A Portrait of Our Food System: 2022

(This post is an expanded version of a talk delivered by Katie Sardinha at the Summerland Fall Fair on September 10, 2022, entitled “How is our food system doing?”.)

[Last updated on October 24, 2022]

From 2017-2022, I’ve been working full time as a farmer. During this time, I’ve also been trying to understand what’s going on inside our food system. While I’m sure no one is keen on hearing about yet another impending crisis (!!!), I am here to inform you, dear Reader, that a lot of the stuff I’ve learned keeps me up at night, and not in a good way. I wrote this essay because I felt compelled to get various ideas out of the rumination chambers of my mind, and out into the world. I hope you’ll stick around until the end, where I’ll talk a bit about solutions.

1. Snapshot

At the moment of writing this (September 2022), the food system in Summerland/BC/Canada appears to be functioning in a way we would collectively classify as “normal”. This is only an appearance though, since at the level where food is produced, the system is already buckling. I believe that if we don’t do something soon to reverse certain trends within the food system, most of those who read this might live to experience its general unraveling.

2. Food Security

I will be concerned here with the concept of food security, which itself is internally complex. We can think of it as consisting of two components:

• Food availability: Sufficient food exists within the system to satisfy the nutritional requirements of the local population.

• Food access: People can access and afford the food that exists.

Neither component is more important than the other. Here, however, I will be focusing primarily on the issue of food availability, as this is the aspect of food security that as a farmer, I have an insider’s perspective on.

3. Scale Matters

Let’s begin by establishing some context.

To talk about “the food system”, we need to talk about this system at a particular scale, be it global, national, provincial, regional, or household. In an age where climate disasters are becoming more frequent, threatening to reduce agricultural yields across the globe in a patchwork fashion, I think it makes the most sense to focus on shoring up the food system at provincial and regional scales, as these are probably the levels at which food security can be attained somewhat independently of the vagaries of global transport systems. However, because some agricultural policy is national, we need to consider the national scale as well.

Picture a farm in your mind’s eye. What do you see? Everybody will see something different, because there is no such thing as an “average” farm. Farms in Canada vary dramatically in size (2 acres, 200 acres, 2,000 acres…), and even among farms of the same size, there can be significant variation in management styles, employment practices, environmental footprints, crops, yields, and every other variable you can imagine.

That being said, in BC we are (in my opinion) extremely lucky to still have an overwhelming abundance of “small” and “medium” sized farms. Of course, these terms are context dependent. In the Okanagan, for instance, a small farm might be 3 acres, while a large farm might still only be 200 acres - in other words, still “small” in comparison with most farms in California or the Canadian prairies.

In general however, the trend across Canada is towards farms consolidating and getting bigger over time. While this trend is often attributed to the adoption of labour-reducing technology, it is also an indirect consequence of the rising price of agricultural land. (To buy farmland, you need to either already own farmland you can leverage, or else be very wealthy.) Most farms in BC, and indeed Canada, are still at least family-owned, and the complex geography of BC places certain limits on how large farms here are likely to get. We can contrast this situation with nearby Washington State, where consolidation has progressed much further. It is increasingly common there for huge farms to be owned by private equity firms and hedge funds.

The trend towards farms getting bigger is concerning for a few reasons.

Firstly, the bigger the farm, the more of a negative impact it will tend to have on the environment. This is because efficiencies of scale are achieved through engineered homogenization, and homogenization is antithetical to the kind of bio-diverse farm ecosystems scientists are telling us the world needs more of. Larger farms also tend to rely more heavily on chemical pesticides, because they are easier to apply and usually require less labour than other methods of pest control. We have also noticed (anecdotally) that the larger a farm is, the more likely it is to pay the majority of its workers minimum wage (whereas smaller farms seem more often to pay better when they can). In our opinion, the assumption that larger farms are necessarily more “efficient” than smaller ones is in need of critical examination; it seems to us that what larger farms are more efficient at, specifically, is concentrating wealth. (For instance, smaller farms are capable of producing just as much food per acre as larger farms, and are often substantially more productive due to the fact they can’t rely on quantity to make up for failures in quality.) If this is so, then achieving “efficiency” through homogenization should be recognized for what it is: an engine for generating environmental and social costs that are then borne by society at large.

