Farmers adapting to weather challenges
Everybody talks about the weather. Amir Maan is doing something about it.
“You have to,” the Abbotsford farmer said on Monday.
For Maan, who focuses on strawberries and pumpkins, that means a state-of-the-art greenhouse the farm opened in March.
Not anticipating the coldest spring in ages, perhaps, but with an eye to the future and what climate change will bring, Maan is one of a growing number of farmers turning to technology to help overcome unpredictable and sometimes debilitating swings in weather.
“Farmers are trying their best with whatever weather throws at us,” Maan said. “There is no such thing as a normal year anymore.
“Every year it's a challenge now, so farmers are putting technology in to adapt. If you don't adapt with new technology, if you don't put these innovations in place, it's really hard to be a farmer.”
Fields are too wet to plow or plant. Crops that have managed to be planted aren't getting enough heat to grow.
“We don't have a baseline to refer to anymore,” Maan said. “We used to.
“A couple of decades ago when my dad was farming, I still remember when I was younger and getting into it, when I was 12, 13, 14, that's when the irregularities started, we'd get a lot of rain, or we'd get too much sun, the strawberries weren't happy from having their feet wet or the strawberries were not happy because they did not have enough water.”
Take away the greenery and the weather could be November's, and there is no respite at least until the end of May, according to Environment Canada.
“Going back and comparing to other years, recently we've had extremely warm and dry springs, in May in particular,” meteorologist Armel Castellan said.
But this year, the weather took a turn after the first week of April and that weather pattern has not changed.
In fact, it's still snowing at elevation, itself a danger because when the snows do melt, that means extra run-off in the major rivers and tributaries.
“The freshet is kind of hinging on a critical moment right now because we've been adding more snow to the mountains into May,” Castellan aid. “Usually, the April 1 snow bulletin is peak snow and it starts to go down from there. That's not been the case.
“We'll have to worry about flooding when it warms up.”
Maan's paternal grandparents started the farm in 1977. The new controlled-environment greenhouse grows as many strawberries on a 2.5acre (one-hectare) site as would have taken seven acres (three hectares) of field.
And it is the wave of the future for farming in Metro Vancouver, according to Lenore Newton, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of Fraser Valley.
The problem, she said, is farmers are encountering so many disruptions they have no recovery time. Meanwhile, bankers are getting weary of hearing about next year.
“These disasters are impacting multiple crops, the scope is a little unusual,” she said. “This cold weather is so exceptional and so wet, we're seeing disruptions in apples, in cherries, the berries, and also potato crops because it's too wet to plow.
“We haven't really recovered from the last set of disasters, now here we are again.”
A lot of Newman's work involves studying the technology of growing crops indoors.
“I would say the last year has really lit a fire under everyone to say, `Yeah, how do we do this and how do we do this fast?'” she said.
There is a limit, for now anyway, of what can be grown at scale indoors, but Newton sees massive opportunities.
Indoor agriculture is more efficient, leaves a small carbon footprint compared to importing food, uses less water, and is friendlier to the environment because biological ways to deal with insects and disease are easier to implement, yields increase exponentially, the list goes on.
“We'll never replace all of the outdoor agriculture, but we should be doing anything we can to shift indoors and help farmers make that pivot,” Newton said.
“It is a difficult pivot, but it's not impossible.”