History crops up for fruit growers

BCFGA elects first all-Indo Canadian board of directors

A unique election in a troubled time has resulted in the first all-IndoCanadian board of directors for the BC Fruit Growers Association.

Apple farmers cast votes at drivethru polling stations in Kelowna and Penticton, Thursday, during the 132nd annual general meeting.

The meeting itself was held online because of COVID19 but there was a break from 3-4:30 p.m. so 120 participating orchardists could drive to the polling station nearest them.

“It’s how we had to do things because of the pandemic,” BCFGA president Pinder Dhaliwal said on Friday.

As a result of the election, all eight positions on the association’s board of directors are held by Indo-Canadians, the first time that’s ever happened.

“That reflects the background of the majority of people who are involved in agriculture now in the Okanagan,” Dhaliwal said. “Historically, there’s been different waves of immigrants that have come through the Valley and done farming.

“It’s changed throughout the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. When I was growing up, in my area around Oliver and Osoyoos, the farmers were all Portuguese, I would say 90% at the time,” he said. “There were literally three East Indian families that were involved in agriculture.”

It’s common for the children of farmers to see how hard their parents work and decide against getting into agriculture. “There’s a reason farm kids don’t get into farming,” Dhaliwal said with a laugh.

Historically, people from other areas with strong farming backgrounds have looked at the Okanagan and seen opportunity, he says. That has always created successive change to the demographic makeup of Valley farmers.

But even now, many children of Indo-Canadian orchardists show little interest in taking over the family farm, Dhaliwal says.

“Those kids, they can see the long hours, the struggle, the hardships, the ups and downs, and they’ve spread out into banking or other careers they think are more stable and perhaps better for their lifestyle,” he said.

The new BCFGA board of directors has serious challenges ahead of it, including a calamitous decline in the acreage under apple cultivation in the Okanagan.

Two years ago, BCFGA executive director Glen Lucas says, there were about 8,800 apple acres; last year it was 8,000 acres and expectations for this spring are in the range of 7,000 acres.

“The industry is in crisis because of several straight years of terrible returns,” Lucas said.

Many apple orchards have simply been abandoned, he says, though some farmers have switched to wine grapes and cherries in hopes of turning a profit.

Dhaliwal says apple growers in other countries are getting direct subsidies from their governments to offset depressed market prices, lower charges for irrigation, and grants to deal with additional financial challenges triggered by the pandemic.

“We can’t compete with those kinds of advantages and our efforts to try to get our governments interested in what’s going on with farming here, they just don’t seem to be working,” he says. “That’s what’s caused a lot of apple growers to just give up.”