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.

High input costs and global economic forces aren’t the only things having an effect on Canadian beef prices. Climactic changes, including increased drought, put pressure on pasture and water conditions and have resulted in smaller herds in recent years. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal

“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. 

Some areas throughout Canada are seeing warmer weather and longer growing seasons, making cattle farming possible where it wasn’t previously. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

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.”

In the last decade, some southern Ontario farmers have started to venture farther afield, moving cattle farming into the province’s north, where once derelict farms have been revitalized. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

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.

Cattle farming expanding north hasn’t been a saving grace for Canadian beef prices — at least not yet. Demand has jumped in recent years, meaning consumers are still willing to pay high prices at the grocery store. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal

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.”

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Summary

• Alaska-caught salmon are more likely to be found in B.C. grocery stores than salmon caught in-province, partly because the Alaskan fishery is so much bigger than B.C.’s.
• Alaskan fisheries have also been more successful at obtaining certification as sustainable operations, even though some experts claim Alaskan fisheries are depleting salmon populations.
• Indigenous fisheries in B.C., such as the one owned and operated by Lake Babine Nation, prioritize sustainable harvests, and their products can still be purchased — though maybe with a little extra effort.

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Walk into a grocery store in British Columbia and you’ll likely see bright red sockeye salmon for sale, one of the province’s most iconic foods. You might assume the sockeye was caught fresh in B.C. — but it’s far more likely the fish was caught by Alaskan fisheries, and frozen before it reached this store.

Buying Canadian products is a top priority for many people, especially in the face of U.S. tariffs and annexation threats. Some Canadian conservation groups argue Alaska fisheries are unsustainable. So why is salmon from Alaska so much more common? 

A major challenge is volume: Alaska caught 194.8 million salmon in 2025 and 103.5 million in 2024. Some of those salmon would have spawned in B.C., Washington and Oregon — though it’s hard to say exactly how many of those would have returned to B.C. specifically. The catch includes all five species of wild Pacific salmon: sockeye, coho, Chinook, chum and pink. 

Meanwhile, B.C. caught 2.9 million salmon in 2025 and 2.4 million in 2024. 

Those are just commercially caught and retained salmon. Critics are concerned about how many fish are caught in commercial bycatch — those unintentionally caught while targeting other species. Recreational fisheries have an impact, too; catch-and-release can kill significant numbers of fish.

A Lake Babine Nation fisher loads freshly caught salmon into a community member’s truck at Lake Babine’s fish counting fence.

Alaska’s salmon fisheries also have something B.C. salmon fisheries don’t: a globally recognized certification that tells stores and consumers its fish are caught sustainably. The Marine Stewardship Council certification faces some criticisms from conservation groups, but having it helps get fish on shelves and into shopping baskets.

So, why don’t B.C. salmon fisheries have it? How do we find B.C. salmon in stores, and how could there be more of it? What’s the most sustainable? Read on.

Why does Alaska have a leg-up on B.C. in selling salmon?

Alaska catches more salmon, which means it can sell them for less. Smaller fisheries pay more to process and ship fish to the store. The sheer volume also means frozen Alaska-caught salmon is available all year.

Big grocery stores “don’t necessarily care about the story,” Brittany Matthews, chief executive officer of Talok Fisheries in central B.C., says. “Price is going to win every time.” And Talok, owned and operated by Lake Babine Nation, can’t compete on price alone. “That’s what we’re fighting with, to add that care, to add that story, to add the power of an Indigenous product on the shelves and make people think about it versus just grabbing the Alaska fillet,” Matthews says.

And Alaska’s Marine Stewardship Council certification can act as a golden ticket, selling the message to stores and consumers that the fish is sustainably caught. “Major retailers, almost bar none, want [that] certification,” Greg Taylor, fisheries advisor to Talok, explains.

Fish caught by Lake Babine Nation ready for processing.

The Marine Stewardship Council says, globally, fisheries responsible for 19 per cent of the world’s total marine catch have its certification. Getting it requires fisheries to go through a rigorous auditing process.

Due to climate change, forestry and overfishing, B.C. salmon fisheries “no longer produce the volumes to satisfy the Canadian market,” Taylor says.

The fact no B.C. salmon fisheries are certified “says a lot about how poorly our fisheries are managed,” Taylor argues.

Conservation groups have pointed out flaws in the Marine Stewardship Council certification program.

Smaller B.C. fisheries may choose not to take on the task and additional costs of meeting stringent reporting requirements — meaning they are less likely to be stocked in stores.

In 2019, the Canadian Pacific Sustainable Fisheries Society pulled the B.C. fisheries it represented out of the program, since it was likely to fail an upcoming audit, largely because of a lack of good data on the health and abundance of salmon.

Separately, conservation groups have argues the Marine Stewardship Council sometimes certifies unsustainable fisheries. In 2024, a group of Canadian conservation groups formally objected to Alaska salmon fisheries being recertified, but were unsuccessful. They argue that while Canada has been cutting down allowable salmon catch, Alaska is catching too many.

“Alaska’s indiscriminate harvest is preventing the recovery of vulnerable Chinook, chum, sockeye, coho and steelhead that are headed for Canada,” Aaron Hill, executive director of Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said in a statement about the objection.Misty MacDuffee, biologist and wild salmon program director with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, argues the Alaskan Chinook fishery “deprives endangered southern resident killer whales of their primary food source.”

A young grizzly fishes for salmon just below the Babine River counting fence.

Broadly, salmon are struggling. Lake Babine Nation paused its Ts’etzli food fishery in 2024 due to salmon struggling in shallow, warm water of the Babine River. “They’ve had a food fishery there for 8,000 years, and they stopped it two years ago because of climate change,” Taylor says.

Concerns about the Marine Stewardship Council’s certifications go beyond salmon: in March, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition objected to the Marine Stewardship Council’s decision to recertify the Antarctic krill fishery.

The council’s Canada program director, Kurtis Hayne, says certifications are led by independent experts and include stakeholder input and peer review. The council itself does not lead assessments. Certification requirements include effective management and responsiveness to environmental conditions.

“We are confident in the credibility and outcomes of [our] assessment process,” he said in an emailed statement.

Where do these sustainability concerns about commercial practices come from in the first place?

In the open ocean, most commercial salmon is caught using purse seines and gillnets, which can scoop up non-targeted species, including from endangered stocks. Marine fisheries often catch salmon when they are still far away from their spawning grounds, and in B.C., operate on Canada’s best projections of what returns may be — but in reality, returns can be lower or higher than expected. If they’re lower, there’s no way to un-catch those fish.

Salmon have lost habitat due to development and are impacted by flooding, drought and warming water temperatures. Meanwhile, federal monitoring has declined, leaving spotty data for many populations.

Scientists and conservationists see the value in what First Nations have done for millennia: selectively fishing close to spawning grounds, a sustainable management practice called a terminal fishery. These in-river fisheries enable close monitoring of how many have returned to spawn.

Talok Fisheries, where Matthews is chief executive officer and Taylor is an advisor, is a terminal fishery that is preparing to apply for Marine Stewardship Council certification with support from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Matthews says.

“Indigenous-produced, sustainably harvested, selectively caught — they hit all the buttons to what a sustainable fishery should be,” Taylor says.

The council told The Narwhal the Quinsam River pink salmon in-river fishery has nearly finished its assessment to be certified as well.

So how can a B.C. fishery compete with Alaska?

Talok salmon is stocked at Costco, Sobeys and Thrifty Foods, thanks to its partnerships with distributors North Delta Seafoods and Premium Brands. It also sells fish through Authentic Indigenous Seafood, a collective that shares processing and shipment costs across Indigenous fisheries. These partnerships have been essential and gave Talok the chance to explain its selective practices, Taylor says.

Otherwise, “for small producers to get into Loblaws or Sobeys is next to impossible,” he says, because the fees are too high and it’s hard to compete with bigger fisheries that can beat them on pricing.

Talok is one of the biggest commercial sockeye operations in B.C., but it still relies on just a couple boats and a beach seine net hauled by the nation’s members who remove fish by hand traditionally. That means a smaller carbon footprint than a fleet of fishing vessels on the ocean, Taylor argues.

During roughly the first two weeks of the season, Talok sees the brightest red salmon. They “have beautiful meat colour early on in our lake harvest,” Matthews says. When processed for the store, they don’t have the “shiny silver skin” buyers love. Alaska “floods the market” with silver-skinned, whole fillets, and has ample fish caught early “before any other B.C. inland fisheries have the opportunity,” she explains. Top that with the price, grocery stores are “going to take the Alaska fish — hand over fish,” she says.

After two weeks at Talok, the fish gets paler. Matthews explains those pale fish are harder to sell to grocery stores but are great for smoking.

The paler fish are sold internationally to be processed into food like fish flakes. The roe from these fish is also good quality, but there’s a limited market for it in B.C., Taylor says.

Alaska’s Bristol Bay sockeye fishery, which is Alaska-origin, is the world’s largest sockeye run. “Even in weaker years, Alaska still dwarfs B.C.’s total output,” Matthews says, and that “sets the tone for pricing, market expectations and buyer relationships.” 

Meanwhile, B.C. has smaller, more variable runs, “chronic” conservation issues and time restrictions. “Markets hate inconsistency — Alaska offers the opposite,” she says.

At the Lake Babine Nation counting fence, people count each fish that goes by. Once a million salmon have passed the fence, the nation can begin fishing commercially.

Talok targets enhanced stocks, which are boosted through hatchery programs, not sensitive wild stocks. Those enhanced stocks return to specific spawning channels.

“If you reduce harvest rates on the coast, all those surplus fish end up at the spawning channels,” Taylor says. This means Talok can target different stocks appropriately, which is good for populations, and also efficient: “like shooting fish in a barrel.”

People count the fish passing the Babine fish fence. Once a million fish pass the fence, they get the green light to fish commercially. It’s prep, wait, then “fish like crazy” in the roughly four weeks they have, Matthews says. Last year they caught 191,872 salmon, according to Taylor.

“We will never fish until we know we have a healthy number to sustain the channels,” Matthews explains. Fisheries and Oceans Canada allows a specific number of these enhanced salmon to enter the spawning channels to maximize productivity in the habitat, and then closes a gate to the channel. Talok harvests fish still heading to that channel, which would have died with their spawn in them if they weren’t harvested. Matthews says the fishery leaves enough for the eagles, the bears and the river system while preventing too many from going to waste.

There’s some debate around spawning channels, since surplus stranded fish can affect productivity of the surrounding habitat. Taylor believes they ultimately should be removed, but it’s best to catch the surplus fish while they’re there. If removed, resources in those spawning channels, like flow control, could be directed to recovering wild streams instead, and Talok could catch a smaller yield.

So why do Alaska fisheries have this designation if B.C. fisheries have found it hard?

First is the capacity to meet monitoring and auditing requirements. Then comes the contention over whether the designation is applied fairly. Alaska and B.C. have interception fisheries, meaning they catch fish in the ocean before they reach their home waters in another country, not in their own jurisdiction. 

Alaska’s constitution requires fish to be maintained on a “sustained yield principle” in its own state, basically meaning “don’t deplete it.” But it allows a fishery to intercept fish returning to Canadian rivers where salmon stocks are experiencing depletion.

“It’s frustrating to see them wipe out the stocks that we have — and then also in the grocery store chain market, to compete against the Alaska fisheries is tough,” Matthews says.

Talok Fisheries tries to use as many fish as possible and reduce waste. Early season salmon are sold to stores for their bright red colour, and later salmon are great for smoking, Brittany Matthews says.

Taylor says “it’s appalling” for Alaska to apply a different standard to B.C. fish and the Marine Stewardship Council “is letting them get away with it.”

Though Taylor objects to this discrepancy he sees, he compliments Alaska for setting escapement goals for its own salmon stocks (meaning how many adults “escape” being caught and return to spawn). Most B.C. salmon stocks don’t have escapement goals. 

“You have to give Alaska credit for managing their own fishery. They do a much better job than Canada does — except when it comes to fishing our populations that are passing through their waters,” he says.

What does Alaska say?

Forrest Bowers, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game’s director of the division of commercial fisheries, says Alaska sells more fish partly because it has more salmon generally, and the vast majority of salmon caught spawn in Alaska. He agreed the Marine Stewardship Council certification helps get Alaska’s fish sold worldwide. He also points to the state’s escapement goals — the same ones Taylor commends — which prioritize sustaining populations into the future “over all other uses of salmon, including harvests.”

Bowers adds that Canada transferred allocation from commercial to recreational fisheries. In some parts of B.C., the recreational fishery catches more than the commercial.

In an emailed statement, Bowers said the cross-boundary fisheries are managed under the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and “a minute amount” of Alaska’s harvest would spawn outside the state. He says Alaska carefully monitors catches of Canadian-origin salmon to meet treaty requirements, “often forgoing harvest opportunity on our own stocks.”

Alaska’s commercial sector is made up of marine fisheries, though they can still be close to a river’s mouth. Pink and chum are its biggest catches. Bowers says in-river fisheries are not viable for Alaska because salmon spawn in thousands of waterways that aren’t connected by roads and would require airplane access.

“Attempting to harvest millions of pink and chum salmon in-river is not only impractical, but it would also lead to lower quality food products since pink and chum salmon sexually mature quickly in fresh water,” he says. He adds commercial operations in-river could lead to conflict with recreational and subsistence fisheries.

Salmon are integral to local economies, First Nations and non-Indigenous communities and habitats, Brittany Matthews points out.

How many Canada-origin fish is Alaska actually taking?

Taylor says the reality is “no one knows what that number is.” It takes several years to finalize annual estimates, and even then, specific numbers are difficult to obtain because they would require extensive genetic testing to be completely sure, he explains. Alaska gave The Narwhal a preliminary catch estimate of 260,000 B.C. salmon in 2025 (excluding some fisheries managed separately under the treaty) but said it doesn’t typically generate those estimates. Other observers think it could be much higher.

The Pacific Salmon Commission, which implements the treaty, told The Narwhal “there are no straightforward answers” in tallying a cumulative number of how many fish each nation intercepts from the other. Estimates of each salmon run are made separately because they “come with important caveats that make summing them together across fisheries and species problematic.”

What does Canada’s fisheries department say?

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (commonly called DFO) was not able to arrange an interview, despite repeated requests made several weeks in advance of publication. In a statement the department said it’s up to fisheries to apply for the Marine Stewardship Council certificate, but it supports applicants by providing data on stocks and compliance and explaining conservation measures.

