal with a more expensive crop — can really impact a farmer’s bottom line. 

Across Canada, research links extreme climate-driven weather events to rising mental-health strain on farmers, causing guilt, hopelessness and panic. Many are leaving the industry.

Even Tulloch acknowledges the gamble.

“The weather is more erratic,” Tulloch said. “You see that when the storms come, there are heavier storms and you have more risk of flooding.”

“It’s a risky venture.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Summary

• In 2024, an extreme cold event caused many B.C. wineries to lose most of their grapes. In response, the province allowed wineries to join a program allowing the import of U.S. grapes, a practice usually reserved for larger commercial labels. 
• The full rules about how sales of wine made with U.S. grapes would be taxed were released months after wineries had already bought foreign fruit. Each winery got a sales tax exemption on a specific quantity of wine — after that, taxes could reach as high as 89 per cent. 
• These taxes apply to all sales for as long as wineries sell any wine made with U.S. fruit, even if the actual bottle in question is made with 100 per cent B.C. grapes. The result, winemakers say, is losing out on years of profits and, possibly, going out of business.

The program offered a lifeline when the forecast was unequivocally dire. In January 2024, temperatures dropped below -25 C in B.C.’s Okanagan, Thompson and Similkameen Valleys — the province’s agricultural breadbasket. 

The cold snap in the Interior came right after unseasonable daytime highs of 10 to 13 C. The weather whiplash hit the area’s fruit trees hardest: acres of peaches, pears, plums, apples and nectarines were damaged, with the plants’ buds dead come spring. The ripe, juicy produce tourists flock to the Okanagan for in summer and fall never arrived.

The deep freeze also crushed one of B.C.’s most prized commodities: wine grapes. More than 90 per cent of the Interior’s annual harvest was lost, which meant nearly 90 per cent of the province’s total vineyard acreage. Suddenly, a $3.75-billion industry was in crisis. 

“There were zero grapes,” Paul Sawler, vice-president and general manager of Dirty Laundry Winery, a mid-sized winery in Summerland, B.C., recalls. The winery’s 100 acres of vineyards produced almost no fruit.

“Where we would normally see 300 to 400 tonnes [of grapes], we got less than half a tonne from all the vineyards combined,” Sawler says.

The solution seemed clear at the time: “There was no way to survive except to buy Washington State grapes.” 

In British Columbia, alcohol is regulated by the BC Liquor Distribution Branch, a government body long assigned to the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. In July 2025, it was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food — a nod to the realities of producing a weather-dependent consumer good in an increasingly volatile 21st-century climate. For winemakers and grape growers, who had seen several difficult years of damage to their vineyards from extreme weather, it was a welcome move.

Under the liquor branch’s policy, certain wineries — mostly larger operations that hold a commercial winery designation — are allowed to import foreign grapes to complement their B.C. fruit. Often acquired from the U.S., these grapes produce wines that the liquor branch taxes at high sales mark-ups — the dollar amount the branch charges a winery when it sells its wines directly to consumers, restaurants or other distributors.

Regulations normally prevent most small and mid-sized B.C. wineries from purchasing foreign grapes. This is part of the liquor branch’s complex policy, which involves different regulatory and taxation systems not just for different types of wineries, but also for direct-to-consumer sales versus sales through the liquor branch. The short version is that independent, “land-based” wineries are required to use exclusively B.C. fruit, in exchange for which a good chunk of their sales are tax-exempt. 

After the 2024 freeze, the liquor branch relaxed these rules, allowing a wider range of wineries to import grapes to salvage their businesses. But bringing in foreign grapes meant signing on to a program that limited each winery’s tax-exempt sales. 

“We really had no choice,” Sawler says of his decision at Dirty Laundry. Though most Okanagan wineries were committed to making B.C. wines with B.C.-grown grapes, the weather had decided for them. 

“If we didn’t buy the grapes, we would have had to lay off half our staff,” Sawler says. “We probably would have had wine to sell at the winery, but we would have lost our whole outside market — a market that we spent the last 20 years building.”

So, Dirty Laundry and 91 other wineries in the area rolled the dice and brought in foreign grapes to make their 2024 wines. 

“I don’t regret buying them,” Sawler reflects. “The quality was good; the pricing was good. It worked out well.” 

But the decision has come with a latent — and significant — unanticipated cost. The limit on wineries’ tax-exempt sales was based on a complicated calculation many did not understand at the outset. In fact, some didn’t understand they’d be subject to mark-ups at all. Now that the program is in its second year, some wineries have wine they can’t sell without a significant financial hit.

