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Food and Drink

Keeping the farm but not the farmers
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A collective cheer went up last week when the Agricultural Land Commission refused to remove from the Agricultural Land Reserve 441 hectares (1,110 acres) on Barnston Island in the Fraser River. After all the media brouhaha and public meetings, the commission’s South Coast Panel members were unanimous in their decision.

They concluded that the applicants’ claim that the Greater Vancouver Regional District needed more industrial land was as hollow as an old pumpkin. Besides, even if there was huge demand for more industrial sites in the Lower Mainland, an application for removing farmland from the land reserve, for industrial or other uses, has to come from government, not individual property owners.

Thankfully, it’s not as if a bunch of farmers can get together and say, our area needs a huge industrial park or zillions more houses, so please, sir, could we have our farms removed from the ALR and make ourselves a whack of money with the new zoning so we can retire.

No, there are a few more hurdles to retirement than that.

While people have been arguing for years over how effective the ALR system is in preserving farmland, especially in light of questionable decisions like last year’s removal of 170-some hectares near Abbotsford, Jordan Sturdy thinks that in a place like Pemberton Valley – a floodplain with rich soil – nobody argues about the value of conserving farmland. In fact, the ALR is one of the valley’s primary assets.

But another fundamental issue challenges working farms.

"I think that we have fairly good protection for farmland. What we don’t have protection for is farmers – it’s the human capital that I am worried about," he says.

Likely to the surprise of the organizers, that was the focus of a presentation Jordan made to the Healthy Eating Forum in Whistler. Aimed at building on the healthy eating/active living initiatives in the area, the June event attracted everyone from food suppliers to health and education officials.

Jordan figured it was a good opportunity to get people thinking about, never mind the healthy eating choices, rather, who’s going to be minding the farm and growing those so-called healthy choices with all the impinging challenges they face?

First off, how tough is it to earn a living when North American food costs are so low and subsidies to industrial farmers so high that you have to sell a bunch of carrots from your labour-intensive family farm at the same price as a bunch in the local supermarket?

Then there’s the bigger question: what do we do when all the farmers are too old or too tired to do it in the dirt anymore? (The average age of farmers in the Pemberton area is in the mid-50s range.)

This is especially problematic when the land becomes so expensive that the only people who can afford it are "gentlemen" landowners. Not that they are necessarily "problems", more that they aren’t really into farming. For instance, one didn’t want to graze horses in winter because brown horse poop on white snow ruined the bucolic fantasy, and others disdain how dusty farming can be.

As mayor of Pemberton, a self-taught farmer and owner of North Arm Farm, and a father, Jordan sees the challenges in their many permutations. People value the fresh produce and experiences to be had on small, family-run, sustainably-sound operations. Or at least they say they do.

But how do you keep those kinds of farms going in terms of human capital? How do you develop it, and keep it, and how do you create a succession plan that’s viable?

"I have two daughters and let’s say in 10 or 20 years I don’t want to work the hours that I work, and I want to hand this farm off to my daughters, assuming they want it, of course. And they are only going to be interested if I make it manageable, reasonable, profitable, sustainable – all those things.

"If they see me running around like a chicken with my head cut off, they’re going to go, not a chance, dad," he says. "But assuming they do want to take it over, how do I do that? This is my retirement, my pension plan."

Right now, Jordan says that options for a farmer in such a situation are limited. You can sell the place. But in 20 years if it’s worth $4 million, who would want to buy it and operate it as a "healthy choice" farm, pulling weeds by hand around the rows of carrots? Besides, there’s nothing legal you could grow on that property that would pay a $4-million mortgage.

And what happens if both daughters want the farm? You can’t subdivide the property, nor can you legally build more houses on it so each daughter can have her own home. Never mind ma and pa who want to have a place of their own so they can sit on the balcony and enjoy the fruits and veggies of their labour, telling the kids what to plant and yelling at people who tromp through newly seeded rows.

Ironically, we save the land, but we don’t have a system to keep small family farms in the family, or to make them available to new families who want to work the land and make a living, as opposed to creating an industrial farm that sucks up the entire valley or having pretty places with a horse or two that don’t poop.

So what’s the solution for keeping the kids – or any new family – on working farms? Other than working your butt off or doing a bit of an end run like building an extra house for a family member and designating it as "farm-hand accommodation" to meet existing requirements, there aren’t a whole lot.

However, Jordan suggests that one day he would like to see a system of creating smaller farm holdings with covenants on them requiring a significant return in terms of agricultural production. Currently, to secure farm tax status, you’re only required to produce $2,500 annually from the first 10 acres, something he says you can do in your sleep, or by growing a bit of hay. And all that produces is nice houses on small acreages with a horse – nothing to do with farming and everything to do with real estate and lifestyle.

In the meantime, 16 years later, he and his wife, Trish, each still hold outside jobs in order to keep their family farm going and growing.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer whose best farm experience was feeding pigweed to the pigs on her uncle’s farm in Peace River country.