It might seem like I am making the case for all farms to be as small as possible, but in fact I am not. For our food system to be as resilient as possible, we actually need to have farms at a diversity of scales. Why? Because farms that operate at different scales are vulnerable in different ways. Covid-19 has made this fact very obvious. During the growing season of 2020, we read in The Grower and Country Life in BC about how larger farms across Canada could not obtain the labour they needed to operate, forcing many of them to forego planting or harvesting. The Canadian government had to step in and provide relief funding so these farms could return to operation. In general, large farms which rely on an imported labour force are particularly vulnerable to large-scale shocks, like pandemics.

While the larger farms were struggling, smaller farms like ours, with smaller labour requirements, carried on more or less as normal. Our farm neither required, nor received, financial assistance related to Covid-19. On the other hand, we are especially vulnerable to situations where one member of the farm crew gets sick or injured. Small farms need supports from time to time too, but they are of an altogether different sort than those needed on large farms.

In conclusion, a food system is most resilient when it contains farms operating at a diversity of scales. We are especially fortunate here in BC to still have an abundance of small and medium-scale farms, but the trend towards farms getting larger continues.

4. Food Reliance

There have been a number of attempts, over the last several decades, to estimate the degree to which BC is able to produce its own food supply. Two very general findings are:

(4.1) BC farmers produce roughly half of the food consumed within BC.

(4.2) The proportion of BC’s food supply that is supplied by BC farmers is decreasing over time.

The fact that we rely on other regions for much of our food means that we need to pay attention to what is happening in these other regions. Serious drought in California, for instance, could substantially affect food availability (and affordability) here.

The state of our information also isn’t great, which is to say that we are not very sure how much of our food supply we are capable of producing locally. In practical terms, it is very difficult to measure food reliance in a region. This is because much of what is grown is exported, and the amount of food that is exported can vary considerably from year to year.

On the topic of exporting, I imagine a reader wondering: Isn’t it bad that farmers here grow food for export, when we don’t even grow enough food to supply our own population? Aren’t farmers the ones undermining food availability, by making the choice to grow crops for export?

These are not unreasonable questions, but the blame they put on farmers is misplaced. The reality right now is that if Canadian farmers could not sell their highest-quality produce into export markets, where significantly higher prices can be obtained than in the Canadian market, many existing farms would likely cease to exist within a few years. In other words, the need for Canadian farmers to sell into export markets is a symptom of an underlying problem that is inherent to the way produce is sold here.

And this brings us to one of the core problems within our food system.

5. The System is Rigged

Most people think that when prices go up at the grocery store, farmers get better returns too. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is no consistent relationship between what you pay for produce at (almost all) grocery stores in Canada and what farmers here actually get paid. Why? Because retailers are big, and farmers are small.

The graph below has been taken from an article written by the National Farmers’ Union of Canada, entitled “Grocery Prices are Rising and Farmers’ Share Declining as Corporate Processors and Retailers Take More and More” (Dec. 9, 2021). The solid blue line on the top of the graph shows the retail value of bread made from one bushel of wheat over a period of 40 years (not adjusted for inflation). This line steadily rises, indicating that the cost of bread you pay at the store has continued to rise over time. The brownish line on the bottom of the graph represents the net price paid to the farmer for one bushel of wheat. This line remains basically flat over a period of 40 years, indicating that the price wheat farmers receive for their wheat has not gone up in 40 years.

Source: https://www.nfu.ca/grocery-prices-are-rising-and-farmers-share-declining-as-corporate-processors-and-retailers-take-more-and-more/ [obtained Sept. 22, 2022]

In other words, this graph shows that there is no relationship between the price you pay at the grocery store for bread and the price that a wheat farmer receives for the wheat that went into that bread.

While the graph reproduced above is specific to wheat, graphs with the same shape are provided for corn, pork, and beef at the link provided above. And while tree fruit growers like me don’t currently possess a graph like this that we can point to, families like mine, who have been involved in this industry for generations, know that the prices we receive from retailers do not relate to the prices you pay at the store.

As you might imagine, costs go up for farmers every year, just like they do in every other primary industry. How then, have farms managed to survive? And how has this obviously unjust situation been arrived at and maintained?

