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COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • DECEMBER 2016 Kamloops home to Canada’s largest hop farm by TOM WALKER
KAMLOOPS – Joey Bedard is enthusiastic. He’s just completed harvesting and processing his first full crop from Canada Hops, the largest hop farm in the country at 220 acres. “We had a pretty good yield of 60,000 pounds,” says Bedard. He explains that included losing 20 acres that had to be treated for crown rot.
“This was definitely a training year,” Bedard adds. “When we are in full production, we hope to see 500,000 pounds.”
Hops Canada sits in an old horse pasture on a bench above the North Thompson River, on Tk’emlups Indian band land. Bedard says he was looking for a large property to grow and support his hops brokerage business. “We had about a million in sales in 2015, buying hops from other growers. I can contract out five years in the hop world. Things were going good.” He had a small 20 acre hop farm in Ontario. “It just made sense that the next step was to grow to supplement what we are buying.”
commercial growers of Sorachi Ace, developed by Sapporo breweries in Japan,” says Bedard. “It grew and yielded well and right now, it’s the most expensive hop in the world. The Yakima and Oregon guys are having a hell of a time growing it. It needs cold nights.”
Operations manager Ian Matthews and founder Joey Bedard TOM WALKER PHOTO
“I approached the band to do just a lease and part of the lease agreement is that they want to see your business plan,” says Bedard. “And at that point, they wouldn’t let me lease. They bought me out and I formed a partnership with the band. So I own 33% of the farm and brokerage, and the band owns 66%.” “The land is part of the band’s capital investment. We get the land at a good price for the first three years,” adds Bedard.
The fields are covered with 7,000 spruce poles.
“We got ours for $6 each,” says Bedard. “The Tk’emlups Forestry Development Corporation was doing a thinning contract. The cheapest I found short of doing it yourself was US$35.” “There is about 2 million feet of wire up there to trellis the hops,” adds Bedard. “And 160 km of drip irrigation.”
Bedard says there were challenges that contributed to the rot.
“Part was issues with the irrigation system, the wet summer, the contours of our land and a thick mat of weeds that kept the moisture in.” The bench land had been fallow for years, but when they began to water it, the weeds just exploded. “We tried 11 different hop varieties and four turned out very well. We are going to be the only
“Cascade and Chinook are definitely my two favorite ones, followed by Centennial,” he says. “Even if Centennial doesn’t do very well, it’s worth a pile of money and it’s in high demand.” “I think Kamloops could beat the rest of the world in Chinook production,” Bedard says. “It’s not very sexy but it’s in high demand. I think I can get 3,000 pounds an acre and at $7 a pound, that’s a great harvester for us.” Established growing regions have bred plants adapted to their local
climate that need fewer inputs.
“(Associate Professor of Microbiology) Jonathan Van Hamme from TRU (Thompson Rivers University) is amazing. He is helping us with our plant genetics. We found a male plant at a golf course in a planting that has been there over 25 years. They don’t water these plants and they yield like crazy. We are trying to breed Chinook with the local. Right now, for me to get 3,000 pounds out of an acre, I’m going to put on at least a $1,000 of fertilizer and a guy in Yakima can get that yield from $200. That’s what we need to do.”
“With the cool weather the end of August and early September, it was like the hops waited for us to harvest them,” says Bedard. “I’ve never smelled hops that smell as strong as our hops do this year.”
OUR TEAM OF EXPERTS
British Columbia / Evergro Gurnaib Gill Fraser Valley
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418 666-8947
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