Some agriculture is growing

Editor: There may be fewer farmers in the Central Okanagan, as noted in the July 21 article in The Daily Courier, but not all agriculture is in decline.

Information from the 2016 Agricultural Census is now being published and among the grim numbers are some hopeful trends.

The headline on the Ron Seymour article is correct; we lost 25 per cent of our food producing land in the Central Okanagan in just five years.

We now have 141 fewer farms to feed an increasing population.

Something missing from the 2017 Central Okanagan Economic Profile of Agriculture that reported on the census, as well as Mr. Seymour’s article, was the small but continued increase of certified organic farms in B.C.

True, the increase was only 0.2 per cent, but that is much better than the steep 11.3 per cent loss of farmers in B.C., double the 5.9 per cent decline across Canada.

Good thing certified organic farm numbers continue to increase in B.C. since we already import tens of millions a year of organic vegetables that we could grow more of in Kelowna — lettuce, carrots, tomatoes.

I did some research and found Statistics Canada’s B.C. summary of the 2016 census. The title notes a hopeful trend: small farms and direct marketing play a large role in British Columbia.

Here are some other things the census found :

• 40 per cent of B.C. farms are small and 32 per cent sell directly to consumers vs 17 per cent small farms in Canada;

• 37.5 per cent of B.C. farmers are women, the highest in the country vs 28.5 per cent nationally;

• 6.9 per cent of B.C. farmers were under 35 years of age, an increase from 2011, a first in 20 years.

One kind of farming continues to decline in Canada, as has occurred for the last 20 years, it just happened much faster in the Central Okanagan.

At the same time, another kind of agrifood based on younger farmers on smaller urban land parcels selling directly to consumers is alive and well and even growing strongly.

This kind of agri-food also seems to be more profitable than conventional agriculture.

One final point from a really interesting census report. B.C. joined Confederation and participated in the 1881 census. At that time there were 49,459 people in B.C. and 2,743 farms to feed them.

That is one farm for 18 people. Today, there are 4.7 million people in B.C. and 17,500 farms. That is one farm for every 269 people.

Will 56-year-old farmers (average age of census farmers in Canada) still be producing food 10 years from now? Are there enough young farmers coming into agriculture to replace them?

Where will our daily servings of organic local vegetables and fruits come from in Kelowna? Robert Dixon, Senior citizen, organic entrepreneur