6. In Canada, Retailers have all the Power

In the winter of 2021/2022, I remember reading somewhere (maybe The Grower?) that the top five grocery retail corporations in Canada are believed to control upwards of 80% of the market. (I have since read elsewhere that market concentration in this industry might be much worse than this, but that a precise estimate is hard to ascertain). In other words, Canadian grocery retail is an oligopoly, where a few large companies (Loblaw Companies, Metro Inc., Empire Co., etc.) each own numerous grocery chains and essentially control the market and possess all of the leverage in what are technically called price “negotiations” with the supply chain.

In Canada, farmers who sell into the wholesale market are “price takers”. What does this mean? Retailers don’t actually pay farmers directly. Instead, retailers buy commodities from food distributors, packers, processors and via shippers in the “middle” of the chain. These businesses have to cover their costs, and do so by taking a cut from whatever prices the retailers pay into the supply chain. That leaves farmers at the bottom of the chain, receiving whatever is left over. With costs steadily rising for businesses in the middle of the chain, and the prices paid into the supply chain by retailers staying roughly the same (if graphs like those shown above are to be believed), less and less overall money remains left over for farmers to scrape by on.

The result of this massive power imbalance/market distortion has been rising profits for corporate retail executives, higher prices at the grocery store for you, and increasingly desperate economic conditions for farmers across the country.

How have existing farms been adapted to these abysmal market conditions? Some farmers have gone the route of getting bigger, buying up multiple farming properties to try and achieve the efficiencies of scale I talked about above (typically, this involves going into debt). Other farmers choose to work off-farm jobs (roughly 48% of farmers in BC supplement their farm income with off-farm work; this is the route Kaleidoscope Fruit Ranch is taking as of 2022). Increasingly, farmers are exiting the wholesale market and selling into specialty high-end markets or pursuing direct sales models (At Kaleidoscope Fruit Ranch we are diversifying in this direction as well).

7. Government policy… or lack thereof

Where does government fit into all of this?

With the exception of a few supply-managed industries where production targets are set annually, there is no broad government policy in place in Canada to ensure that food availability (as defined above) is attained.

“Let the market decide” is the main organizing principle in Canada, where when it comes to the food system, the market serves as a proxy for policy.

The problem with this strategy is that the market is currently “deciding” that it doesn’t want there to be farms or farmers in Canada... at least not ones that grow food for local consumption.

8. A Patchwork of Programs

When the market fails to compensate farmers at a sustainable level, farm industry organizations lobby the government for help. The result of decades of sustained dialogue between government and industry organizations is a patchwork of funded programs, some of which are very successful (but always in need of update), and others that work better in theory than they do in real life.

In years where forces beyond farmers’ control threaten catastrophe, there are two business risk management programs which are essential for preventing farm bankruptcy: Production Insurance and Agristability.

• Production Insurance is a program that offers farmers subsidized insurance for crop losses, where losses occur due to (certain classes of) weather events and natural disasters. Our farm, and many like it, would probably have ceased to exist long ago without subsidized production insurance. Even so, there are ongoing concerns that the program is not adapting fast enough to the changing landscape of risk brought on by climate change. In tree fruits, for example, extreme heat can effect yields in the years after the heat event occurred, but there is no mechanism in place for compensating farmers for these types of losses.

• Agristability is a federal income stabilization program designed to prevent farms from going bankrupt after years where farm income plummets due to uncontrollable forces. Participating farms pay into the program, and are compensated for disaster years at a level that is calibrated according to each farm’s (normalized) income in years previous. Since multiple bad years in succession affects this calibration, there are concerns that this program, too, is becoming less effective at income stabilization over time. Fortunately, the government has shown willingness in recent years to make improvements to this program.

When I began farming, I remember being optimistic about the array of other federal and provincial programs offered to farmers. As I have explored them, however, I have found many of them to be inaccessible for a number of reasons.

Probably the main issue is that for many programs, the eligibility requirements are so specific that many farms that probably should qualify, don’t. The provincial Crop Loss and Damage due to Wildlife program is an almost comical example of this (it should be named the “Crop Loss and Damage Specifically Due to Elk Knocking over Fences, Getting into Enclosures, and Doing Measurable Damage Program”), but there many other programs that fall into this category.

For other programs, entry into the program presents practical difficulties for farmers, whose work is highly seasonal. The timeline for submitting applications is usually inflexible, and often does not align with the time that an urgent need is experienced. The worst case is when the application window for funding is scheduled during the middle of summer or harvest (peak work season), when most farmers simply do not have the time to divert towards preparing applications. Our impression is that these practical issues are primarily a problem for small and medium-sized farms, which (usually) do not have paid administrative staff and must rely on time in the off-season for preparing applications. This is one of several ways that we feel government funding in Canada favours larger farms - an important topic for discussion, but one I’ll leave for another day.