“A program that was basically designed to help wineries, in some cases may actually kill some wineries,” Sawler tells The Narwhal. “Those are extreme cases … but it is happening”

“We know how devastating the 2024 freeze event was for grape growers and wineries in the Okanagan and we’ve worked together with the B.C. wine industry to help them recover,” Minister of Food and Agriculture Lana Popham told The Narwhal in an emailed statement. 

“The Liquor Distribution Branch will continue to work closely with wineries and Wine Growers BC.”

A program that brought wine flowing back into B.C. has soured

The vintage replacement program, or just “the program,” as many in the industry refer to it, was first announced in July 2024 and laid out in fine print in a liquor branch memorandum that October. Importantly, this was after most wineries had already purchased U.S. and foreign grapes. 

For the 2024 vintage, the BC Liquor Distribution Branch would permit wineries that opted in to the program to purchase foreign grapes or a partially fermented product known as unfinished juice, and would treat any wine produced from those products the same as B.C.-grape wine. That meant the liquor branch would offer the tax exemption usually reserved for certain types of 100 per cent B.C. wine to all B.C. wineries using foreign grapes.

This main component of the program was a success. Wineries like Dirty Laundry and many smaller, newer wineries kept their staff, juiced their grapes and made wines they were proud of. The wider industry, which supports a substantial economy of restaurants, hotels, hospitality workers, supply companies, migrant agricultural workers and small family businesses remained afloat.

But the details were a shock to many.

The exemption wasn’t a blanket exemption. Each winery had what was known as a “support cap,” or a limit on tax-free exemptions. Wineries’ individual caps were based on an “Olympic average” of five years of previous mark-up exemption totals — for land-based wineries, of their B.C.-grape wines; for commercial wineries, of B.C.-grape wines certified by the BC Wine Authority’s Vintner’s Quality Alliance, or BCVQA. This was a dollar value calculated by taking the mark-up exemption on sales numbers from the past five years, dropping the highest and lowest numbers, and averaging the three remaining years. 

Sales over that limit were taxed at the liquor branch’s standard rates for foreign-grape wines — as high as 89 per cent on the first $11.75 of the wine’s per-litre value, and 27 per cent after that. 

The calculation didn’t pose a problem for many commercial wineries used to importing foreign grapes — and selling huge volumes. It was also doable for many established wineries that had relatively steady sales over the period in question and dedicated accounting departments. It did pose an issue for many newer, growing independent wineries, though. 

Another surprise was how long a program meant to help with one bad year was going to last. The ability for wineries to buy foreign grapes for tax-exempt wine was extended for the 2025 vintage, to account for any lingering cold snap effects on the province’s vineyards. Additionally, once participating wineries brought in foreign grapes, they were tied to the vintage replacement program until they’d sold every last bottle of wine containing U.S. grapes.

This all means the support cap will remain in effect until March 2028, to account for the added year of foreign grapes, and sales of wines that take longer to produce, like reds or sparklings. 

All that, and the mark-up exemption limit each participating winery received was not exclusive to its U.S.-grape wines. Post-limit taxes would be applied to all the wine a participating winery sold. 

Let’s say a winery had 5,000 cases of U.S.-grape wine — “replacement” wine — left to sell, starting this year. That newer stuff would likely share shelf space with bottles of carefully cellared, 100 per cent B.C.-grape wine from years past, too. Signing onto the program meant this B.C.-grape wine would count toward the winery’s annual mark-up exemption limit. Which means that once the winery hit the annual limit set by its Olympic average, this 100 per cent B.C.-grown-and-produced wine would be taxed the same way as malbec from Argentina: at up to 89 per cent. 

In an emailed statement on behalf of the liquor branch, the Ministry of Agriculture said that “to ensure revenue neutrality and fairness across the sector, the annual support cap … includes all wines sold within the fiscal year, including vintage replacement wines, BCVQA and 100 per cent B.C. grape wines.” 

The ministry added that a support cap based on historical sales data was recommended by Wine Growers BC.

“From the outset, there were very clear guidelines communicated to the wine industry about eligibility and annual support caps, and it was intended to help the industry keep the lights on during a very serious agricultural emergency,” Minister Popham told The Narwhal.

“It is in everyone’s interest to return to producing 100 per cent B.C. wine production.,” the liquor branch-attributed statement concluded.

Small, new B.C. wineries suffering the most under program’s limits

Paul Sawler’s neighbour in Summerland, Ron Kubek, started Lightning Rock, a small, family-owned business just up the road from Dirty Laundry, in 2017. It’s grown steadily ever since. 

“I think the problem in the wine business is that too many people in ownership or in the tasting room want to show how smart they are,” he says. His greatest pride is his winery’s consistent five-star ratings on Google, which show that everyday people appreciate Lightning Rock’s approach.