The department says that while no B.C. salmon fisheries currently have the designation, B.C.’s groundfish trawl fishery has the certification for 16 groundfish species and the offshore hake and halibut fisheries are certified as well.

While the certification affects grocery store decisions, Fisheries and Oceans Canada says it “does not alter [the department’s] regulatory authority or consultation obligations.”

I want to support B.C.-caught salmon — what can I do?

Smaller, locally-owned shops may be more likely to carry B.C. salmon, and you can search and ask around for what B.C. fish is carried by bigger stores. You can find local fisheries in your area and see how you can support in-river operations. Fisheries and Oceans Canada responds to questions from civilians, and the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Pacific Salmon Commission have lots of public data so you can find out which stocks are doing well and which are struggling.

On the larger scale, protecting Pacific salmon relies heavily on co-operation between Canada and the U.S. The two countries signed an agreement in 2024 to suspend fishing of Yukon River Chinook for seven years, so such agreements are possible. Contacting your elected representative is one way to add your voice to the issue. You can also decide how you’re able to support local initiatives to restore salmon habitat and improve monitoring and share information among your peers.

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.

This story is part of Generating Futures, a series from The Narwhal exploring clean energy sovereignty among B.C. First Nations.

Summary

• West Moberly First Nations has limited access to fresh foods, due to long supply chains, cold winters and environmental contamination that has made many traditional foods unsafe to eat.
• The First Nation believes a greenhouse could boost food security and food sovereignty, and plans to tap a geothermal reservoir — which holds scalding hot water buried deep underground — to heat it.
• Their geothermal project could be the first of its kind in the province, which boasts major geothermal opportunities but has no commercial-scale projects in operation.

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Moldy strawberries, wilted lettuce. A forlorn cauliflower pocked with brown. West Moberly First Nations Councillor Clarence Willson jokes that produce available in nearby stores is sometimes “compostable” before it hits the shelves.

That produce arrives by way of a very long supply chain, and their northeastern B.C. territory, a three-and-a-half hour drive northeast of Prince George, is often the end of the line. And thanks to the compounding effects of hydro dams, seismic lines for oil and gas, forestry and coal mines, traditional foods the nation has long harvested or hunted have grown increasingly scarce or unsafe to eat.  

“We have to start looking at how we sustain ourselves,” Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations says. “Not just West Moberly, but the people in the northeast.”

“The idea of the greenhouse is, to me, where I think we have to go.” 

Growing fresh food year-round in greenhouses could improve food security in the community and across the region, but it would take a lot of energy, too. Fortunately, the First Nation has a serendipitous asset buried deep underground: scalding hot, salty water. 

Wilted, moldy produce is not an uncommon sight at grocery stores in B.C., especially in remote and rural areas. The province imports much of its fresh produce from places like the United States, and by the time the food has arrived on store shelves, it’s often past its prime. Photo: Supplied by Zoë Yunker

Thanks to B.C.’s lively tectonic faults, it has an abundance of this underground water, a key ingredient in what’s known as conventional geothermal energy. Hot water is pumped to the surface, using tools like turbines and heat exchangers to generate renewable electricity or direct heat. Elsewhere, companies are working to design so-called “unconventional” geothermal technologies to extract the earth’s heat from places without such reservoirs, but the drilling required makes it much more costly. B.C.’s geothermal opportunities, in other words, are a relatively low-hanging fruit — one that could literally yield fruit, and other fair-weather crops like tomatoes and peppers, even in winter’s subzero temperatures. 

“British Columbia has a world-class geothermal resource,” says Emily Smejkal, a geologist and policy lead for the Cascade Institute’s geothermal energy office. “We’re just not using it.”

Geothermal energy supplies consistent power, making it similar to the hydro dams and natural gas B.C. currently relies on.   

If the nation’s project succeeds, the West Moberly direct heat geothermal greenhouse project would be the first of its kind in Canada. Such innovation brings risks to its trailblazers, but Clarence, a longtime lead on the geothermal project, says the potential outcomes are worth it.

“When we learned about this geothermal availability, it fit right into our idea of food sovereignty,” he says. 

“We want to be in control of our supply of food, knowing what goes into it and what’s good about it.”

Fragmented food systems have impacted food security, territory

Fresh food used to be abundant in West Moberly’s territory.

“If you needed meat, you’d go to the mountains and get yourself a caribou,” Roland says. Fish came easily, too: rivers were once plentiful enough that you could catch them by hand. The nation’s members travelled throughout their territory with the seasons, maintaining balance and keeping their impacts in check.  

Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations is an advocate for harnessing the First Nation’s geothermal energy. “We have to start looking at how we sustain ourselves,” he says. Photo: Ryan Dickie / The Narwhal

Over a century ago, Canada signed Treaty 8 which promised signatory First Nations would retain the right to hunt and fish as they always had.

But that’s not what happened. 

To supercharge resource extraction in the north, former premier W.A.C. Bennett dammed the Peace River, bisecting the once-expansive migration of transient caribou that fortified the residential herds. “Caribou that roamed throughout the territory got fragmented down into these small, little pockets,” Roland says, “and then wolves came in.”

Wolves and other predators made use of roads — and seismic and power lines etched across the territory, offering them an easy-access escalator to the caribou’s mountain hideaways. As logging and mining further depleted caribou habitat, the herds plummeted. In 2014, the nation launched a breeding pen program with the Saulteau First Nations, and yet herds remain in critical condition.

Restoring boreal caribou habitat, one tree at a time

Other foods suffered, too: moose and elk populations fell, thanks in part to habitat loss and to new hunting pressure in the caribou’s absence. Berries throughout the territory were sprayed with glyphosate, a chemical now deemed “probably carcinogenic” by the World Health Organization. 

For decades, fish remained relatively plentiful — and critical to diminishing food security. 

Every year in May, Clarence and his family would gather at a special spot along the Crooked River to fish for char, sometimes setting up barbecues to cook by the river as they worked. But worries began to surface, thanks in part to a sign in the Hudson’s Hope post office warning of elevated mercury levels in the Williston Reservoir. The nation knew that fish travelled through the reservoir, and initiated a study in 2015 to determine whether they were safe to eat. 

Char like this Dolly Varden species populate the Crooked River in northeastern B.C. and have long served as a vital food source for West Moberly First Nations. But the impacts of mining and logging in the area have contaminated the water, leading to unhealthy mercury levels in the fish. Photo: troutnut / iStock

“I was in tears when we got the results back, because I knew my family had been eating those fish for years,” Clarence says. 

Ninety-eight percent of the samples had mercury concentrations above B.C.’s health guidelines. Women of childbearing age could safely eat only a Hershey’s Kiss worth of fish every other day.

Before it was flooded, the community learned that BC Hydro’s new dam project, Site C, would bring mercury contamination closer to home. The reservoir is downstream of the Moberly River, which threads through the nation’s territory and flows into Moberly Lake directly facing their community. Just as the Crooked River carried the reservoir’s toxins upstream, the Moberly River is poised to do the same. “A lot of us eat fish directly out of the lake,” Clarence says.

“They went ahead with Site C with the full knowledge that it was going to do the same thing there.”

Site C dam builder fined $1.1 million for discharging contaminated wastewater 

Clarence added that selenium pollution from nearby coal mines also impacts the region’s watersheds. “All the river networks in our region are affected by something,” he says.

With many traditional food sources depleted or contaminated, West Moberly has taken action over the years to regain access to fresh foods. The nation funded community members to build garden beds, but short growing seasons mean they offer limited respite to a year-round problem. 

A greenhouse could bridge the seasons, but West Moberly First Nations has no natural gas service in its community. And according to Michael Keefer, president of the ecological restoration consultancy Keefer Ecological, the added costs of using electricity to power a greenhouse year-round would make the prospect a non-starter. 

“It’s very energy-intensive to heat a greenhouse,” he says.

That is, unless the nation has another energy source to draw from. 

Energy from an ancient sea-floor

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the earth’s supercontinent broke up along the border of northeastern B.C. and Alberta, turning it — and what would become West Moberly’s traditional territory — into a shallow tropical sea, populated by giant reptilefish.

Eventually, sediment and rock covered it over, leaving little holes underground where that sea-floor had been. 

“If that buried sea-floor doesn’t hold air anymore, it holds salty water or oil or gas,” Smejkal says. Known as “brine,” that water is more plentiful than its fossil fuel cohabitants. “Oil and gas are hard to find,” Smejkal says. “Water is actually pretty easy.”

In addition to that ancient sea-floor, B.C.’s geothermal potential also abounds beneath the chains of volcanoes tracing its coast. There, hot water comes from rain that trickles underground through porous rocks, heated by the volcanoes’ pimple-like proximity to the earth’s molten core.

Some B.C. buildings use a geothermal-lite technique called “geoexchange” to supplement their energy needs by heating water in shallow underground pipes, but to date no projects have successfully tapped the potential of deep-buried water. 

B.C. holds vast reserves of underground water in the form of an ancient sea-floor filled with brine and hot water bubbling under the volcano chains that pepper the province’s coast. Photo: Ryan Dickie / The Narwhal

Glen Clark, chair of the BC Hydro board, told The Narwhal he thinks B.C.’s lacklustre geothermal industry is due in part to an abundance of cheap hydropower and gas. “You’ve got these inexpensive fuel sources that have impaired, in a way, the kind of experimentation you’d have if the price were higher,” he says. But Clark says geothermal is “a really, really important resource,” that could play a key role in B.C.’s energy system in the future. 

Producing electricity from underground water is also finicky: it needs to be super hot, at around 120 C. But industrial sites like greenhouses can easily skip the electricity step, using geothermal heat directly in their operations, creating a less risky project. When West Moberly realized the heat in their geothermal resource was ideal for greenhouse conditions, it seemed like an obvious conclusion, Clarence says. 

“That’s been a topic we’ve discussed for years.” 

Next phase of geothermal project is risky, requires substantial new funding

If all goes as planned, West Moberly’s geothermal greenhouse will bring fresh produce and fish back to the territory. 

Using a system known as aquaponics, the nation plans to raise fish in tanks and use their waste to fertilize vegetables in the greenhouse, cutting down on or eliminating the use of synthetic fertilizers. 

“The waste from the fish is excellent fertilizer for the greenhouse products,” Clarence says. “They work together very well.” 

So far, the nation plans to raise fish like tilapia alongside produce like tomatoes, strawberries, greens and peppers in a 40,000-square-foot greenhouse — enough to provide food for its members and surrounding communities. Keefer is working with the nation to develop a business plan, including reaching out to local grocery stores. He’s confident their products will be in high demand — as long as everything goes according to plan. 

Even though the project is designed to produce a more forgiving form of direct heat, the enterprise still brings risk. “For our project, flow is our big worry,” Ben Lee says. He’s an operations engineer and heat transfer specialist with Calgary-based company Raven Thermal Services, which is helping to design the geothermal project with the nation. If the company doesn’t find enough water in the reservoir it targets, it won’t be able to bring enough heat to the surface, and may need to drill farther into the rock to access it, upping the project’s costs. 

Geothermal energy remains a largely untapped resource in B.C. and across Canada, due in large part, experts believe, to the abundance of cheap hydropower and gas. Tapping into underground water may open up a key avenue for B.C.’s energy future. Photo: Supplied by BC Hydro

Lee says they chose to locate the project next to an abandoned oil and gas well near the community, which can serve as a pre-drilled test plot to assess subsurface conditions they might encounter. This is among the many conservative decisions made, Lee says, to reduce risks inherent in the project. “When you’re talking about a community-based project, risk management becomes absolutely critical.”

Having received early feasibility funding from federal and provincial governments, the project now requires substantial new funding to take on the next big step of drilling the hole to determine how much water is there. 

In countries where geothermal energy has boomed, Smejkal says that risk-taking has often been a shared enterprise. For example, in what’s known as the “glass city” — the Westland region of the Netherlands — geothermal-powered greenhouses produce food for distribution across Europe. There, governments agreed to help compensate for the cost difference between geothermal power and natural gas, and offered an insurance program to reduce risks for geothermal projects. By removing the consumer carbon tax and failing to provide consistent support for geothermal energy, Smejkal worries Canada is heading in the opposite direction. 

Clark sees a role for the utility to advance geothermal in the province and help to reduce risks for developers. But, he warns, it faces competing demands for funds and time, including major substation investments to replace aging infrastructure. He says he wasn’t aware of West Moberly’s geothermal greenhouse project, but added that the utility generally enters into equity agreements with First Nations to share ownership of the energy system, like transmission lines, “as opposed to more historic reparations.” He added that he didn’t know enough about the mercury issues related to Site C to comment on them.

Speaking to The Narwhal from his home alongside Moberly Lake, Clarence says those responsible for the community’s collapsing food system are indebted to help. 

 “Some of these people that are poisoning our food supply, they should help us with trying to have good food here,” he says.

Generating Futures is made possible with support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

Updated on March 9, 2026, at 6:53 a.m. PT: This article was updated because a previous version incorrectly attributed a quotation to Roland Willson in a caption. The quotation has been deleted from the caption, but remains unchanged in the story’s main text, where it is correctly attributed to Clarence Willson.

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.

Toyin Kayo-Ajayi’s favourite meal is pounded yam, with cassava and egusi — protein-rich African melon seeds, roasted in oil with spices and blended into a paste (pumpkin seeds will do if that’s all you can find). You can add turkey, chicken, fish, shrimp, kpomo (cow-skin) — any meat you want, with some broth and African spinach or amaranth — to turn it into a stew. 

Cassava and yam are central foods in his Nigerian culture and other Black cuisines across Africa, South America and India. He’s growing the tropical produce in greenhouses in Miracle Valley just outside Mission, B.C., about a 90-minute drive east from Vancouver. 

Kayo-Ajayi was told again and again that farming in Canada would be out of reach — it would be too expensive, the climate too unforgiving for the tropical crops he dreamed of growing. It wouldn’t last.

But he says enthusiasm for his five-acre farm has only grown since he got started in 2020. For five months of the year, he can grow tropical produce in greenhouses. His soil, which he makes himself, consists of clean silt, sand and goat manure. It’s working so well, he says, he is now selling it online and trying to get it stocked in stores. He’s still experimenting at a small scale, but the food he grows, like cassava and yam, he mostly supplies to the African Foods Food Bank, an organization he launched to provide healthy food to Black families.

Toyin Kayo-Ajayi, founder of the Canadian Black Farmers Association, feeds goats at his farm near Mission, B.C. He is committed to empowering Black farmers by connecting them with training and funding.