Finally, many programs do not work for farmers because the funding levels they offer are simply too low. For instance, the Environmental Farm Plan covers up to 30% of the cost of new farm equipment for successful applicants. This is a nice discount, but not really helpful if you can’t afford the remaining 70%.

What farmers need is more flexibility in the way programs are funded. For instance, I would like to see a merit-based grant program for farmers modeled along the lines of the SSHRC/NSERC postdoctoral awards, where farmers could propose projects, have them judged for merit by a panel of experts, and have them fully funded at levels appropriate to farms operating at different scales. Successful farms would be required to prove that funds are being used as intended, and would be ineligible to apply for a certain number of years after a completed project, the intention being that funding is distributed to as many different farms as possible over time.

We are also convinced that a universal basic income scheme could benefit Canadian farmers operating at every scale, but this too is a topic of discussion for another day.

9. The Looming Demographic Crisis

At the time of writing this, the average age of a farmer in BC is 58 years old. In the next couple of years many of these farmers are planning to retire, and at the moment it is not obvious who is going to replace most of them. If you were to look at a graph of farmer demographics, you would see: farmers in BC are an endangered species.

For young people today, the barriers to get into farming are daunting. The most significant one is probably the price of agricultural land in BC, which is prohibitive for most would-be food producers. Being born into a farming family is almost a necessity to farm young (that’s the only reason I am able to farm!). Unfortunately for our food system, msany of the people wealthy enough today to be first-time farm buyers appear to be doing so without any intention of growing food. Relatedly, speculation on agricultural land is driving land prices ever higher. McMansions and McModerns popping up on farmland used to only be a problem in the Lower Mainland; now, they’re becoming real estate brochure photo opportunities province-wide.

There is an organization in BC called The Young Agrarians, which manages a land-matching program to connect retiring farmers with aspiring young farmers, to facilitate transfers of land and knowledge. If you ever had the thought that young people today just don’t want to farm - you’d be wrong! The Young Agrarians manages a waitlist of wannabe farmers that is hundreds of names long.

You should be surprised to learn, then, that according to the most recent census, the number of young people farming in BC has actually decreased over the last several years. Reportedly, this is due to young farmers dropping out.

Why are young people are getting into farming, working for a few years, and then quitting?

If I had to guess why, I’d say the reason is… chronic stress! Which brings me to my next topic…

10. Existential challenges

There are (at least) three major “existential challenges” facing farmers today that go beyond the problem of having a low (and increasingly unpredictable) income. These include (1) climate change, (2) mental health, and (3) Canada’s Food Safety Regime (and other regulatory burdens).

10.1 Climate Change

Climate change is experienced viscerally every day by anyone whose work involves manipulating the natural world directly. To understand why, imagine for a moment that your workplace is outside, and that every work-related decision you make depends on the weather. Farmers have always been at the mercy of forces we can’t control; yet now and into the future, these forces themselves are becoming increasingly erratic.

How do you plan for tomorrow on your farm when none of the weather forecasts agree? How do you estimate your harvest dates when your pollination window was the longest it’s ever been? How will your trees be affected next year by the current year’s Heat Dome? How do you get work done on the farm done when the air is choked with wildfire smoke, or it’s 45 degrees Celsius out for the third day in a row, or half of your fields are covered in flood water (etc.)?

Farming has always been complicated, but this is just getting ridiculous.

10.2 Mental Health

As farmers, we are seeing things happen on our farms that we’ve never seen before. For me, the spring drought of 2021 marked a shift. Trees in drier zones of my orchard “screamed out” for water - their leaves grew in with a yellowed-green hue, edged in orange, and once mature, their edges curled inwards like sinister canoes - the trees’ desperate attempt to conserve moisture. It was horrifying being in the orchard everyday, watching this happening. Seeing my trees sicken made me sicken along with them. 2021 was the year I had to put a lot of effort into learning how to disentangle the health of my orchard from the health of my own body and mind. 2022 was the year I had to put a lot of effort into learning how to deal with feelings of generalized despair.

It stresses me out knowing that if I feel this way, farmers everywhere are feeling this way too.

There are a couple of factors specific to farming that relate to mental health in negative ways:

• Farming can be very isolating work.