“Wine is supposed to be something that’s enjoyed among friends and family. Some of my favourite reviews are, ‘It was my first time in the tasting room and they didn’t make me feel dumb.’ We can talk about the technical stuff, but we’d rather just have fun.”

Kubek hasn’t shied away from sharing his views on the program, which his winery also opted into after losing its 2024 harvest. 

“We’re still small, but we’ve experienced tremendous growth, from just a few bottles in 2018 and 2019 to [when] the pandemic hit and wine sales went through the roof,” he tells The Narwhal. 

But that initially promising upward trajectory is now proving an impetus to further growth. The program calculated Lightning Rock’s mark-up limit using the low sales volumes of its early years, and now the winery isn’t eligible to sell much tax-exempt wine.

Kubek says his situation is “not because we brought in too many grapes from the U.S. — we brought in about 60 per cent of what we would normally do in a year after the catastrophic [harvest] loss — but because … [the liquor distribution branch] took what was a simple program and misapplied the Olympic average to help jack up revenues and get their bonuses.” 

Lightning Rock’s speciality is single-varietal wines, a large portion of which are reds and sparklings that take several years to age. That means Kubek will likely have to remain in the program until 2028. As a result, he has to carefully calculate the amount of wines from previous B.C. vintages he can sell each year without losing too much profit.

“The problem is that my previously B.C. [tax-]exempt wines are now being taxed or in danger of being taxed,” he says. “So I’m trying to grow, but I have a limitation, because if I do grow, I’m suddenly hit with an 89 per cent tax.” 

So Kubek, like many Okanagan winery owners, was holding back sales in March when he spoke with The Narwhal — waiting anxiously for the liquor branch’s fiscal-year turnover of April 1 to reset his mark-up limit. For a small winery with hard-won personal relationships with restaurants and other distributors, the cost is significant. 

“I’m having to tell my sales agents, ‘Hey slow down on sales,’ because I’m very, very close to going over my Olympic average and then suddenly I’m going to be paying 89 per cent tax on a bottle of wine.”

Kubek says he would have been able to sell an additional 1,000 cases of wine in the last fiscal year if it weren’t for his mark-up cap.

In response to The Narwhal’s questions about these limitations, the agriculture ministry noted, “While some wineries accessing the temporary supports have exceeded their annual cap and are facing payment obligations, many other wineries planned their operations around the annual support cap or chose not to access the temporary supports. Any changes to the policy directives or requirements mid-stream would not be fair to these businesses.”

Kubek feels frustrated. “I lost all my fruit. I had to pay for fruit to come in and now the government’s penalizing me if I try to grow.” 

He believes the program has hurt wineries like his the most. 

The support cap clause in the vintage replacement program was meant to prevent some of the Okanagan’s biggest wineries from bringing in more cheap foreign grapes than they normally would while paying below-normal sales taxes, Kubek says. It was supposed to prevent these grapes from flooding the B.C. market, which could have changed the industry’s local fingerprint and provided an unfair advantage to some. 

But what the government feared never happened, and the little guys are the ones now being hurt, Kubek says. He pointed to two wineries under the same ownership — Kelowna’s Mt. Boucherie Estate winery and Rust Wine Co., a smaller winery in Oliver — which confirmed they have had to lay staff off as a result of tax bills currently exceeding $500,000.

The agriculture ministry told The Narwhal, “In recognition of the payment obligations for those that exceeded their cap last fiscal, the [BC Liquor Distribution Branch] will continue to work with wineries to explore flexible payment arrangements within reasonable timelines.”

B.C. wine industry is pushing for solutions to a complex situation

Jeff Guignard is the CEO of Wine Growers BC, the primary industry marketing and lobbying organization for B.C. wines. He has heard his fair share of complaints about the vintage replacement program, including from Kubek, who he speaks to nearly daily. He also speaks with the provincial government every week, trying to find a solution for wineries who say the taxation approach has pushed them to the financial brink.

“This program was an essential lifeline to industry in a moment of generational crisis,” Guignard says. “It literally saved people’s businesses. There are wineries in B.C. that would not be in operation without this program. So we’re immensely grateful to government for that.” 

But, he adds, “It’s now clear — because things were rushed, and though everyone was doing their best — that the program has had some unintended consequences.” 

Guignard says the constraints built into the program for good reason are now injuring the very people and businesses the program was designed to support. 

“The constraint is acting as a limit on sales,” he says. “You could be selling, right now, a 100 per cent made-and-bottled-and-grown-in-B.C. wine, that was bottled years ago, prior to the freeze, and prior to the program being developed. But it counts against your business as though it were part of the program.” 