Donating to the food bank helps more people access African produce that may be out of reach in Canada. Imported cultural food, like cassava, can face extreme mark-ups by the time they get to the grocery store. On top of rising grocery prices and systemic income inequality, those mark-ups can put these foods out of reach. “If it’s somebody that is still low-income, now, he’s struggling to afford the cultural food,” Kayo-Ajayi explains.

This summer, he plans to host people on his farm at the Kara-Kata Africa Village, where they can camp, learn about farming, share good food and enjoy music together, he says. In its fifth year, the initiative is part of his wider vision to break down barriers for Black, African and Caribbean people to get into agriculture in Canada. In 2022, he founded the Canadian Black Farmers Association, which now has over 200 members.

The farm produces an average of 4,500 pounds of produce for the food bank and 250 dozen eggs per year. To date, Kayo-Ajayi has provided agricultural mentoring to more than 500 people.

Breaking down barriers for Black farmers across Canada

Primary agriculture — meaning the work done on a farm or in greenhouses — contributes $31.7 billion to Canada’s economy annually. It employs about 223,000 people, but 40 per cent of that workforce could retire by 2033. 

Just under five per cent of those farmers are Black, and Kayo-Ajayi sees huge opportunity to increase that number in order to grow local economies, improve food security for Black homes, make communities more “self-reliant” food-wise and increase access to cultural foods.

Food growers are the roots of the entire agricultural sector, which generates $149.2 billion annually, or seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

While Kayo-Ajayi’s priority is getting cultural foods into Black homes at reasonable prices, he says supporting food growers stands to benefit all Canadians as the United States imposes tariffs and threatens annexation. 

“It’s something that is beneficial for our community and for Canada,” he says. “Everybody wins.”

Small-scale producers can face challenges getting operations off the ground and getting products into stores, often operating on small margins. Toyin Kayo-Ajayi has spent years investing in his operations, and wants to make it easier for other aspiring farmers.

Soil ‘the key to most of my success’

When he was about five years old in Ekiti State, Nigeria, Kayo-Ajayi’s mother would send him to visit his grandparents’ farm. “I didn’t like it,” he says. 

But that was where he learned “the most important thing in life is food.”

“I remember, we walked in the farm, they would smell the soil … They could tell you what could easily grow in that area,” he says.

He discovered planting seeds made him feel grounded. “It’s energy. It’s spiritual. It’s actually good for us,” he says.

Toyin Kayo-Ajayi says good soil is the “key” to all his food.

He’s stayed in farming his whole life, and has been farming in Canada for more than 20 years, beginning shortly after he arrived in 2001 at 23 years old. Today he still owns a 500-acre sister farm in Nigeria from which he imports food into Canada as well, including about 7,000 pounds on average each year to the food bank. He’s able to grow more throughout the year, and stocks some produce in the food bank, and sells some to support his operations.

In 2011, he began what would officially become the Kara-Kata Afrobeat Society, which brings music and food to community events in order to build connections and share information about food-growing.

“When there’s music and food, you find more people in our community. And I know how to make good food,” he says.

Family farmers in British Columbia were already struggling. Then Trump started a trade war

At his B.C. farm he creates a loam soil, which supports the tropical plants that yield traditional African foods, like cassava and yam. He says it’s made all his produce grow better and easier. It’s a simple mixture — but it’s “the key to most of my success,” he says. 

“The soil is the root of everything I was able to do.”

Toyin Kayo-Ajayi’s soil is made from clean silt, sand and goat manure.

He hopes to make it widely available for purchase across Canada, and even beyond.

But he says he’s had trouble getting it into stores. He’s reached out to retailers but it hasn’t gone anywhere.

 It can be difficult for small producers to meet retailers’ requirements and make goods at scale, and often little guidance is available.

Kayo-Ajayi wants to use proceeds from soil sales to support programming for Black farmers. In turn, he hopes those farmers will someday contribute to the food bank and build capacity in the community.

“It’s like a cycle, reinvesting back,” he says.

Toyin Kayo-Ajayi, who is also a board member for the Small Scale Food Processors Association in B.C., wants to empower Black food growers to “create a sustainable economy in our community.”

Cultural food can ‘create a sustainable economy in our community’

Kayo-Ajayi’s operations are all-organic, and the plants he grows work together to benefit each other. Herbs repel pests. Cassava leaves provide protein for cows. He grows sorghum, a nutritious grain that grows like grass. You can cut it three times a year, but it just grows back, rather than needing to be replanted like other crops, he says.

He’s met a fair amount of nay-sayers who doubt how successful he can be. “People think I’m crazy, but, you know, it’s good to be crazy in a good way,” he says.

Sorghum, a protein-rich ancient grain, growing at Toyin Kayo-Ajayi’s farm. The nutritious grain is easy to harvest because it will regrow after being cut, instead of needing to be replanted, he explains.

He met aspiring Black farmers who found there was little support in navigating the agriculture system, and wound up giving up on farming. That’s why he created the Canadian Black Farmers Association, which provides advice but also helps members purchase land, create business plans, find funding and secure infrastructure.

Kayo-Ajayi thinks there can also still be lingering stigma around Black farmers. When he first moved to Canada, he was working on a farm close to the road, and someone walked by and asked, “Are you picking some cotton over there?” and laughed.

Those associations can be internalized among Black farmers too, he says. “It’s kind of stuck in the mind, seeing a Black person on the field … That kind of pushed most Black people away,” he says. “ ‘My ancestors were brought here, so I don’t want to bring myself here now, and now give myself up as a slave again.’ ”

Kayo-Ajayi’s vision is to highlight the empowerment that comes from growing healthy and cultural foods for one’s own community. 

“The most important thing in this life is food,” he says again. “We can use that food to create a sustainable economy in our community.”

“The most important thing in this life is food,” Toyin Kayo-Ajayi says at his farm. He wants to expand operations to grow more food, make more soil for sale and expand learning opportunities.

Beyond financial and informational barriers, there are still more challenges for new food growers. Farmers rated upfront costs and climate change as their top two concerns, according to a 2024 poll commissioned by Farmers for Climate Solutions. 

Flooding and drought have caused billions in damages to farmland across Canada, and climate change also is leading to a rise in pests. 

Kayo-Ajayi says his vegetables are mostly grown in greenhouses and are drought-tolerant, and he believes they can be very adaptable to a hotter, drier climate. 

What was it like to farm in 2025? Canadian farmers weigh in

Kayo-Ajayi says he invested a lot of money personally before he started getting funding. “You have to prove that you can do something before you can get support,” he says. 

Since then, the Canadian Black Farmers Association has received funding from organizations like Agriculture Canada, the Vancouver Foundation and the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative. But he says he needs a lot more funding to get the farm going at a bigger scale and get to the point of selling soil.

“This is my passion,” Kayo-Ajayi says. “To me, somebody has to do it. It costs a lot, but guess what? The reason why you have a little is to be able to use the resources you have to make a difference in somebody’s life. To me, investing in another human being is my best investment, and I’m doing it this way.”

Updated on Feb. 18, at 1:50 p.m PT: A previous version of this story stated the farm produces an average of 250 eggs per year. The story has been corrected to state the farm produces an average of 250 dozen eggs per year.

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.

Walking down the aisles of one of Canada’s major groceries, it’s rare to see Indigenous food products. Even in smaller, independently-owned retailers, they are still few and far between. Fish might be from Alaska and seaweed from Japan, despite being plentiful on the coast of British Columbia and harvested by local First Nations. There are many Canadian products big and small, but Indigenous producers, as well as their local traditional foods, are rare. Where are the Indigenous goods?

Food is a unique gateway for bridging cultures and building understanding, and picking up a package of bannock mix or candied salmon is a tangible way of supporting Indigenous economies. For those seeking them, they’re not too hard to find at gift shops and independent markets, and directly purchasing from Indigenous businesses online and in person is an option too. But it left me wondering — what does it take to get Indigenous foods into grocery stores? And is the effort worth it for the companies? 

The production costs can be high, while the margins can be low, business owners told me. Grocery stores can charge producers high fees to be on their shelves, and distributors can want a cut of the profit too, while expecting low costs on wholesale goods. Meanwhile, meeting large orders and checking all the boxes can challenge the capacity of small businesses. 

Kelsey Coutts is co-owner of Bangin’ Bannock, which sells premade bannock mix and is based in Coast Salish territories. She said covering those fees requires raising the price. “Then who are we catering to, who is it for, if it’s very expensive?” she asked. At the same time, Indigenous food producers are like other businesses: they want to reach more customers and be sustainable. 

So, how do companies break into these stores — and do they even want to? Read on.

Kelsey Coutts (left) and Destiny Houshte are co-founders of Bangin’ Bannock. Coutts said community support was integral to them getting their company off the ground. Photo: Supplied by Bangin’ Bannock

Fees are a challenge for small producers, Indigenous businesses say

Some Indigenous producers have found a foothold in stores. Authentic Indigenous Seafood can be found in stores of all sizes, in particular their candied and canned salmon — and that’s because it is a supply chain co-operative that brings together about a half-dozen fisheries, making the costs more approachable. Authentic Indigenous Seafood takes in fish from Indigenous fisheries and takes on the often expensive roles of transporting, processing, packaging and marketing to get fish to market. The costs can be prohibitive when operating independently, especially cold storage for frozen fish. 

Gordon Sterritt, chief executive officer of the co-operative and member of the Gitxsan Nation, said the idea came from a handful of Indigenous fisheries finding they didn’t have the capacity to do the processing and marketing individually.

Lena Russ, the co-operative’s special projects manager and a member of Haida Nation, said they would like to expand more into frozen fish in grocery stores, and into restaurants and wineries. For now, their shelf-stable preserved fish has been easier to transport and stock. Every bag or can of salmon gives details where the fish came from and which community caught it. 

“It took us a while to get to a point where distribution is easy now, and we’re not fighting for sales,” she said.

The fees to be carried in a grocery store can be high. They vary by store, but food suppliers can face late delivery fees that can cost up to $1,200 per delivery, out of stock fees that can cost thousands, and unloading fees that can charge $500 per pallet of goods, according to a 2021 report from a working group on retail fees in the Canadian food industry. The working group said shelf fees — essentially, the cost to claim space in a grocery aisle — broadly made sense to food suppliers, but other fees were more contentious for lacking transparency and being unpredictable.  

Grocery stores largely keep data on these fees confidential, but anecdotal research found between 15 per cent and 40 per cent of sales could go to the grocery store, according to the report. 

There can also be fees to the small producer if goods get damaged, even if it happens in the grocery store, Greg Taylor said. He’s an advisor for Lake Babine Nation, which owns Talok Fisheries.

“If your products get damaged in their stores or their process, they charge you back for them at the price they would have sold them for — not at the cost they bought them for,” he said. “And this is the damage done in their shop.” 

Authentic Indigenous Seafood’s collective structure means independent fisheries can access equipment, refrigeration and transportation that can be too expensive for a small operation to take on alone. Photos: Supplied by Authentic Indigenous Seafood

Some grocery stores have local programs that waive shelving fees for local businesses, like the Loblaw small supplier program. But overall, the fees can be prohibitive for small companies, Shyra Barberstock, chief executive officer of Anishinaabe tea and coffee company Kebaonish, said — making it largely worth it for them to prioritize seeking direct sales or working with smaller stores, at least while they grow.

“Our main focus right now is working with smaller independent businesses … but we do expect that as we expand, we also will eventually be in mainstream supermarkets,” she said.

What will it take to make traditional foods thrive again?

Sayisi Dene chef Sarah Meconse Mierau had a similar experience. Mierau runs Tradish, where she started out selling teas and jams, and expanded to a food truck, catering and running The Ancestor Café at Fort Langley. Initially, she wanted Indigenous people to be able to see her jams with plant medicines in the grocery store, but she quickly realized the cost of getting into the big chains “wasn’t very feasible.” She said it didn’t align with her cultural protocols to profit off selling plant medicines. Instead, she prices them just to cover the cost of producing them, and makes a profit from the other parts of her business.

Jordan Hocking, founder of Sriracha Revolver Hot Sauce, said bigger chains often require business owners to put their products on sale for a certain amount of time each year, but the business owner has to pay the difference in price to make up for the customer’s discount. “I can see why it’s not always a place people want to stay, or go, in the first place,” she said.

Hocking, a member of Sweetgrass First Nation, said getting commercial kitchen space to create enough supply is another high cost. She got coaching and access to a kitchen from Andrea Gray-Grant, founder of Good to Grow, which provides training support for emerging food and beverage companies.

Sriracha Revolver founder Jordan Hocking said small businesses are often making high quality products, which makes them less competitive price-wise. “Your product may have better ingredients, but the consumer doesn’t always know that, or isn’t able to hear your story from the shelf to know why they want to invest in you,” she said. Photo: Supplied by Sriracha Revolver

Pursuing growth while upholding values

Sterritt pointed out that post-contact, First Nations were restricted to reserves and prevented from living off traditional foods. After operating fisheries for millennia, communities were sidelined in the newly imposed system and found it hard to compete.

Sterritt first began working in fisheries in 1997 and said for a long time, due to these systemic issues, it could feel like their project was “never going to get anywhere.” But business really took off the past couple years, and Authentic Indigenous Seafood received an Indigenous Business Award in 2024.

Operating as a collective works better for the small, in-river fisheries run by Indigenous communities that are prioritizing sustainable harvest. These fisheries harvest salmon close to their spawning grounds, according to the number that have managed to return in a given year. Marine fisheries, on the other hand, will catch large numbers of fish mid-migration based on spawning predictions, before it’s known how many will actually get to their spawning grounds.

“Our fisheries have to be sustainable. They have to have that conservation focus,” Sterritt said.

Deer are destroying B.C. island ecosystems. Indigenous hunting could be the solution

Challenges such as climate change and natural disasters, including the 2019 Big Bar landslide and Chilcotin landslide in 2024, affect their planned fisheries. But Authentic Indigenous Seafood hopes to grow, which depends on partnering with more fisheries. 

“We have huge opportunities, we just need to have the supply,” Sterritt said.

For others, maintaining high-quality ingredients or sustainable packaging that align with their values and protocols can also make it hard to meet supply demands of bigger chains. Hocking’s hot sauces don’t rely on traditional Indigenous ingredients, but for businesses that do work exclusively with those foods, maintaining a consistent supply year-round “can be a real challenge,” she said. “If you’re going to make a relationship with a large retailer, they’re going to expect that you are going to supply that product when they need it … So that is intimidating.”

