Three case studies examine soil management practices in the face of climate change By Rachel Penner, BC Agriculture & Food Climate Action Initiative Improving soil health is one way producers can increase the resilience of their operations in the face of climate change. The BC Agriculture & Food Climate Action Initiative (CAI) has supported multiple… Keep Reading
Anna Helmer Would you mind if we talked about Biodynamic farming? There. That’s how you keep your readership small. Those of you still with me have fought through eye-glaze and eye-roll and have resisted page turn. You will notice that even I am struggling a bit to stay on topic, and if only you could… Keep Reading
Cultivating Climate Resilience in a Living Laboratory Constance Wylie Surrounded by forest and sea, the University of British Columbia is a quick 30 minute bus ride west of downtown Vancouver. A city unto itself, more than 55,800 students and close to 15,000 faculty and staff study, work, live, and play there. A small but growing… Keep Reading
Anna Helmer Here’s a question I hear a lot: So, what are you going to do now that winter is here and there is no more farming? Leaving aside the irony that I most often hear it while selling potatoes at farmers’ market, not to mention its (alarming?) assumption that farming is not a full… Keep Reading
Shauna MacKinnon From extreme flooding to drought and previously unheard of temperature variability, climate change is a serious matter for BC organic growers. While agriculture is feeling more than its share of climate change impacts, a set of solutions exist where farmers and ranchers play a key role. Land-based climate solutions can avoid and absorb… Keep Reading
Scaling Up Organic Vegetable Seed Production in BC Emma Holmes, P.Ag The organic seed sector will be getting a boost through a comprehensive project that includes seed production, business, and market supports. FarmFolk CityFolk, which has been working to cultivate local, sustainable food systems since 1993, will be leading the project with funding provided from… Keep Reading
Michael Marrapese Agriculture as we define it today has existed for roughly 12,000 years. Though the practices have been refined over millennia, modern farmers would still recognize the intent and the activity as ‘farming.’ We can find examples of plants we recognize as cereal grains, peas, barley, wheat, rice, and squash dating back 10,000 years.… Keep Reading
BC Crop Adaptation & Diversification in Climate Change Marjorie Harris BSc, IOIA V.O. P.Ag I have stood on my back porch trying to imagine what a three kilometer high Cordilleran Ice sheet would have looked like here 12,000 years before the last big melt. It is estimated that people arrived in BC’s virgin landscape only… Keep Reading
The Dangers of Investing in the Promise of the Techno-Fix Lucy Sharratt For 20 years, the world’s biggest seed and pesticide companies have profited from selling genetically modified (GM, also called genetically engineered) seeds that are tied to their brand name herbicide formulations. In fact, almost 100% of the GM crops now grown in Canada… Keep Reading
Lennea Durant A solid health and safety program is important for any agriculture business, but workplace safety doesn’t always come naturally. Often safety practices are implemented after the fact, once a worker has been injured. There are over 26,000 agricultural workers in British Columbia and 550 organic farms operating in the province.(1) Between 2013 and… Keep Reading