• Farmers often lack access to mental health services (though this is getting better! AgSafe is now offering free counseling to farmers).

• Many farmers routinely operate heavy machinery and/or engage in physically dangerous tasks, which does not mix well with mental distress.

• Farm income is highly variable from year to year, and typically much lower than the Canadian average. You’d be surprised how many farmers in Canada make less than minimum wage for hours worked.

• Farms can become permeated with visual reminders of environmental devastation and climate change, which can be a source of chronic stress.

• Culturally, farmers also tend to value self-reliance and have trouble asking for help.

10.3 The Food Safety Regime and Other Regulations

Every farmer I have ever talked to recognizes the importance of food safety as a general concept.

That being said, the Food Safety Regime in Canada is not a federally regulated set of standards; it is a set of standards imposed on farmers by grocery retailer corporations, working through various bureaucracies that accept input, nominally, from industry organizations. Within this regime, farmers who sell their produce wholesale to major retailers are being forced, with increasing regularity, to certify their operations according to one of several food safety certification bodies. It is only by doing so that farmers are granted the ‘'privilege” of selling their produce to the companies that dominate the Canadian market.

This process is expensive - in our experience, thousands of dollars each year - and is paid for entirely by the farmer. In addition to the direct costs of certification, farmers spend hours adding up to weeks of unpaid time every year preparing for audits and maintaining sets of written records. While we acknowledge that keeping written records is an essential farm practice, in our experience, the one-size-fits-all paperwork required by the Food Safety Regime is at best redundant with respect to the farm-specific records we already keep.

We find some of the food safety standards in existence to be sensible, such as the need to have spray records audited by a third party (note, however, that this is something all organic producers already do). However, there are some food safety rules that make our workplace less sustainable, others that make our workplace less safe to work in, and others that make it difficult to adapt to changing economic circumstances (for instance, integrating agritourism).

In addition to food safety rules, farmers are increasingly being asked to conform to a wide variety of new zoning and environmental regulations. While we acknowledge that most regulations have been created to accomplish worthy goals, the fact of the matter is that every year we are being asked to do more with less, and are not being compensated for these efforts. For some farmers, the hours of absurd, mind-numbing, unpaid work that regulatory compliance entails is threatening to suck the joy out of what should be an inherently meaningful and rewarding profession. This is why we classify food safety and other regulations as an “existential threat” to farming and farmers.

11. Solutions

So what can we do to fix some the problems I’ve enumerated above?

11.1 Unrig the system

A top-down solution to the problem of low commodity prices would require some mechanism be put in place to ensure that a larger share of the total value generated through the sale of food gets back to primary producers.

This could proceed in two directions:

• Regulating and/or breaking up the major grocery retailer conglomerations.

• Creating and/or strengthening modern cooperative unions (e.g. marketing commissions) that represent producers, in order to gain leverage in price negotiations with retailers.

Top down solutions are the most surgical, since they don’t really upend the status quo. I’ll admit though, it is hard for me to imagine the Canadian government actually standing up to corporate power. Then again, who knows? I am somewhat more optimistic about the marketing commission direction, though it will be a long, uphill battle in which producers will need to work hard to get along.

11.2 Create an alternative retail system

I recently listened to an episode of the Big Biology Podcast (episode 75), where they talked about the evolution of cooperative structures in nature (specifically, they focused on mutualism between fungal mycelia and plant roots). Biologists note that in nature, for lasting mutualistic relationships to evolve, both sides must depend on each other. Viewed in these terms, the relationship between Canadian grocery retailer conglomerates and Canadian farmers is far from mutualistic.

An enduring solution to many of the problems I’ve talked about would be to create a new food distribution system from the bottom up, thereby gradually displacing the major grocery retailers. In this system we create, farmers, processors, distributors, and support persons would cooperate to share returns in an equitable way. They would depend on each other. And they would depend on consumers, and consumers would depend on them. Imagine, for instance, taking the BC government’s food hub concept and broadening it, to turn food hubs into autonomous (locally owned and controlled) cooperative ventures where food is stored, packed, processed, and sold locally and regionally. These cooperatives could be organized so that everyone associated with a given food hub (farmers, packers, sellers, shippers), receives a fair and stable income, so that equipment and expertise are purchased by and shared among hub members, and profits obtained through the hub are reinvested into the hub and used to meet the needs of its members and the community (since the cooperative depends on its community, after all).