Mireau uses all organic and local ingredients in her Tradish jams, and hemp labels for the jars, and acknowledges that gets expensive. She wants to keep the cost per jar as low as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to sell them at markets and online. She’d prefer bigger chains mark up products to create their own profits, rather than cut into the independent businesses’ profits by asking for a lower price. 

“Our profit margin is already so small,” she said. “They want us to do it for literally nothing.”

Trained chef Sarah Meconse Mierau said culinary school helped her learn the ins and outs of running a food business. She focuses on selling her jams and teas directly to people to keep the cost as accessible as possible. Photo: Supplied by Tradish

Sarah Meconse Mierau said the glass jars, hemp labels and all-organic ingredients cost her $15 per jar of jam to make, and she sells them at $20 to cover overhead costs. She could cut costs by using cheaper materials and ingredients, but she’s not willing to sacrifice on the quality or the values she upholds, she said. Photo: Supplied by Tradish

Collaboration, mentorship and community are key to success

Coutts is working with distributors to sell her bannock mix, but said the capacity demands can be very high for such a small company. There can be last minute, very large orders that are hard for a small team to fulfill.

“We do it — but it can be a bit stressful,” she said.

Coutts said Bangin’ Bannock was only possible due to community support. In their first year, before they had the funds for a warehouse space, Squamish Nation’s Chief Joe Mathias Centre let Coutts and co-founder Destiny Houshte use the recreation centre’s kitchen to make their mixes. Coutts is Nak’azdli Dakelh and Houshte is Assiniboine.

“That’s the only reason we were able to begin,” Coutts said. “Just the community who decided to open their hearts and their doors and allow us to come in and succeed.”

She said she and Houshte combined their two family bannock recipes, and it was a winner on the first try. Then they created a gluten-free version.

“That was super fun too, because you’d have the uncles in and we’re getting up to try all the different tasters of bannocks and jams,” she said of the recipe development process.

Kelsey Coutts said federal requirements called for French on Bangin’ Bannock packages, but she and Destiny Houshte pushed back to include Cree and Nakota instead, the languages spoken by their families. Photo: Supplied by Bangin’ Bannock

She said peer support and mentorship has been key. “The small Indigenous business world is just so uplifting and so supporting and so loving,” she said.

Bangin’ Bannock is currently stocked in over 150 stores across Canada, and while Coutts and Houshte are more focused on smaller stores that are more community-oriented, Coutts said she sees the value in getting on big grocery store shelves for the representation of Indigenous foods. She wants young people to see Indigenous products where they shop. And that representation can also lead to connection, she said.

She’s found “bannock is a golden ticket to be able to have a non-threatening conversation with many curious people,” she said. 

“We’re able to have conversations about food sovereignty, and about reservations and residential schools and all of the history that brought us to what bannock is,” she said.

“It’s so much more than fried bread — it’s a really full history.”

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On a warm September evening nearly 15 years ago, Katie Sardinha had her first real glimpse of what life as a farmer could be. It was harvesting season in Summerland, B.C., where she’d grown up on her parents’ 10-acre apple orchard. Though she’d spent her summers picking cherries on other Okanagan farms and had watched her parents pick apples and run the farm her whole life, they had never recruited her or her brother for the harvest. They didn’t want to pressure them into farming. Sardinha had just finished her undergraduate degree and was preparing to pursue a career in academia. 

“Back then, we had a lot more big trees on the orchards,” she recalls. “We used wooden ladders with stakes on the end. With wooden ladders and stakes, you can do things on hills that you can’t quite do with the metal ladders that are more standard now. You can angle them in just these insane ways. I remember I turned around and my parents were picking apples into their bags, and I thought, ‘Wow, my parents are ladder acrobats!’ I was so impressed. They were so nimble.” Though it would be several more years before Sardinha decided to go into farming herself, she remembers that evening as pivotal.

Sardinha’s reality as a farmer has been quite different from that of her parents. Though her love for the job remains, she’s faced economic, climate and other challenges on a much greater scale than her parents did. She is farming in a new paradigm.

Farmer Katie Sardinha faces many more challenges than her parents did on their 10-acre apple orchard in Summerland, B.C. Both Sardinha and her husband have taken off-farm jobs to make ends meet. B.C. Photo: Aaron Hemens / The Narwhal

B.C.’s agriculture industry — which is still mostly comprised of small-scale farms like Sardinha’s — has been suffering for years. Mounting costs for essentials like animal feed and fertilizer, high land prices, labour shortages, extreme weather events and a retail market dominated by large grocery stores have made farming an increasingly difficult endeavour. And while slogans like “Buy Canadian” and “Shop Local” are gaining momentum because of U.S. tariffs, buying apples from Washington or spinach from California is not only cheaper but also easier than buying local for many B.C. residents.

Compounding these issues, B.C.’s agriculture industry is the lowest-funded in the country. Only 2.5 per cent of the province’s agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is funnelled back into the industry, compared to a historical national reinvestment figure closer to 12 per cent. “We’re kind of the lost child of federation in agriculture,” Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, and a leading researcher in agricultural innovation and food policy, tells The Narwhal. “It’s frustrating that we could be an agricultural superpower and agriculture does not get the respect that, say, the oil and gas industry does.”

As the Canada-U.S. trade war drags on, the impact on B.C.’s food system will be significant. The challenge may provide an opportunity to remake the system, but a rehaul won’t come without struggle — and thorny questions already litter its path forward. Can a new food system succeed without leaving farmers like Sardinha behind?

Could the farms of the future grow 12,000 heads of lettuce on one acre?

In a large, warm, airtight room that looks like the inside of a spaceship, rows of lettuce grow stacked on top of each other at Avery Farms, a vertical lettuce operation in Okanagan Falls, B.C. People wearing white hazmat suits patrol the rows, making sure the lettuce heads are properly watered and lit. They aren’t wearing the suits to protect themselves from hazardous materials, but to protect the plants from contaminants. This is a farm of the future — and it’s already arrived in B.C.

Indoor farming operations, like those at Avery Farms in Okanagan Falls, B.C., can grow food efficiently, but the start-up costs can be enormous. Photo: Supplied by Avery Farms

“In one acre, we can [produce] 12,000 heads of lettuce a day, every single day of the year,” Avery Farms owner Garry Peters says. In 2020, Peters and his wife Victoria, retired entrepreneurs, witnessed the panic and fears about food scarcity created by the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to invest in something that would contribute to B.C.’s future food security and give back to the community they’d grown up in.

The farm starts lettuce plants as seedlings grown in water. They are lit and heated by electric sources and moved to new rows as they grow. It takes about 45 days for the lettuce heads to grow to market size. Avery Farms can produce 100 to 150 times the amount of lettuce grown in field farming on much less land, while the crops don’t require pesticides and use about 90 per cent less water than traditional agriculture. 

When the lettuce plants are ready for market, Peters says they’re sold exclusively within B.C. to a mix of small and larger retailers, for about $3.90 a head. Pioneered in Singapore and Japan, vertical farm technology presents one potential option to scale up B.C.’s food production and grow imported produce year-round.

But there are significant challenges to implementation. After a year-and-a-half in operation, Avery Farms is only just breaking even. The upfront investment required for vertical farming — in the tens of millions of dollars — is unfathomable for most farmers.

Peters says they’re currently working at scale — producing at an industrial capacity while reducing their input cost per item — because of U.S. tariff threats and increased consumer demand for local produce. “We have an opportunity now,” he says. “If you’re not going to try and make something better because you can’t make a profit on it right away, you’ll never be able to make a profit on it. You need those people who will go in there and pioneer the industry and go, ‘Okay, this isn’t working, so what about this?’ ”

Climate change and land costs hinder expansion of B.C. food production 

B.C.’s agriculture industry is small compared to other Canadian provinces, even though the province has some of the richest agricultural land in the country, favourable growing conditions and the country’s most diverse food production profile — producing everything from meat and dairy products to grains, oil seeds, fresh fruit and a wide variety of vegetables. But expanding the province’s food production has proved a challenge in recent years. 

According to Farm Credit Canada, a Crown corporation supporting the food industry, farmland values in B.C. rose more than 10 per cent between 2023 and 2024 — part of a 30-year unbroken upwards trend. In B.C.’s South Coast region, which includes important agricultural hubs like Richmond, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Langley and Pitt Meadows, an acre of farmland costs between $72,000 and $255,000. 

Getting into farming is an expensive proposition in the fertile Okanagan Valley, where farmland costs as much as $120,000 per acre. Photo: Aaron Hemens / The Narwhal

In the Okanagan, where growers like Sardinha produce the majority of the province’s tree fruits and wine grapes, Farm Credit Canada reports average acreage prices up to $120,000. The high cost of land makes getting into the business difficult for new farmers. And for those already in the industry, like Sardinha, other challenges abound.

While the pandemic and its aftermath led to labour shortages, inflation and disruptions in supply chains, farmers in B.C. have also faced climate issues and extreme weather events in recent years that weren’t present even a decade ago. Last year, a January cold snap in the Okanagan damaged more than 90 per cent of tree fruits in the valley, wiping out acres of apples, peaches, pears, nectarines, cherries and wine grapes. It followed a similarly destructive cold event the previous winter.

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In the summer of 2021, the heat dome that hit B.C. cooked fruit on trees and berries on bushes. It was followed only a few months later by an atmospheric river that flooded the Fraser Valley, killing more than 600,000 livestock, affecting more than 1,100 farms and 37,000 acres of land and costing farmers and government millions. In a warming world, where our weather seems increasingly unpredictable, growing food off the land is a bigger gamble than it’s ever been.

And for a domestic industry competing with an influx of cheap produce from other countries, including the U.S., while grappling with increased production costs and low returns, the cards were stacked even before the threat of U.S. tariffs.

B.C. is dependent on international food imports as the U.S.-Canada trade war deepens 

B.C. consumes only one-third of the food it produces. The rest is exported to international markets, including to the U.S. Nearly 40 per cent of the province’s food supply comes from other countries. While B.C. is self-sufficient in supply-managed commodities like dairy, poultry and eggs — which means the milk in your coffee this morning likely came from a local producer — the province relies heavily on international imports of most fresh produce (roughly $2-billion worth in 2021).

According to research from the University of British Columbia, in 2022, B.C. sourced more than 80 per cent of its lettuce and spinach from California and Arizona. The province imported more than a quarter of its tomatoes from California and nearly 60 per cent of its onions from Washington state.

Despite abundant orchards in the Okanagan Valley, most of the apples consumed in B.C. are imported from Washington state, where large-scale operations are more common. Photos: Aaron Hemens / The Narwhal

B.C. also depends heavily on fruit imports from the U.S., even though it produces many of the same things. In 2022, the province imported 75 per cent of its strawberry supply from California. Though B.C. farmers like Sardinha grow some of the most beautiful heritage apple varieties in North America, the province sourced nearly 60 per cent of its apples from Washington state — where producers benefit from larger-scale operations, more government support and cheaper land — and 17 per cent from China.

“Ultimately, we’ve got a food system that is designed for and responding to consumer preferences,” Tyler McCann, managing director of the Canadian AgriFood Policy Institute, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, tells The Narwhal. “Increasingly, consumer preferences relate to being able to go to one place to buy products, to be able to buy the most affordable products possible. And that was true before we saw significant food inflation. In my mind, that’s often the starting point for understanding what’s happening all along the food system.”

McCann says this has encouraged the proliferation of big box stores, where people do all their grocery shopping at once and buy in bulk (think Costco, Walmart and Loblaws). It’s known as retail consolidation. The impacts have trickle-down effects on the rest of the food system, making it hard for smaller farms and operations to get their products onto grocery shelves at a fair price.

This has also played a role in B.C.’s dependence on international imports, which offer consumers choice, availability and affordability. “Canadian consumers and Canadian agriculture have both benefited from predictable and reliable trade and market access,” McCann says. “We do export a lot of things, like canola, but we also import a lot of fruit and vegetables that we can’t produce here and can’t produce year-round.”

In addition to exporting high-value commodities like Okanagan cherries to markets in Asia, or Fraser Valley blueberries and mushrooms to the U.S., B.C. farmers also send their raw products to the U.S. to be sorted, stored and processed into other food items like baked goods, cereals, freeze-dried items, nutritional bars and meat products, which are then sold back to Canadian consumers.

Goods included in the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement weren’t part of the latest round of U.S. tariffs, announced in early April, but agricultural products could eventually fall under this category. If they do, Canada could respond through retaliatory tariffs.

McCann says the impacts would be felt on multiple fronts. “It’s important to think about it in the two ways that those flows happen,” he says. “It’s the American tariffs that will hurt Canadian farmers and food producers, and Canada’s retaliatory tariffs that are likely to impact Canadian consumers. The impacts could be quite significant.”

High-tech indoor farms can produce more food on less land than conventional agriculture, while using 90 per cent less water. Photo: Supplied by Avery Farms

For many in the food industry, the threat is also an opportunity for innovation and investment. For McCann, the stakes could not be clearer: “The question is really, ‘How do we produce affordable, accessible food in a way that is environmentally, economically and socially sustainable?’ And do that at a time when the risks that people in the food production system are facing are increasing in ways we would not have thought possible a few short years ago.”  

Agritech could help scale up B.C.’s food production

Vertical farms like Avery Farms are only one example of the indoor, controlled-atmosphere growing already found in B.C.’s greenhouses, which produce everything from blueberries and strawberries to cucumbers and peppers. They are also part of a burgeoning global industry referred to as agricultural technology or “agritech,” which uses technological innovations to enhance and streamline agricultural production. According to many industry experts and a food-security task force initiated by the B.C. government that produced a 2020 report called “The Future of Food,” it’s part of what’s needed to strengthen the province’s food system.

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“There’s so much potential,” Newman, the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, says. “Canada could really be an agricultural technology superpower.” 

Newman, who participated in the task force, believes B.C. and Canada will need to rely on agritech over the next decades to feed a larger, more urban population and to weather the impacts of a changing climate. 

By 2050, the United Nations predicts global agricultural yields will have decreased by as much as 25 per cent due to climate change. While Canada faces its own challenges, the countries from which it sources the bulk of its produce — the U.S. and Mexico — are at particular risk. Growing food indoors on vertical farms, incorporating Artificial Intelligence or computer-assisted technology like robotic machinery, sensor monitoring and drones and investing in seed genomics — selecting certain genes to improve plant hardiness — may help reduce those impacts.