Guignard says the problem with the program is its one-size-fits-all approach, when the province’s wine industry ranges from huge, established players like Arterra Wines Canada or Andrew Peller Ltd., which both own multiple wineries, to medium-sized operations like Dirty Laundry and smaller newcomers like Lightning Rock. 

He says he knows of over a dozen wineries that have gone over their support cap and received invoices from the provincial government — businesses being treated “as though they were importing foreign wine into the province.”

“The program was designed to help you not have to do that,” he says, adding that one person told him, “ ‘I wish I hadn’t brought any fruit in. I would have had no wine, and I would have had to lay off all my staff, but my business would actually be in a better place, financially.’ ”

Adding to the challenge is the fact that the 2025 grape harvest in the Okanagan and Similkameen was — to everyone’s surprise — highly productive. Many of the vines that had survived the cold freeze produced abundant fruit, but grape growers unattached to specific wineries were left without customers. Businesses trapped in the “golden handcuffs” of the program, as Guignard terms it, weren’t buying, because they weren’t looking to make new wines they couldn’t turn a profit on. 

With growers, too, facing financial hardship, the program has in some ways simply deferred the crisis it was trying to prevent. The crucial support the program offered when the industry seemed on the brink of collapse has turned into an albatross hanging over some winemakers’ necks. 

“From a Dirty Laundry perspective, I’ve taken the position that if I had 1,000 cases of imported wine left over at the end of March next year, I’d dump it before I’d stay in the program another year,” Sawler says. “That’s the amount of impact it’ll make on our winery. We’d be better off to throw the wine away or to sell it for nothing … to make it go away.”

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Summary

• Farmers in Saskatchewan are dealing with variable weather, exacerbated by climate change. For many, this has meant hotter, drier summers, but the experience is far from universal.
• In some areas of Saskatchewan, growing conditions have improved with a changing climate.
• Farmers are also better equipped to deal with harsh weather, as new technologies and farming practices develop.

Scott Hepworth’s great-grandma used to have to shovel dirt out of the kitchen after dust storms swept across the Prairies.

More than a century later, drought is still a factor on Hepworth’s fifth-generation family farm near Assiniboia, Sask. In fact, it remains a defining feature of the land, which sits within the Palliser Triangle, one of Canada’s driest agricultural regions. 

But despite increasingly volatile weather in recent years, including long dry spells, record heat and sharp swings between extended drought punctuated by patchy rain, Hepworth says his crops aren’t suffering — instead, they’re performing better than expected in these conditions. 

He estimates that since he began farming in 2004, his crop yields during hot, dry summers have roughly doubled compared to what they were a few decades ago. 

It’s come as a surprise to some farmers across the Prairies: they are seeing the impacts of climate change, yes. But those impacts haven’t necessarily been bad for their bottom lines.

Only a few hours away from Hepworth’s farm, in northeast Saskatchewan — a region once considered too cold and wet — warming temperatures and drier conditions have improved growing conditions. 

“We were the worst place in the province to farm when I started farming, and now we’re the best place,” Ted Cawkwell, who owns a farm in the area with a couple partners, says.

On his land, fields that were historically difficult to seed and harvest are now more reliable. And he hasn’t seen damaging early frosts, once common every few years, in decades. 

Cawkwell says yields on his farm have improved dramatically over the past decade. The area overall has seen some of the highest yields in the province in recent years.

While there are several reasons for this — including better crop genetics and farming practices — Cawkwell believes changing weather patterns have been a major factor, too. 

“Twenty years ago, I would have never guessed the climate could change like this. You think of climate change as in tens of thousands, or millions, of years — not twenty. And that’s kind of the scary part of this.”

Farming wins are a combination of changing weather and new practices

Of course, the story is nuanced. On Hepworth’s farm, it’s not just the changing climate that has improved his crops. Conserving moisture has long been a focus for the family. Hepworth’s dad adopted what’s known as minimal-till seeding in the 1980s — essentially, reducing or eliminating the need to plough the soil when planting new seeds. This has improved soil health and reduced erosion. Another practice that Hepworth believes has benefited his farm is called continuous cropping, meaning every acre has a crop on it every year; roots in the ground rather than bare fields help retain moisture and protect the soil.

Advances in crop genetics have also played a big role, Hepworth says. He also serves as a director for SaskWheat, the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission — a farmer-funded organization that invests in wheat research and crop variety development. Over the past several decades, hundreds of millions of dollars in public and farmer funding have gone into developing new wheat and durum varieties in Canada. Hepworth is now able to grow drought-tolerant wheat and durum varieties bred to be shorter and better able to withstand stress.