What about farms that are already self-sustaining? As I mentioned above, many farms today are leaving the wholesale model and finding ways to sell their produce directly (joining many farms which already do this). Thinking systemically about our food system, it is good for some proportion of farms to directly sell their produce, since farms which do this are nimble and adaptable to changing conditions (a type of resiliency).

However, we do not advocate a solution where every farm goes its own way. If every farm becomes alienated from every other farm, fierce internal competition is likely to develop between farms, leading to more farmer attrition. The benefit of the wholesale-oriented system we currently have in place is that it allows the majority of farmers to focus their time and expertise on maximizing food production, while leaving the packing, marketing, and sales work to other people. In the process of creating an alternative retail system, we should not lose sight of the significant advantages we obtain through cooperation between farmers and experts in other fields.

In the short term, while we transition to a food system organized according to the concept of mutualism, we need people to support local businesses that support farmers directly, like the many fruit stands that line highways in the Okanagan, or the LocalMotive Low-Waste Market in Penticton, BC. You can also support farmers directly through farmers markets, by joining CSA programs, or in some cases by contacting farmers directly. Farmers will usually be able to sell you produce at prices that are less than what you pay at the grocery store. However, if the price a farmer gives you is not as low as you thought it would be, please don’t jump to the conclusion that they are gouging you. Instead, ask them why their price is where it is (hint: it probably won’t be because they want to buy a new Persian rug for their yacht).

11.3 Consumers lead the way

I truly believe that if consumers understood more about how our food system operates, they would mass up and demand change. For instance - do you have any idea how much of the produce that is grown can’t be sold, purely for stupid cosmetic reasons? You’d be shocked at what gets wasted.

The twisted reality is that consumer expectations play a role in the process of generating food waste. This is because your buying behaviour makes a difference - and not always in ways you might expect! Today, perhaps more than ever in history, retail corporations are studying minute aspects of consumers’ buying behaviour and are using what they find to make specific demands of primary producers.

The ongoing saga of the ambrosia apple provides an interesting window into some of this complexity. (You can also read a bit about the ambrosia apple on our “What we Grow” page). The ambrosia apple is a bicoloured apple, with a yellow background and a red blush. Below is a picture of an ambrosia apple taken from the Washington Fruit Growers’ website. This picture depicts accurately what growers might consider to be an “average” ambrosia apple, in terms of its overall colour.

Source: Washington fruit growers

Now, take a look at the photo of four ambrosia apples below. This photo was taken from the Real Canadian Superstore’s website in August 2022 (you’ll have to take my word for it, because the photo has since been changed out for another similar-looking one).

Source: Real Canadian Superstore website (August 2022).

My family has been growing ambrosia for over two decades (high density plantings, with slender spindle and super spindle trellis systems), and I can tell you that the apples in this picture do not even remotely look like ambrosia. Under normal conditions, the proportion of ambrosia that develop red colour on all four sides of the apple, like the ones pictured above, is pretty close to 0%. The reason is that ambrosia is not inherently a red apple; its red pigment develops in response to light exposure. An ambrosia apple grown in complete shade will be yellow all over. Concomitantly, for an ambrosia to be uniformly red, it needs to have light exposure on all four sides, which occurs very rarely under natural lighting conditions. So why is this picture being used to represent ambrosia apples, if it is not what ambrosia apples actually look like?

Before I go on, you should know that more red colour on an ambrosia does not mean better taste. If anything, it might be the other way around (since “high rates of anthrocyanin, the red color pigment, have been shown to interfere with the development of flavour volatiles.” Edwards 1998:180).

Nevertheless, peoples’ monkey brains like the colour red. Studies have shown this, and retail executives know that people prefer redder apples. Observe anybody picking over a pile of ambrosia - do it! - and you’ll see them pick out the redder ones. (Denise MacDonald pointed out that yellow also shows bruising easier than red, so people may avoid yellower apples for that reason as well.) Okay, so what am I getting at? Well, this consumer preference for redder ambrosia has led (via a chain of decision-making that is obscure to me) the major Canadian retailers to demand that the BC apple industry produce ambrosia with higher-than-normal amounts of red blush. In the conventional market, retailers are in fact only interested in buying redder ambrosia. In short, peoples’ monkey-brain preferences have been perversely transformed into an actual imperative for apple growers to produce redder-than-natural ambrosia.