An extreme cold snap in January 2024 — one of several recent extreme weather events that hit farms hard — severely damaged grape vines in the Okanagan Valley. Photo: Aaron Hemens / The Narwhal

Newman says agritech is one of two major focus areas needed to expand B.C.’s food production and make it more resilient in the long-term. “We really need to pull out all the stops and do these two things: radically increase our year-round production … because we have the technology, and if we don’t, we can develop it. And number two, radically grow our processing capacity,” she says. The latter won’t come without a fight, because of what it will require. “[We do this] by putting processing back on the Agricultural Land Reserve, where it was supposed to be in the first place.”

Changes to B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve would boost food processing  

B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve was established in the early 1970s to protect valuable farmland in the province. The first legislation of its kind in Canada, it has kept some of B.C.’s most fertile agricultural areas out of the hands of private developers. But its powers are limited, and over the years the land reserve has been eroded. “When I look at the Agricultural Land Reserve — and I map it — what we’re seeing is every year, despite the need, more and more acres are falling out of farming,” Newman says. In Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, she says, only 50 per cent of the Agricultural Land Reserve is currently used for farming. 

This is not only due to general under-use, but family farms being sold off by aging farmers whose children don’t want to continue farming, leaving the land to potentially be bought up for private residences. Because the land is zoned as agricultural, new owners can benefit from the tax exemptions that come with this designation even if they’re not farming. In recent decades, mega-mansions have appeared on agricultural reserve land in Richmond and Delta, pushing farmers out of the area and driving up farmland prices.

Newman helped alter the policy in 2017 to limit the size of residential developments, but she says it’s still a problem. “[The land] is being purchased by people who want a nice residential place to live. And it’s a great deal. If you sell a house in Vancouver for a few million dollars, you can go buy five acres. You can have a nice big green lawn and you get a tax break.” 

In Richmond, B.C., which has prime agricultural land, the demand for new housing threatens the availability of land for growing food. Photo: Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press

Speculative investment is also an issue. In recent years, corporate developers have purchased portions of agricultural reserve land; many believe they are waiting to have it rezoned if a future B.C. government changes land reserve regulations. When it comes to B.C.’s food security, much hinges on the future of this hotly contested farmland.

Expanding both agritech and processing — making food into refined and value-added products — will require large, affordable swaths of land. Newman and others are advocating for B.C. to change the rules and allow food processing on agricultural reserve land.

“Originally, when the Agricultural Land Reserve was launched, it included a food processing zone,” Newman points out. “Dave Barrett (B.C.’s first NDP premier, whose government established the land reserve) famously said, ‘Why grow strawberries if you can’t make strawberry jam?’ ” In the early 2000s, the former B.C. Liberal Party government removed processing from land reserve regulations. Since then, B.C. has lost most of its processing industry.

Processing facilities can currently be built on agricultural reserve land only if at least 50 per cent of the processed product comes from the land the facility is on. “They made it so it was nearly impossible to build processing on the Agricultural Land Reserve … so we lost our green bean industry, we lost our green pea industry, we lost our strawberry industry,” Newman says. “Our potato industry is down about 70 per cent, because processors are moving elsewhere.”

Those who oppose building out large-scale processing and welcoming the Saputos and McCains of the world onto the Agricultural Land Reserve say they should instead build on industrial land. But, Newman says, it’s not so simple. 

“I’ve worked with municipalities to try and site food processors on industrial land and the parcels just don’t exist because we didn’t protect our industrial land. Ironically, we were supposed to have an industrial land reserve that was supposed to come in the same legislation that created the Agricultural Land Reserve, but it never happened.” As a result, she says, Metro Vancouver has about a third to one-half the industrial land of equivalent-sized regions.

Welcoming industrial processing on the agricultural reserve could damage valuable topsoil and further displace B.C. farmers, opponents believe. But Newman says reserve regulations could be altered to include soil class, outlining which areas would be dedicated to field farming and not available to processors.

Nipissing First Nation greenhouse provides year-round fresh food in northern Ontario

If food processors — even small or medium-sized operations — were to get the green light to build on the land reserve, it still raises questions around whether farmland should be used for growing food outdoors or making industrial-scale food products indoors. But Newman says it shouldn’t be an either-or issue, especially with a trade war underway. “This is a giant problem and it’s easy to fix. We drive blueberry south, we drive cranberry south, we drive beef south. What do we do with the blueberry harvest this year if there’s a tariff? We should immediately be building processing in those industries.”

Newman thinks the time for stalling on the issue has long passed. “It’s frustrating,” she says. “It’s a political issue, definitely, and it’s one that’s felt in the heart. This [is a] philosophical fight over whether the Agricultural Land Reserve is an industrial food production zone or a greenbelt. And if it’s a greenbelt, just decide that, and I’ll move somewhere else and do my work.”  

Will B.C.’s family farms be left behind as the food industry scales up?

Questions surrounding use of the land reserve get at the heart of larger existential issues facing B.C.’s food system. It’s personal for many, including for Sardinha. Like many young people in the industry in B.C., she comes from multiple generations of farmers. Her grandparents worked the apple orchards before her parents did. Her farm, Kaleidoscope Fruit Ranch, produces four varieties of apples for the commercial market, and she and her husband perform almost all the farm labour and upkeep by hand.

While Sardinha supports expanding the province’s processing capacity, she isn’t sure agritech developments will prioritize her needs. “There’s certain things like drone technology that I could see working on my farm. [But] a lot of it is very capital intensive, so I’m never going to be able to afford it,” she says. “I worry that it presupposes a future where we don’t have farmer-operators like me on farms anymore; we have hedge fund owners from Washington state. It can be really great, but it needs to be done in a way that allows access for people like me. We’re happy to adopt technology if it’s friendly in that way.”

Like many others in the industry, Sardinha and her husband have taken off-farm jobs to make ends meet. If they were both working full time at minimum wage, she says they would be making more money than they are from farming. The only reason they’ve managed is because they own their land and house and produce most of their own food. At the end of the day, they don’t want to give up farming.

Katie Sardinha faces economic pressures and challenges related to climate change on her Kaleidoscope Fruit Ranch in Summerland, B.C. — well beyond what her parents dealt with when they farmed. Photo: Aaron Hemens / The Narwhal

Sardinha and many others believe the most fundamental issue is that B.C. has lacked a vision for its agriculture industry for too long.

“Farmers end up needing to ask the government for money and then taxpayers are paying for it too. In a profound sense, we don’t really have agricultural policy here. We have sort of this background belief that the market will decide, and we’ll evolve a system that will work within the market. Making food a priority would change things.”

In February, the provincial government announced the creation of a new task force that will focus on food security and sector growth, uniting producers, retailers, advocacy groups and experts, who will weigh in on the industry’s future amid trade war threats. The group will meet quarterly over the next 12 to 18 months.

In the meantime, Sardinha and other farmers aren’t holding out hope for top-down solutions. They believe immediate action needs to be taken from the ground up to strengthen the province’s food system. “I imagine the best thing would be a connected system of non-profit, cooperative distributor-retailers that are basically working to make sure everybody gets paid and we still keep consumer prices down,” Sardinha says. “And I do think that’s possible.”

Crunch time: co-op closure adds to B.C. apple industry’s many worries

Grower-owned co-operatives have flourished in Quebec and other places in Canada. In countries like Italy, the entire agricultural system is built around co-ops, which produce both raw products and processed foods. Newman and other researchers at the University of the Fraser Valley support the co-op model as a way for small growers to stay in the business and to maintain a place for local, handcrafted foods and food products in the food system. Land reserve regulations also support the presence of co-ops as a way to build out processing capacity (the processing clause stipulates that 50 per cent of the processed food must come from the property or from a co-op the farm is part of), but experts say it’s a vastly underused tool.

Ultimately, Newman says, we need to find a middle way to resolve the tension between expanding the scale of our food system and maintaining local industries like B.C.’s tree fruit sector. An important component will be getting more young people involved in farming. “I think what I would see as success is more pathways for people to enter the industry if they weren’t born into it. If you don’t inherit a farm in B.C., it’s really hard to start farming. And I don’t know what we do about that.”

Sardinha believes the problems are solvable, and she thinks the trade war offers a good opportunity to begin — with consumer choices. “Consumers will understand what is happening. We are outsourcing our food production. We send all our best stuff abroad and our leftovers are for our market here.”

Her parents showed her that farming was a valuable pursuit. The money wasn’t always great, but they had time to pursue hobbies, volunteer and build a meaningful life. After converting her orchards to organic a few years ago, Sardinha was reminded of why she chose to follow in their steps, despite the hurdles she’s faced. “I saw and continue to see this huge increase in biodiversity. I love the insects. I love just seeing life everywhere. It’s fundamentally a beautiful thing. I like farmers and I like our culture. There’s a struggle to keep that culture,” she says. “But it’s worth fighting for.”

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The crops have been harvested, the soil tilled. The fields are blanketed in snow. Normally, this is a farmer’s quiet season. But this year, on either side of the Canada-U.S. border, there’s a chill of unpredictability hanging in the winter air.

“My stomach starts to turn just a little bit,” Minnesota farmer Harmon Wilts said in a late January interview. “As a farmer, we can control the things we can control … but when it comes to something like tariffs — that is totally out of our control and very frustrating.”

Since November, President Donald Trump has threatened to impose broad 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods. He’s repeatedly claimed the country has no need for Canada’s exports — cars, lumber, oil and food products in particular — because America makes “the same products on the other side of the border.”

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Canadian leaders have promised retaliatory measures ranging from export taxes on major commodities like energy to dollar-for-dollar tariffs meant to squeeze vulnerable sectors of the American economy. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau maintains “nothing is off the table.”

Experts predict the ripple effects of a trade war could be crushing for both economies. Canadian and American farmers, who have long relied on a steady exchange of crops, equipment, fertilizer and other agricultural goods, are bracing for impact.

Agricultural trade between Canada and the U.S. reached more than US$73 billion in 2023. That doesn’t include other commodities farmers buy from across the border, like fertilizer, fuel and equipment. Photo: Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press

Wilts, his wife Gina and their three daughters tend almost 650 hectares of corn, soybeans, sugar beets and alfalfa on the family farm near Kerkhoven, about two hours west of Minneapolis. Canada is an important trading partner, both as a customer and as a supplier of crucial inputs like potassium fertilizer.

In the short window before any tariff decisions are formally announced, Wilts is negotiating with suppliers and strategizing with lobby groups to build some resilience for his farm in the tumultuous years ahead.

“Canada is really important for us and I think we’re important for them on several things too,” Wilts says.

It’s a similar story in Elm Creek, Man., some six hours north, where Colin Penner and his brother grow a mix of canola, wheat, soybeans and oats on their family’s 1,450-hectare farm.

“It does feel more chaotic and uncertain than most years, but it takes a bit of nerve sometimes to be a farmer,” Penner says.

“Right now what we’re trying to do is … have a plan. What can we lock in? What can we do to make sure that we’re safe? And where can we gamble a little bit and hope for the best?”

Farmers on front lines of Canada-U.S. trade conflict

While the impacts of a Canada-U.S. trade war are likely to hit all economic sectors, Wilts believes farmers are on the front lines.

“Business owners, farmers and folks like that are right in it right now — and have been — because it totally directly affects them,” Wilts says.

Margins have been tight in farming for many years. Family farms like the Wilts’ and Penner’s are slowly losing ground to larger corporate operations. Unpredictable costs and commodity prices continue to make farming difficult, and younger generations have been reluctant to stay on the farm.

“On the farm business side of things, this is some of the tightest budgeting I’ve ever seen,” 39-year-old Penner, who is in the process of taking over the family farm from his parents, says.

“We’ve seen tremendous years where farmers are making hundreds of dollars an acre, and this year it’s looking like we might be losing $10 to $20 an acre. It does make it a little more complicated to farm.”

Manitoba farmer Colin Penner says the coming year will bring “a lot of uncertainty” as tariff threats loom over Canada’s agriculture industry. Photo: Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press

Tariffs would add another layer of complexity given Canada and the United States are among each other’s largest agricultural trade partners.

More than US$70 billion worth of agricultural goods crossed the border in 2023, with the U.S. buying more than half of Canada’s exports and supplying more than half its imports.

Manitoba’s agricultural industry, one of the province’s most important sectors, sent more than $4.5 billion in agriculture and food exports stateside in 2023 — almost half of all its agri-food exports. In recent years, agricultural sales to the United States have grown faster than other export sectors.

“Canada-U.S. relations on any farm is huge,” Penner says.

His farm sells oats and soybeans to brokers who then sell to U.S. customers. In recent months, he’s checked in more than once to make sure they can honour their contracts, asking: “Can you still find a home for some of these grains?”

Soybeans (right) — a crop both Wilts and Penner grow on their farms — suffered heavy losses during trade conflicts in 2018. The U.S. government eventually provided nearly US$30 billion in subsidies to farmers who were impacted by a wide slate of tariffs that year. Photos: Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press

Canola is even more uncertain. Penner sells grain to a local crusher, which in turn exports to the United States. Canola products are Manitoba’s largest American export, and experts predict it will bear the brunt of tariffs. Penner says the commodity is also vulnerable to political instabilities at home — a federal election is looming and a new government could indirectly impact how much canola is produced and used in Canada — and canola producers have been left to watch and wait before the impacts are fully understood.

“That’s why we grow a quarter of the farm to wheat, canola, oats and soybeans, to manage that risk,” Penner says. “[We’re] not throwing all our eggs in one basket.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., it’s precisely the crops Wilts grows — corn and soybeans — that stand to be most affected by a trade war. They’re the country’s biggest farm export, together accounting for a quarter of all agricultural exports. For more than two dozen states, including Minnesota, Canada is a farmer’s largest market.

“I want to have our best trading partners to the north have a good relationship and it’s hard to do that when you have tariffs,” Wilts says.

Manitoba farmers worry canola prices will suffer if tariffs are put in place. Some cross-border canola trade agreements have already been put on pause as buyers wait for clarity on tariffs. Photo: Tim Smith / The Narwhal

For corn and soybean farmers, talk of tariffs is a sour dose of déjà vu. Midway through his first term, Trump imposed tariffs on a raft of goods from China, Canada, Mexico and other nations. The retaliation — particularly from China, which imposed its own 25 per cent tariff on American soybeans — cost farmers billions.

“Our soybeans went from about $10 a bushel to about $7 a bushel — and that does not work in this economy,” Wilts says. “That will put a lot of farmers out of business within a year or two.”

