Climate change ‘top of mind’
NSFA president also calls for local food in N.S. institutions
HALIFAX — Climate change has already affected agriculture in the province but we’re nowhere near having a Nova Scotia mango industry.
Allan Melvin is following in his father’s footsteps, both in the fields of a sixthgeneration family vegetable farm and at the helm of the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture.
The NSFA’s 109th president spends winters working at an accounting firm, with a significant number of his clients coming from the farming sector, and is full-time at Melvin Farms Ltd. from April to November.
Melvin, his father and his uncle export cauliflower, green onion, cabbage, romaine hearts and leeks to five provinces and the U.S. The changing climate is “top of mind.”
“It would be at the forefront of our thoughts and considerations right now, and has been for the last decade or better as we see a shift in weather patterns and bigger weather events when they do hit, hurricanes and such,” Melvin said. “And then winters like this — something is changing in our environment and it’s going to have an impact on us longer term. We’re all thinking about it and how we deal with it as an industry, there’s the mitigation side of things, trying to stop it in its tracks, and there’s also the adaptation that we’re at this point now, things are inevitably going to happen, how do we respond to those?”
In the fruit and vegetable business, changing climate is more likely to allow farmers to grow new varieties of existing crops than completely new crops, at least in the short term.
“It’s not just adapting current processes with current crops, but also looking at opportunities where there might be crops that haven’t had enough heat units, in the case of grapes, for example,” said Melvin. “Within the current crops that we grow, there’d be other varieties that didn’t work previously, but with a longer, warmer fall it’s going to work.
“When you look at some of the long-term projections that are out there, we could potentially see temperature zones kind of on par with California and some of its regions, so you say, well, maybe in 40 or 50 years this is what we’re going to be facing.”
Melvin is joined on the new NSFA board by vice presidents Alicia King and Jocelyn Durston.
King co-owns Six Maples Farm in Antigonish County, raising beef, sheep, meat birds and laying hens, while Durston and her partner own Seven Acres Farm in Kings County, growing vegetables, herbs and flowers, and making naturally fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi.
With five generations of ancestors running his farm before him, Melvin’s life in agriculture was pretty much set. He said the viability of newcomers getting into farming depends on “how much you want to bite off.”
“There’s lots of good examples of new entrants into the industry, I can think of many in the Annapolis Valley alone, but it depends on the complexity and the scale of the business,” said Melvin, listing food safety compliance, workers' health and safety, bringing in international workers and the regulatory burden as some of the issues involved in running a “reasonable size” farm. “Certainly getting into the business at a certain scale is very reasonable with the right mindset, but to take on a medium-size family business is a little more cumbersome, I would say.”
Melvin said getting local products in front of consumers who shop at large stores comes down to supply chains and market competitiveness, and that grocery store chains present their own challenges.
“They’re for-profit businesses that have to be as streamlined as possible, so pushing a model on them that doesn’t work economically doesn’t work, either,” he said. “To get local food into consumers’ hands, we’ve got retail but we’ve got our institutions: our schools, our hospitals, correction centres could be using more local as well. It is really government driven …and taxpayers dollars ultimately, but there’s probably a lot more room in some of those spaces to make headway in local supply than there is in retail.”