It’s all helped. Hepworth, now in his early 40s, has his own memories from his childhood, of dust storms so intense he couldn’t see across the yard. Largely because of improved farming practices and soil management, he hasn’t seen one since. 

For Hepworth, a combination of climate, farming methods and technology have led to increased success.

But the experience is anything but universal.

“It’s been quite variable, even within a few kilometres,” he says. 

In parts of southern Saskatchewan, particularly deeper into the Palliser Triangle, recent conditions have had a very different impact.

A few hours southwest of Hepworth’s farm is Climax, Sask. — one of the driest regions in the province. 

Here, farmer Cody Glenn says he has experienced about six consecutive years of drought on his farm. 

In 2021, the worst year for drought in Saskatchewan in two decades, Glenn says 260 acres of barley resulted in almost nothing. The crop couldn’t even be properly harvested, producing just a couple bales of low-quality feed.

In other recent years, his barley yields were around a quarter of what they should be. 

In light of all this, he says his current strategy is just to stay viable. 

Despite changing weather, crop yields overall are holding — and even rising across the province

Even though there’s no question some farmers have struggled under increasingly variable weather across the Prairies, crop production has not declined as sharply as some predicted. 

The reality is far more nuanced, Dave Sauchyn, a leading Canadian climate scientist with a focus on the Prairies, says. 

“There’s no single climate,” he says. “It varies a lot from place to place.” 

Across the Prairies, climate change is showing up most clearly through warmer winters and longer frost-free seasons, rather than consistent increases in extreme summer heat, he says. 

In many areas, peak temperatures still haven’t exceeded those seen in the 1930s, in the “Dust Bowl” era.

Water patterns, however, are shifting in more complex ways, he adds. Snow is generally melting earlier, more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow and less water is available later in the summer. 

As a result, Sauchyn says, drought remains the main concern. That pressure is most acute in the Palliser Triangle, where dryness has long shaped farming practices. But in recent years, moisture stress has also become more common in parts of the northern and eastern grain belt — areas that historically faced fewer drought constraints.

And not all these changing patterns are bad for farming regions. 

Fewer and shorter cold periods are extending the growing season. In some regions — particularly along the northern and western margins of Saskatchewan — this is actually improving production, as Cawkwell has seen on his farm.

And despite increased variability, overall crop performance has remained relatively strong. Yields for major Saskatchewan crops such as wheat and canola have generally trended upward over the last couple decades, with many recent years coming in at, or above, long-term averages. 

Jeff Schoenau, a soil scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, says this reflects decades of improvements in farming practices.

He says comparisons of Prairie soil samples from 1996 to 2018 show significant gains in key indicators such as microbial biomass, respiration and organic matter — factors that contribute to healthier, more resilient soils. These improvements are the result of smarter farming practices, he says. That includes conservation tillage (avoiding or minimally ploughing a field every year), diverse crop rotations (not planting the same monocrop in the same field year after year) and more precise use of fertilizers.  

Combined with advances in crop genetics and other improved farming strategies, Schoenau says crops today can withstand conditions that would have caused far greater losses in the past.

And while climate scientists like Sauchyn expect continued variability — and potentially more severe drought — Schoenau believes farmers will continue to adapt. 

“Farmers are pretty resilient, and when things change, they adapt and they use all of the resources and ingenuity and expertise available.”

Some scientists and farmers are cautiously optimistic — but not all

Sauchyn is also cautiously optimistic. 

He is clear that prolonged drought would pose serious challenges, particularly in a warmer climate. It will be critical, he says, to understand the difference between what’s a short-term blip and what is a long-term trend. 

But his team’s projections, based on large geospatial datasets of climate, soils and yields, suggest that northern and western margins of the grain belt may continue to benefit. That’s because it’s getting warmer and growing seasons are getting longer.

This offers little hope to farmers like Glenn, who lost the lottery in terms of farm placement. 

He says farmers in his area are displaying their despair.

“There’s more land for sale down here than there is buyers.”

For now, he hopes crop insurance will help carry him through, but if dry conditions persist, the path forward becomes less clear — particularly in areas where irrigation options remain limited. 

“I know I’m an optimist. I always have been, but it’s really hard to see the future currently.”

Hepworth is inspired greatly by his great-grandparents, who persisted through their own tough times.

“We’re in a dry cycle now, but farmers always find ways to adapt, and we’re always looking for ways to improve our soil health and leave our land in better shape for the next generation,” he says. 

“I feel as though every generation on this farm has had it better than the last, and that’s what motivates me.”

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