Minnesota farmer Harmon Wilts works with political advocacy groups — as well as his suppliers in Canada and the U.S. — to encourage policies and practices that strengthen relationships between farmers either side of the border. Photo: Supplied by Climate FieldView

Wilts is involved in the political side of farming — part of advocacy groups like the Minnesota Farmers Union, the National Farm Bureau and the National Corn Growers association — and supports lobbying efforts to convince American lawmakers that tariffs aren’t good for agricultural business. He’s planning a trip to Washington, D.C., in the spring with the American Coalition for Ethanol, where he serves as a board member, to advocate for measures that keep farms profitable.

“We’re about at a break even right now with prices — at best,” Wilts says. “I think the biggest thing has been to show legislators exactly what will happen if this happens. We can’t afford to lose any more farmers than we are now. We need to find a way to bring the next generation in.”

American farmers depend on Canadian potash — tariffs could hike costs

It’s not just the exchange of food that American farmers are worried about. As threats of a cross-border trade war gain traction, Canadian politicians have publicly mulled the possibility of an export tax on commodities Americans may struggle to find elsewhere. Energy products and critical minerals like uranium and potash top those lists.

Potash, in particular, is among Canada’s most significant exports.

A catch-all term for minerals rich in potassium, potash is one of three key ingredients in fertilizer, making it vital to food production. Canada lists potash as a critical mineral; American lawmakers have lobbied to see it designated in the States, too.

About a third of the global potash supply comes from 11 mines in southern Saskatchewan, where the remnants of an ancient inland ocean form the largest potassium deposit in the world. Canada exports about 20 million tonnes of the rose-coloured rock each year, mostly to American farmers.

“Potash is very important to our operation,” Wilts says. “A very good chunk of it does come from our trading partners in Canada.”

Canada produces more than 22 million tonnes of potash — a fertilizer ingredient — every year, compared to just 430,000 tonnes produced in the U.S. Photo: Elena Bionysheva-Abramova / iStock

Fertilizer is already in the ground for the 2025 growing season, but the next year and beyond are full of unknowns. If tariffs or export taxes drive up the cost of fertilizer, Wilts will either need to cut back on potassium inputs, which could be bad for yield, or strike a deal with suppliers to lock in a price before tariffs are announced. In the last weeks of January, he says, those conversations are already underway.

“I’ve got about 25 different people that help me with things: my seed supplier, my fertilizer supplier. I want to have a good relationship with them,” he says.

Manitoba’s lone potash producer shares the sentiment.

The Prairie Evaporite Formation — that ancient, potassium-rich ocean bed — stretches about 25 kilometres into western Manitoba, where Daymon Guillas has spent the better part of two decades trying to get his home province into the potash game.

As of 2023, the Potash and Agri Development Corporation of Manitoba successfully made its way onto the market. It expects to extract a modest 250,000 tonnes annually once it scales up its Harrowby-area mine, just west of Russell near the Saskatchewan border.

Daymon Guillas, president of Manitoba’s only active potash mine, says potash is critical to food security. Potassium from his company’s mine is sold to customers across North America, but he is not worried about the potential impact of tariffs. Photo: Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press

Though the mine is still in its infancy, Guillas says he isn’t worried about the impact of tariffs on business. The company has secured customers across North America, including many in the United States. Because potash is critical to America’s food security, relationships between Canadian miners and American farmers will outlast any political administration, Guillas says, and he’s not interested in jeopardizing those ties. The company is prepared to take an economic hit if needed to keep supplying its U.S. customers.

“Our business model is always long term, sustainable relationships: you share the pain in bad times and you share the gains in good times,” he says. “We’re going to protect our long term relationships with our U.S. neighbours forever.”

Despite uncertainties, farmers are optimistic about cross-border relationships

In Manitoba, the price of key imports like fuel, farm equipment and phosphate — another fertilizer ingredient — could be impacted by tariffs too. Penner secured a long-term supply of fertilizer and fuel while there was still “certainty in the market.”

It’s part of his efforts to future-proof the farm, though he acknowledges there’s only so much he can prepare for in advance.

“It’s kind of like playing cards. You should never hope you’re going to get the next card, you should look at the cards you’ve got and say: ‘This is what I’ve got now, I’ve got to make the best decision with what I know right now’,” Penner says.

Despite the coming uncertainty, Penner and his University of Manitoba students are trying to stay optimistic. Photo: Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press

In the winter, Penner teaches a farm management class at the University of Manitoba, where he recently dedicated a week to discussing current geopolitical issues like tariffs and the upcoming federal election.

“Your head can spin around trying to navigate these things,” he says. But his students are optimistic — a trait he believes helps farmers keep their heads above water.

“There’s times when it absolutely is dark out there,” Penner says. “If we can look at things positively then hopefully we can grow into that and have positive things happen to us.”

Wilts is optimistic, too. Strong cross-border relationships, he believes, can help not only in the present moment, but in the long-term future of both countries’ agricultural sectors.

“I think the ideal outcome is a better relationship than we even have now with our very important trading partners in Canada,” he says.

“A win-lose doesn’t work. So the hope would be that we could come together and find a way to have a win-win situation going forward.”

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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.

Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.

“Our spinach is really big spinach, sometimes the leaves are bigger than my head,” Makenzie Jones said of the greenhouse he manages in Nipissing First Nation. “The arugula as well, sometimes they’re as big as my forearm. It’s really not typical stuff you can get in a grocery store.”

Jones works at Mnogin Greenhouse, which supplies his northeastern Ontario community with reasonably priced local greens year-round. Like other northern, rural and remote communities in Canada, Nipissing First Nation experiences high rates of diet-related diseases like type 2 diabetes, largely because of the limited access to nutritious, fresh food. To help reduce those ailments, and provide better food security in a changing climate, the nation opened the greenhouse in 2023.   

The name Mnogin means “grow well” in Anishinaabemowin, and was chosen from community members’ suggestions.

“It was the perfect name because it meant not only growing food, but growing the nation, growing the economy in a healthy way,” Nipissing First Nation Chief Cathy Stevens said.

Stevens was sworn into office in August, but also sat on the nation’s council back in 2016, when the idea of a greenhouse first arose. The inspiration was the success of similar projects in places with “really dry climates or very cold climates where they had very little sunshine and you could do growing around the clock, around the calendar year,” Stevens said. “So we said, ‘We have to get in on this. Let’s give it a try.’ ”

Just over a year old, Mnogin Greenhouse has three full-time employees harvesting between 45 and 70 kilograms of greens and herbs per week. Photo: Mnogin Greenhouse

Hydroponics present potential and pitfalls in northern communities

Fast forward nearly seven years, past a feasibility study and a push to secure funding from the federal government and others. Mnogin now harvests between 45 and 70 kilograms of greens and herbs per week, all of which sells out. It earns money selling produce directly to consumers, as well as supplying a handful of local businesses, while also contributing produce to community programs including the monthly food box the nation’s health centre sends to expectant and new parents, Elders’ club lunches and the Nipissing First Nation Food Bank.

“We’re in a situation now where we’re able to take that control back and create our own sources of food, and get back on track with our own food security,” Stevens said. 

Hydroponics allow plants to grow without soil. It’s a technique being used to overcome limitations of traditional agriculture like inadequate water, poor soils, short growing seasons, excessive cold and limited sunlight. Hydroponic produce can be grown any time of year at any latitude, regardless of the weather.

“With the way we’re growing, we truly get 52 weeks,” Jones told The Narwhal of the growing season. Something edible is constantly in some stage of cultivation in the farm operation’s three sea-cans and one packing trailer. 

Just over a year in, the project now has three full-time employees growing crops you can’t find in local grocery stores. 

On Mnogin’s menu are several kinds of nutrient-dense lettuces such as Monte Carlo romaine, Toscano kale and five star, alongside at least three kinds of choi including rosie, win win, and mei qing choi. They also grow watercress, which Jones called “a superfood among leafy greens” that “actually only grows in a spring-fed ravine-type thing, so it works perfectly in our hydroponic system.”

Mnogin’s website says its hydroponic plants can grow 40 to 50 per cent faster and 30 per cent larger than similar crops when conventionally farmed, with reduced exposure to disease and no need for pesticides. As well, the team says, the greenhouse uses 90 per cent less water and 95 per cent less land than traditional agricultural practices for the same crops, which they consider especially critical for resilience in times of increasingly frequent and extreme weather events like growing rainfall intensity and drought.

“Especially with climate change … this is strengthening our food channels,” Jones said. “It’s not going to replace traditional agriculture, but rather it’s going to complement it, so that it’s making it stronger, so that we can supply for ourselves.”

With food security an omnipresent issue in the north, Mnogin Greenhouse is not the only project looking into this solution. 

Nearby, Canadore College in North Bay, Ont., is also working on a hydroponic pod solution, this one focused on off-grid pods. And from Alberta to Nunavut to the Yukon, researchers and Indigenous communities are hoping hydroponics can help northerners get better access to fresh ingredients, especially given the cold climate and long transport routes for expensive, poorly preserved imported produce. 

Jones said he regularly fields calls from other growers asking for advice and education on hydroponic vegetable growing because they see Mnogin’s success.

“We encourage other communities, other First Nations that have food security issues especially in the northern communities … to come in and see how our operation is going, so that they, too, can have the same opportunity,” Stevens said. 

But others in Ontario caution against viewing hydroponics and greenhouses as a one-size fits all solution to solve food security issues.

Mnogin Greenhouse uses 90 per cent less water and 95 per cent less land than traditional agricultural practices for the same crops, helping to create resiliency against increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Photos: Mnogin Greenhouse

Deyowidron’t Teri Morrow from the Haudenosaunee Cayuga Nation has worked as a registered dietitian in her home community of Six Nations of the Grand River since 2013. She provides frontline clinical nutritional support for patients dealing with chronic disease and obesity.  

Morrow said she looked into the same technology as Nipissing First Nation, created by Growcer, to implement in her community in order to grow ceremonial medicinal plants year-round. She found it simply was not feasible, due to insurmountable costs and an inability to grow many of the traditional foods and medicines she was hoping to provide.

“It’s a little bit cart-before-horse to throw those things down in communities,” Morrow said. “It’s a great initiative if it’s communicated and collaborated and supported well.” That wasn’t her experience attempting to grow traditional foods such as lamb’s quarters, stinging nettle and yarrow — Morrow found it extremely difficult to get funding for crops that are harder to sell to local restaurants, but important to returning Indigenous nations to cultural and physical health.

Others question how many calories a greenhouse can really provide hungry communities. “Salad is not the answer to food insecurity,” Andrew Spring, the Canada Research Chair in northern sustainable food systems, told The Canadian Press last year.

The Mnogin Greenhouse business development team has already secured a new plot of land nearby, hoping to double production capacity in the future and add new crops, such as fruits. Photo: Mnogin Greenhouse

Bringing in the greens: the economic benefits of growing fresh food

Mnogin’s first year has gone well and there are ambitious expansion plans. The business development team has already secured a new plot of land nearby, hoping to double production capacity in the future. Research and development is being done into the possibility of growing strawberries and other fruits and vegetables. 

Currently, they supply greens to nearby restaurants, a market in Sudbury and a small gourmet grocer in North Bay, The Culture Club. There, owner and baker Leslie Morrison said the greens are an important staple in her fridge through the winter months. “It is great to have an option for greens all year round when the outdoor growing season wanes, to be able to have fresh produce to offer people is really nice. People appreciate it.”

Morrison said the freshness is noticeable compared to what you can get in the area’s grocery stores, too.

“People often tell us how much they enjoy the flavor of Mnogin greens, and then also just how well it keeps for them at home,” Morrison said. “[The] product’s great. It comes in very, very fresh and as a result has a significant shelf life because it hasn’t been picked weeks ago and then travelled cross-country to get to us.”

Updated on Dec. 3, 2024 at 6:44 am: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Chief Cathy Stevens’ name and to remove a statement suggesting that Makenzie Jones is a member of Nipissing First Nation.

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Jacob Beaton’s name has become closely tied to food sovereignty and food security in British Columbia. His successful training program at Tea Creek Farm in Kitwanga, B.C., — a 1,200-kilometres drive north of Vancouver — has equipped hundreds of First Nations trainees in trades, food production and project management since it launched in 2021. 

In 2023, 140 trainees graduated from the program. More than 60 First Nations across Canada have reached out wanting to partner with Tea Creek and learn from its holistic model, which aims to provide the tools graduates will need to pursue food sovereignty projects in their own communities — from growing seeds to carpentry to bookkeeping — all while maintaining a culturally safe space. 

Beaton says the demand is so strong the program can hardly keep up. In addition to trainees, the farm hosted more than 1,000 visitors last year.

Food security is top of mind for First Nations. Tea Creek has quickly become a leader in the food security world, but despite the energy and excitement — graduates have found the program empowering — Beaton says it’s still “fragile,” like a seed that’s just taken root. The program has largely been relying on private donations.

In the documentary Tea Creek, released this month as an episode of CBC’s Absolutely Canadian, Beaton highlights how Indigenous people are showing passionate interest in the program, but it still faces difficulty scaling up.

He says the root of First Nations food insecurity is the systematic dismantling of Indigenous food systems by the Crown. The Indian Act restricted Indigenous people from hunting, fishing, farming and selling goods. They were restricted from buying land and equipment and paid less for work than settlers. As Indigenous people were pushed into poverty, keystone species — animals especially crucial to the survival of an ecosystem, like caribou and salmon — began to decline drastically. The ongoing impacts of these policies continue and Canada has done little to assist in the repair of generations of damage, Beaton says.

“I do see it as an issue of justice. Wrong was done — very clearly — and so there needs to be repair done,” he explains.

Beaton, who is Tsimshian and carries the name Dzap’l Gye’a̱win Skiik, emphasized Tea Creek isn’t looking for piecemeal grants. 

“We’re just looking for fair contracts to deliver services,” he says. “Holistic services that work.”

In the documentary, Jacob Beaton pointed out over half of produce in Canada is imported. He wants to bring food-growing power back to First Nations. Photo: Ryan Dickie

Tea Creek’s main training contract is with SkillsTrade BC, a Crown corporation, through which it provides training and services for unemployed and underemployed Indigenous people.

He says 2024 is the first year the organization has a small federal contract, and it received a two-year grant from the B.C. Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation in 2023 that is ending. While they did receive a grant through New Relationship Trust this year, Beaton and his team have been unable to secure any new or additional contracts or funding directly from the provincial government in the past two years.