In response to this demand, the BC apple industry has (disastrously, in my opinion) capitulated to the retailers. To achieve it, the NTFVDC (a.k.a. the “Ambrosia Council”) has for years been promoting the use of Extenday - a reflective plastic sheet material that can be put down in orchard rows to increase the amount of light exposure in the orchard and therefore, the amount of red colour on ambrosia. Some problems with Extenday are that it is expensive (about $4,000 an acre), that it only lasts 6-10 years before it becomes garbage, that it is labour-intensive to install and remove, and that it interferes with the biology of the orchard floor. In summer 2022, at Peach Orchard Beach in Summerland, tree fruit growers were presented with the results of a study on the economics of Extenday. We were informed that it takes five (good) crop years to pay off an investment in Extenday. In other words, a farmer using Extenday can expect to make no profit on their ambrosia for five years, in hopes that they’ll get (up to) five years of making a profit, all assuming that there is some stability in prices and yields. Yikes! Zooming out, the larger problem with this strategy is that the more that farmers use Extenday, the more red ambrosia are produced and the more this feeds into consumers’ expectations that the ambrosia is actually a red apple - which it isn’t! In other words, it’s a positive feedback loop in which ambrosia growers stare wide-eyed into the abyss of absurdity, investing heavily in a technology to artificially colour an apple purely in order to fit retailers’ demands. And all of this is justified on the basis of consumer preference data.

The prices conventional (i.e. non organic) growers receive for normally coloured ambrosia have been below the cost of production for years now. Consequently, many conventional farmers have chosen to cut down their ambrosia trees. The organic market does not yet demand hyperred ambrosia, and we passionately hope it stays that way. Personally, we believe the use of Extenday is not consistent with organic principles, and we vow to never use it.

The point of this story is that your buying decisions matter more than you probably thought they did, and in ways you may not have any control over.

Farmers really, really need you to buy local when you can, organic when you can, and direct from farmers when you can. The way you buy does actually make a difference. Get people around you to do the same. Get more interested in the flavour of your food than in its cosmetic appearance. Campaign for more sane grading and standards. Eat a diverse diet. Try different varieties of produce. Examine your expectations. Ask more questions.

4. Protect farmland

In BC, we are extremely lucky to have an Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), a bank of land that is zoned specifically for agriculture. We need to find ways to ensure that this land bank is maintained, and that aspiring food producers are able to access and make use of it.

Earlier in 2022, the BC government decided to allow indoor vertical farms on ALR land. This decision was problematic for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that the government fundamentally does not understand the purpose and value of the ALR, which is not just reserved space for agriculture, but a reserved soil bank for agriculture. Installing a vertical farm on a piece of soil ruins that piece of soil just as much as a parking lot does. Second, this decision will probably drive up the price of ALR land. Don’t get me wrong - vertical farms are great in concept, and are definitely part of the solution - but they are industrial operations, and should be built in industrial areas. Not on agricultural soil.

A lot of the decision-making around removing land from the ALR is made at the municipal level. We need more people to attend council meetings and do the (often painstaking) work of protecting the ALR and maintaining connected agricultural regions.

Conclusion

There are just a few final loose ends I’d like to share before I end this rant.

1. There is a lot of hype about agritech these days. It’s true that we live in a time of mind-bending innovation, ample scientific knowledge, and technological opportunity. Farmers are quick to absorb information and adopt technological solutions that fill their needs. The reality is, though, that farmers can’t make use of these things if they are chronically stressed and impoverished. Farmers need to receive a higher proportion of the value that is generated on farms, and this needs to happen soon. Otherwise, who is investment in agritech actually benefiting?

2. In recent years, governments’ attention has been taken up increasingly by the need to respond to natural disasters. This trend is likely to continue into the future, meaning that there might be less attention available, on the part of governments, for solving systemic problems in agriculture. To create a more resilient food system, I think we need to be less reactive and more proactive, and we probably need to rely less on government and more on ourselves and our allied organizations. This will involve forming new kinds of alliances amongst and between between farmers, packers, processors, distributors, and retailers. These alliances must be mutualistic in nature, not parasitic. The parts need to depend on each other for the whole system to function.

Katie Sardinha

Works Cited

Edwards, Linda (1998). Organic Tree Fruit Management. Certified Organic Associations of British Columbia.