“Not a single penny provincially this year, and not for lack of trying,” he says.

Tea Creek seeks core funding to sustain mental health services, free meals and more

Beaton says one of the most misleading and persistent tropes about First Nations is that they were solely hunter-gatherers. In reality, he emphasizes, First Nations in what is now called B.C. have cultivated many foods at large scales for generations. They managed individual species, like clams and camas, and entire ecosystems through practices like controlled burns and selective logging. 

The true history of farming on the Prairies

While B.C. and Canada interfered with First Nations accessing traditional food sources, First Nations were also excluded from the new system, Beaton says. They often got taxed, fined or just simply pushed out of opportunities to prosper in the new economy, all while being confined to reserves.

When Beaton first bought 140 acres of land to start his farm off-reserve, he “didn’t realize it was an act of resistance” in the shadow of all that history, he says. Three and a half acres are actively farmed, and 50 acres are covered by a Gitxsan food forest.

Today, food insecurity is exacerbated by climate change and biodiversity loss. It’s daunting to take on an issue as mammoth as food insecurity, and it’s hard for local projects to scale up. On top of that, Beaton’s priorities include having the initiative be Indigenous led, culturally safe and inclusive. He says Tea Creek needs core or multi-year funding to support its services. The program also addresses issues that continue to impact many of their trainees’ communities: food insecurity, addiction and higher rates of suicide, all of which are linked to discrimination. Tea Creek provides access to counsellors and therapists for trainees, and served more than 11,000 free meals in 2023. Indigenous families can also receive free seeds for their home gardens.

Eighty six per cent of trainees reported an improvement to their mental health after participating in Tea Creek’s food sovereignty program. Photos: Ryan Dickie

“We’re not just a farm,” he says. “We’re a restaurant that serves free meals. We’re a taxi service that picks people up. We’re a university that provides post-secondary education. We’re a healing centre.” 

At the end of day, the program’s goals come down to the personal level, helping each person who comes to the farm to bring back skills to their community. 

“It’s too overwhelming for us to go, ‘Yeah, let’s go and solve even just this region’s food problems,’ ” he says. “But what we can do is we can take you [on as a trainee]. … And you’re going to be able to build a team in your nation and you’re going to be able to get going on Indigenous food sovereignty.”

Practices to exclude First Nations from economy remain ‘embedded in institutions’

Tea Creek has other funding partners including the Real Estate Foundation of BC, United Way, the Vancouver Foundation and MakeWay. In March, the BC Assembly of First Nations passed an unanimous resolution calling on the province to provide Tea Creek with additional support. Tea Creek also received accreditation from SkillsTradeBC as a horticulture training centre in 2023, making it the first designated Indigenous provider in the province.

But Beaton is still waiting to see sustained support from the provincial and federal governments. 

“There’s no hand reaching out from the government side to say, ‘We want to partner, we want to be a part of this reconciliation,’ ” he says.

“My main complaint is that reconciliation is all talk, no action.”

Director Ryan Dickie films the abundance produce at Tea Creek. In the documentary, Jacob Beaton pointed out over half of produce in Canada is imported. He wants to bring food-growing power back to First Nations. Photo: Andrew Stewart

First Nations still face barriers participating in farming and food production across the country, he says. According to Statistics Canada, there are 4,830 First Nations farmers nationwide, and 16,705 Indigenous farmers total. Beaton is willing to bet that most are “micro-scale.”

In the Tea Creek 2023 impact report, the top issues reported by visiting First Nations were “access to land, money and training.”

In a hotter world, Indigenous food sovereignty is key to resilient farms, gardens and communities

Beaton points out banks don’t like to loan on reserve since they can’t seize collateral, and says First Nations people can still face issues getting loans to buy land off-reserve.

“Often, policies that are embedded within institutions are a result of the old Indian Act and the old colonial policy and practice of disenfranchising First Nations people and keeping us out of the economy,” he says.

“We are not looking for any special treatment. We just want fair access to all that money that’s already there,” he says.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada told The Narwhal in a statement it is “working to improve access to funding and resources for Indigenous individuals and organizations” through initiatives like the Local Food Infrastructure Fund and the AgriDiversity program (which has supported Tea Creek) and through implementing the federal United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.

“While we acknowledge there is still work to be done, [Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada] remains committed to ensuring that Indigenous communities have improved access to the tools and funding necessary to thrive in the agriculture sector.”

Becoming community leaders and ‘working on your voice’

Justice Moore, a Gitxsan and Tsimshian horticulture apprentice at Tea Creek, began as a trainee. He’s from Gitwangak Village, just a few minutes up the road. Learning to care for a seed and watch it grow “helped me take care of myself,” Moore says in the documentary as he digs his hands in the soil.

“Everything up here I’m trying to bring down to the village. I want to make people down there feel the way I feel up here — comfortable, safe, secure. Up here is a constant. You’re always appreciated, you’re always valued, you’re always respected,” he said.

“We don’t have a constant in most villages. Everyone’s dealing with their own past traumas … part of that is colonialism. A lot of that is losing our Elders, because residential school taught them to keep to themselves. Their knowledge didn’t get passed down as much as it should have been, and it impacted us a lot.”

Justice Moore spoke with pride about Indigenous Peoples’ ability to cultivate foods over thousands of years, like the pumpkin, squash and corn. Photo: Ryan Dickie

“I go out of my way to try to communicate with everybody now,” he says, smiling. “I found out recently it doesn’t matter how educated you are, where you are from in the world, what minority you are, if you can communicate healthily with everybody, you’ll become a leader because you’re working on your voice.”

In a survey for Tea Creek’s annual impact report, 86 per cent of respondents said they felt an improvement to their mental health after participating. Many First Nations communities are still facing immense struggles due to the ongoing impacts of colonization, including residential schools.

As director Ryan Dickie was working to get the film off the ground in 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced survey findings about unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. It was a raw and emotional moment, and the history of residential schools is closely connected with the work Tea Creek is doing, Dickie said. That year the filmmaker, who is of Dene and Kwakiutl descent and a member of Fort Nelson First Nation, saw many non-Indigenous people were still not aware of the full impacts of these institutions, and the trauma and disruption in cultural knowledge they caused. What reconciliation really means was top of mind when making the documentary.

Ryan Dickie directed the documentary about Tea Creek. Photo: Andrew Stewart

“[Tea Creek] created essentially a healing center and a place where people feel safe, a place where people feel empowered because of the skills that they’re learning. And it really harkens us back to the way things used to be in our communities,” he says.

At community screenings, he says several viewers stood up and spoke about how their people need programs like this one. 

“Our people are dying, they need something to grasp onto, because we need them here. We need them to stay here.”

Dickie says he hopes Indigenous viewers feel a sense of empowerment looking at the history of food production among Indigenous people. He hopes people see the healing in people like Moore and see “what can be done when we’re given an opportunity, and what can be done when we’re given a safe space to really break free of all that trauma.”

Updated on Oct. 24, 2024, at 2:30 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify the size of Tea Creek Farms, which is 140 acres. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated three acres, which refers to the area currently being farmed and not the total property.

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.

Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter.

Spring in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley is usually a time of optimism. In the province’s fertile agricultural hub, April and May mean blossoms on the valley’s fruit trees and bud break in its many vineyards, signs of the growing season ahead. This spring was different.  

“At the end of the day, when it was blossom time, there were no blossoms. That’s when you realize, well, the soft fruit was dead.” 

Pinder Dhaliwal, a third-generation farmer in Oliver, knew his orchards were in peril all year. In January, a cold snap dropped temperatures across the Okanagan down to nearly -30 C degrees from unseasonable highs. The extreme fluctuation damaged grape, peach, nectarine, pear, plum, cherry and apricot plants across the region. In the spring, Dhaliwal realized his 12 acres of orchards had lost all their soft fruits, save for 30 per cent of the farm’s cherries. It was only the first loss of several.  

At the end of July, the BC Tree Fruits Cooperative, an 88-year-old organization that provided packing, storage, marketing and sales services for roughly half of the Okanagan’s 600 tree fruit growers, announced its closure. It was just a week before Dhaliwal was set to harvest his summer apples and the news left him and many other farmers scrambling. 

“It’s kind of a specialty apple,” Dhaliwal says of the sunrise variety that dominates his orchard. The co-op had given him an estimate of how much of his fruit it would take. “The co-op had all its clients and buyers lined up for that apple, so [the closure] made it very difficult for me.” Half of Dhaliwal’s crop was left hanging on the trees. He couldn’t find enough private buyers to take it, nor labourers willing to wait between workdays as he secured clients. 

At the end of July, BC Tree Fruits Cooperative announced its closure. The 88-year-old organization had provided packing, storage, marketing and sales services for roughly half of the Okanagan’s 600 tree fruit growers. Photo: Alyssa Hollis

Dhaliwal’s story is only one among many similar experiences B.C. tree fruit growers have faced in recent years. Apple growers have been especially hard hit. Pummelled by increasingly frequent extreme weather events, rock-bottom prices, a fractured local economy, increased competition with international markets — and minimal government support — the province’s apple farmers have been left to fend for themselves. 

Okanagan tree fruits contributed $162M to B.C.’s economy in 2019

Tree fruits have been a part of the Okanagan since settlers first planted orchards in the area in the late 1890s. Eighty per cent of B.C.’s tree fruits are grown in the North, Central and South Okanagan as well as in the Similkameen and Creston Valleys. The region’s varied climates, warm, hot summers and historically mild winters have allowed orchards to prosper. In 2019, the tree fruit sector’s contribution to the province’s gross domestic product (GDP) was $162 million.

Apples are an integral part of the industry. The valley grows more than 12 different varieties, and apple orchards account for 50 per cent of the more than 12,000 acres of fruit trees in the area. In the fall, roadside stands and markets are lined with gala, ambrosia and honeycrisp, enticing in all their red, green and yellow glory. 

Yet as costs have increased alongside a competitive international market and retail consolidation, the industry’s mostly small-scale growers have struggled to stay afloat. 

According to research out of the University of British Columbia, in 2022 B.C. imported nearly 80 per cent of its apples from other countries, a 30 per cent increase from 2018. Almost 60 per cent of imports came from Washington state, where producers have similarly favourable growing conditions, but also cheaper land costs, larger-scale operations and government subsidies. Chain grocery retailers have long favoured apples from across the border, say B.C. farmers. 

Over the last few years, growers have also faced damage caused by the 2021 heat dome, rising summer temperatures that have impacted labour conditions and two winters of cold freezes. The dissolution of the BC Tree Fruits co-op was only the last chip to fall in a game that already seemed determined.

The BC Tree Fruits Cooperative was formed in 1936, as a way for farmers to consolidate operations and power. The co-op provided growers with bins, packing services, cold storage facilities and marketing and sales. Farmers who worked with the co-op would arrange contracts early in the season, promising a certain portion or the entirety of their crop. For many, it was a way to ensure transparency. 

But over the last decade, private packing houses have emerged as competition, with offers of marginally higher returns tempting some away from the co-op as it buckled under various pressures. 

“We were members, but about 20 years ago I left. I just got kind of frustrated with the management,” says Peter Simonsen, a Naramata-based apple, peach, pear and nectarine farmer and president of the BC Fruit Growers Association, an independent members’ organization. 

Simonsen and other growers The Narwhal spoke with describe the co-op’s issues as multifold: the difficult economic realities of the industry, as well as climate challenges producing lower yields. But the co-op was also suffering from mismanagement and infighting between the board and members. One former grower says there had been complaints around lack of versatility and innovation for nearly 15 years before its dissolution. 

Simonsen has sent his fruit to private packing houses or sold to private clients for the last two decades. It’s not always a safe bet.

Washington state apple producers enjoy a similar growing climate to B.C., but also cheaper land costs, larger-scale operations and government subsidies. Farmers say it’s part of why chain groceries favour U.S. apples. Photo: Alyssa Hollis

“We deliver our fruit into this system and it is unaccountable. I don’t know what they’re selling it for, and I don’t know what they’re charging me,” he says of the private packers. 

The system operates on an annual payout, with growers receiving their cut after the packer has sold the apples. 

“Six months later they’ll say ‘I sold all your fruit, prices weren’t very good, and here’s all your money,’ ” says Simonsen. “And you’ll go, like, ‘Why isn’t it more?’ ” The most trustworthy packers, he adds, have full rosters and aren’t accepting new farmers. 

The Narwhal reached out to two of the Okanagan’s largest packing houses but didn’t receive a response from either. In 2021, the Tyee reported some growers paying 30 to 35 cents a pound to produce their apples, while packers were offering as low as 12 cents a pound in return. 

The co-op announced its closure in an email to members on July 26, citing “extremely low estimated fruit volumes” after the winter freeze and “difficult market conditions.” It was more than $50 million in debt. The business filed for creditor protection two weeks later, and all its assets, including several processing plants and cold storage facilities, are currently up for sale. While former members have called on the B.C. government for assistance, the NDP said it was unable to intervene on behalf of a private business that had moved into the court system.

The co-op’s dissolution has left many apple farmers desperate. Dhaliwal believes nearly all growers have been able to secure clients this fall, but the closure has raised serious questions about the future. 

“We’re fourth and fifth generational orchardists here,” Simonsen says. “This industry, it’s a beautiful thing. It really is a beautiful thing. We grow fruit in the best place in North America to grow fruit, and it’s just so tragic.” 

Canada-wide, provinces reinvest an average of 12 per cent of agriculture profits back into the sector. According to the BC Agriculture Council, British Columbia only reinvests 2.5 per cent, the lowest figure in the country. Photo: Alyssa Hollis 

Farmers say B.C. government offers less support than other provinces and nearby Washington state

Government neglect has fanned the flames of an already-precarious situation. 

“I’m just so disillusioned with how we’ve been treated by the NDP government. We just haven’t been listened to,” Simonsen says. “We have gone to them to say ‘Look, all the other provinces in Canada support their agriculture: the US is getting direct subsidies and competing with us.’ And they have just ignored us. It seems so strange that something as important as agriculture would be considered so flippantly.” 

Simonsen is not alone in his disillusionment. Many growers blame the current government for the situation tree fruit farmers are in. British Columbia has more fruit farms than any other province in Canada and the agriculture sector contributed $2.25 billion to the province’s GDP in 2022. But according to the BC Agriculture Council, the province only reinvests 2.5 per cent of that contribution back into the sector. It’s the lowest reinvestment figure in the country, where the national average has historically been closer to 12 per cent. This low investment has meant the sector has missed out on opportunities for federal dollar-matching. 

Simonsen says the government is also neglecting the increasing, unpredictable effect of climate change. After the 2021 heat dome cooked and sunburned many of the province’s cherries and apples, the government paid out $17 million in heat claims to businesses: $11.9 million went to tree fruit growers — or about 0.8 per cent of the province’s agricultural GDP contribution. In Saskatchewan, which had a provincial agricultural GDP of $6.8 billion in 2022, the government paid out roughly $2.4 billion for crop insurance claims, about 35 per cent. 

‘Treat the land right’: B.C. farmers search for solutions as another year of drought looms

In Washington, the federal government sent growers emergency funding after the same January cold snap, and has offered farms low-interest loans to recover from an equally challenging 2023 season. Washington’s apple growers also received direct federal payments during the pandemic.

B.C. does have a crop insurance program called AgriStability that growers can access if their annual yields fall below 30 per cent of their historical records. In August, Premier David Eby announced the province would invest $15 million into the program for 2024 and increase compensation rates for crop losses from 80 to 90 per cent. This announcement came on top of $5 million for a Tree Fruit Climate Resiliency Program that will help farmers purchase equipment to deal with future climate events. In March, the province also announced $70 million to help grape, berry and tree fruit producers replace dead or diseased plants with more climate-resilient varieties. 

But growers say it simply isn’t enough. Crop insurance assessments often only factor in quantity of a harvest, says Simonsen, but quality has also been a problem when weather events result in smaller or damaged fruits. And replanted trees take several years to reach full productivity. More immediate solutions are needed.The Ministry of Agriculture told The Narwhal it was unavailable for comment as a result of the upcoming B.C. election. 

Consolidation of Canada’s grocery industry makes it difficult for apple farmers to negotiate prices

Everyone agrees: the situation and solutions are complex. But, says Simonsen, one issue is an undeniable contributor: “When you have an open border and five buyers, you don’t have to be very business-savvy to figure that one out.”  

The five buyers he’s talking about are Canada’s biggest grocery retailers. Nationally, there are Loblaw (which owns No Frills and Your Independent Grocer), Sobeys (which owns Safeway and Ontario’s Longo Brothers), Costco and Walmart. In B.C., Pattison Foods is the fifth main buyer, while Metro joins the pack in Ontario and Quebec. These retailers command nearly 80 per cent of the market share, making it difficult to negotiate. 

“Often we sell for less than the Americans because we just basically rely on what the retailers say, like that they can get fruit from Washington for $25 a box,” Simonsen says. 

The solution he and other growers are banking on is a marketing commission. It would allow growers greater control over three key elements, including regulating the quality of the product. Another is the ability to data-share between farms and with the Canada Border Services Agency to learn the price of apple imports. The last is promotional services, which would also bring opportunities for provincial and federal dollar-matching. 

Commissions allow individual agricultural producers to consolidate, with the aim of providing fair, stable incomes for farmers and high-quality products for consumers. Dairy and poultry are managed under similar federal commissions, which allow eligible industries to intervene in national policy related to their product. Under B.C.’s Natural Products Marketing Act, certain agricultural commodities are already eligible, and vegetables and cranberries are regulated under provincial commissions. 

“It also shames the retailer into buying our fruit,” Simonsen says “Right now they have no real reason to buy our fruit, [and] they say it’s because people just care about cost. We can advertise our apples and educate people about our apples and why they’re the best. We’re organic growers [ourselves], but most of the apples in the valley are pesticide and residue-free.” 

Washington has an apple commission, and several other key growing regions across the United States and Canada have them in place for agricultural products. The B.C. apple commission would throw a wrench into the current system of private packing houses, and Simonsen says some private packers are already pushing back, but he and other farmers see it as one potential route forward.   

“You have to get creative and evolve or you just can’t farm anymore,” Kaleigh Jorgensen says. She and her sister-in-law Annelise Simonsen, right, use some of the apples their family grows at their cidery, Creek & Gully, where they also take wedding bookings. Photo: Supplied by Kaleigh Jorgensen

Start a cidery, rip out an orchard: how B.C. apple farmers are coping

For the time being, B.C.’s apple farmers are making do. Nearing retirement, Simonsen maintains hope that his children and grandchildren will be able to continue his family’s multi-generational farming legacy. Since 2018, his daughter Annelise Simonsen and daughter-in-law Kaleigh Jorgensen have used a small portion of the orchard’s annual crop for their on-site cidery, Creek & Gully. 

“We started the cidery so we could use our own apples. We kind of had a ‘can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach,” Jorgensen says. It allows the next generation to have something of their own, she explains, while making use of lower-quality fruit and diversifying revenue streams. 

More recently, the family has started offering non-alcoholic cider, dried fruit and wedding bookings.“You have to get creative and evolve or you just can’t farm anymore,” Jorgensen says. 

She’s saddened by the crisis the industry is in. “You see people chopping down their orchards. All these trees. It’s depressing and scary. This is food. We’re not an airline, we’re not an oil and gas company.” 

In Oliver, Dhaliwal is preparing to rip out his sunrise apple orchard. He doesn’t foresee any future for the crop without the controlled-atmosphere storage the BC Tree Fruits Cooperative offered, which significantly extended the apples’ three-week shelf life. 

“I just see that a lot of other packers don’t want to take [the apple],” he says. “They want to streamline everything, make it efficient, make it cost-effective. It’s a summer apple, so they don’t want to run around every three weeks and make sure everybody gets it. They don’t care if the consumer wants it. They’ll say, ‘OK, we’ve got winter apples.’ There’s less stress there.” 

Dhaliwal’s other fruit trees are also suffering because of the damage from the heat and cold events of recent seasons — many are dying, while others are no longer strong enough to fight off insects. Like B.C.’s apple industry, they’ve fallen victim to a domino effect: “When something gets weak, other things start collapsing.”  

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I’ve always liked potatoes. The variety I’m growing this summer is particularly special. With deep eyes and a knobby appearance, it’s certainly not the prettiest potato. And not everyone thinks it’s the most delicious. Its historical significance, however, is profound.

It’s called the Irish Lumper potato. The same variety that was hit by disease in 1845, initiating the Great Irish Potato Famine — a seven-year cataclysm which killed an estimated one million Irish people and spurred the emigration of another million. 

As a farmer and journalist with Irish heritage, I see the Lumper potato’s story as a chance to celebrate how far we’ve come in breeding more resilient crops and livestock. Most of us in Canada (though certainly not everyone) enjoy a level of food security unprecedented in human history. Crops with better genetics — greater resistance to insect pests, disease and drought — have been a major factor of this achievement. 

Now new, different tumultuous events are on the horizon, many driven by a changing and more volatile climate. I believe biotechnology can help us better weather this uncertain future, but it will require time, money and attention by governments and businesses. 

It will also require farmers and scientists to do a better job of discussing crop and animal science with a sometimes skeptical public, and all of us taking the risk of food insecurity more seriously. More made-in-Canada solutions addressing the unique conditions climate change will bring to this country and our dinner tables, would be a win for us all.

Irish Lumper potatoes, seen here after five weeks of growth, are highly productive — part of the reason they were so widely grown in Ireland in the 19th century. But relying on a single variety comes with great risks. Photo: Matt McIntosh

‘An Gorta Mór’: the Great Hunger

By the mid-19th century, poor Irish farmers and labourers were almost entirely dependent on the potato. The Irish Lumper was universally grown because it was highly productive, although some accounts say it was also more susceptible to certain diseases. 

One of those is a fungal blight called Phytophthora Infestans, or “infective plant destroyer.” After arriving on Ireland’s shores in 1845, the blight destroyed the Lumper’s foliage and rotted its tubers (the edible part of the crop). Starvation and disease quickly set in. The crisis deepened as prolonged cold and rainy weather allowed the pathogen to spread faster and relief schemes proved woefully inadequate. 

The period between 1845 and 1852 became known as “The Great Hunger,” an Gorta Mór in Irish. A branch of my paternal family emigrated to Canada from County Cork, one of the most afflicted areas, during the peak of the crisis. Their final resting place is a small churchyard not far from our current family farm in Essex County.

During a recent visit, I thought about the level of food insecurity they faced when Ireland’s over-reliance on the potato — a miracle crop in terms of productivity and nutrition — was combined with an uncaring government, extended periods of bad weather, overpopulation and chronic poverty. 

Rural landscape in southwestern Ireland. Several factors contributed to the Irish Potato Famine, including extended periods of bad weather and overpopulation. Photo: Matt McIntosh

Phytophthora Infestans is still a problem for potato growers. We have tools to protect our crops now, though, including fungicides and better crop varieties. In 1998, for example, researchers with the United States Department of Agriculture developed a variety highly resistant to late blight, for use by public and private plant breeders. More recently, the American company Simplot used biotechnology (rather than traditional plant breeding) to produce three varieties with high resistance to multiple potato diseases.

What would my ancestors have given for the same?

Crop-breeding can be a climate change solution

The development of better crops is not a new story, of course. Humans have been breeding plants and animals for beneficial traits for millennia. 

But the last century has given us faster and more accurate ways to tinker. Mutagenesis — using radiation to mimic spontaneous mutation in the natural world — has been widely used. Transgenic technology (used to develop what are commonly called genetically modified organisms, or GMOs) can put beneficial genetics from one organism directly into the genome of another. Gene editing, the most recent scientific development, allows for highly precise changes within an organism’s existing genetic code.

The technological achievement underpinning it all is our ability to map an organism’s genetic code — to determine what genes are responsible for what traits. Knowing what gene is responsible for a tomato’s immunity to a specific insect pest, and breeding for it, could reduce insecticide use. Genetically improving gut health in cattle, sheep and goats could help reduce methane emissions. 

Shifting weather patterns can change where insect pests and diseases are found, forcing farmers to respond. Matt McIntosh planted his corn field with a variety tolerant to the fungal pathogen “tar spot,” which showed up in Ontario for the first time in 2020. Photo: Tayler McIntosh

Not all of this knowledge is new, and incorporating the long-ignored traits found in Indigenous crop varieties could make modern varieties more resilient. I’ve come across several examples in recent years. Take Andean potatoes, which are far better at handling drought than today’s common commercial varieties. 

Drought is already a problem across much of Canada, and climate change could make it even more frequent and severe. This will strain water sources used for irrigating potatoes and other crops that need lots of water to grow. 

Many potato varieties native to the Andes, though, are hardier in dry conditions than many modern spuds. Researchers with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada have been analyzing the genomes of these Andean potato varieties to identify where their drought tolerance comes from, thus giving potato breeders more options. 

That’s just one example from a huge list of global public-sector initiatives supporting food system resilience in the face of climate change and other challenges. But for many crops, private sector research far surpasses knowledge production in the public sector. This has been used as a convenient excuse by governments in this country to reduce investment in public sector breeding programs.

Canada has also cut back on extension services — the research and outreach farmers rely on for independent advice, problem-solving expertise and new ideas. While I support innovation from the private sector, and appreciate how companies engage and support farmers like myself and my family, a healthy, resilient agricultural system must include a long-term vision at the federal level, and be supported by a rigorous network of impartial experts. 

Not only are there fewer public dollars flowing to crop development programs, but political blinders also make it more difficult for researchers to access what’s left. Successfully acquiring federal funding for agricultural projects, for example, now relies on the applicant proving their work will address very specific climate change and environmental goals, such as reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Crop breeding on its own is not seen as a means of achieving those goals, even though it certainly could contribute. Consider Sierra Mixe maize, a native corn from Mexico’s Oaxaca state that is related to the crops grown on my farm. 

While modern corn varieties are highly productive, they require a lot of expensive nitrogen fertilizer that can pollute waterways or enter the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, if handled improperly or if the weather doesn’t cooperate when we need to apply it. 

Mexican corn variety Sierra Mixe is able to trap and make use of atmospheric nitrogen by exuding a mucus from above-ground roots. That means it requires less nitrogen fertilizer than other varieties and can help lower nitrogen-based greenhouse gas emissions. Photos: Courtesy of Dr. Jean-Michel Ané / University of Wisconsin

Sierra Mixe, on the other hand, is able to trap and make use of atmospheric nitrogen by exuding a mucus from above-ground roots. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, and elsewhere, have been trying to incorporate the trait into modern commercial corn varieties. Doing so could help reduce our dependence on nitrogen fertilizer, lower fertilizer costs on the farm and potentially lower nitrogen-based greenhouse gas emissions. 

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Even if a crop breeding project doesn’t directly set out to reduce emissions, that doesn’t mean it won’t have some positive effect. Legumes like beans and lentils, for example, naturally produce their own nitrogen by drawing it from the atmosphere and storing it in their roots. Developing more disease or drought -resistant beans and lentils would  allow farmers to grow more of these crops and reduce the amount of nitrogen used and released into the environment.

Crop breeding is a climate solution — and needs to be recognized as such.

Misinformation around biotechnology gets in the way of funding and advancement

There is still opposition to the use of gene editing and other biotechnologies in agriculture. Some of that opposition is rooted in perceived risks to the environment or traditionally bred crop varieties. Concern about corporate ownership is also a factor, but wariness of private enterprise patenting new crops, for example, doesn’t mean there is no role for gene editing in the public or academic sphere. 

And just like in the general public, perspectives within the farming community can differ.

However, much of the past and current discourse around biotechnology has been mired by politically motivated groups spreading misinformation. Public engagement and outreach efforts from scientists, farmers and others who support biotechnology have not always been effective in countering that misinformation. But as the climate crisis grows, Canada should not completely eschew investments in technological advances in plant and animal science — particularly when misinformation still abounds. 

I believe we would do well to embrace modern genomic technology for the revolution it is.

As climate change brings on new pests and weather extremes, the Irish Lumper potato is an example of how important it is to adapt and build resilient food systems. Photo: Matt McIntosh

Traditional plant breeding has served humanity well, and will continue to do so. But new approaches (gene editing, in particular) significantly reduce the amount of time and treasure it takes to develop new organisms. 

I am not naive enough to think biotechnology will solve all our problems, just as it alone would surely not have prevented the Great Hunger. But dedication to crop and animal breeding, in whatever form you support, can certainly help us manage risks — if we get serious about making public investments, ensure those investment dollars are actually accessible and recognize the incredible potential afforded us by modern agricultural science.

I doubt my four-times great grandparents, who crossed an ocean amidst death and devastation at home, took food security for granted. We will serve future generations well if we, similarly, do not.

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.