DECEMBER 2016 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC Dairy acquired a legacy of trouble with ‘field of concern’


“Everyone thinks this is a big corporation. This is the family farm.”


DAIRY nfrom page 1


“Milk prices get tighter, our margins get smaller, you have to get more efficient,” Dale Jansen says.


Special report PETER MITHAM


What was a 600-cow farm in 2006 has expanded to 960 head, all of them Holsteins. The farm now owns 1,300 acres, up from 760 a decade ago, and has access to a further 700 as far away as Lavington, east of Vernon. Andrew and Dale recently bought out their brother’s interest.


While not uncommon in the Lower Mainland, the size of the farm has spooked local residents. What are common farm practices elsewhere have sparked concern here. When the Interior Health Authority told Steele Springs households to test their water after nitrates twice the allowable limit of 10 parts per million (ppm) were found in 2014, it was a case of déjà vu.


A feedlot on a 220-acre property the Jansens acquired for their operation had been pegged as leaching nitrates into the local aquifer in the 1980s.


With the latest contamination, all eyes turned to the Jansens.


“We’ve had people ask, ‘You don’t live near that big dairy do


you?’” he says, noting how things become uncomfortable when people find out they’re actually the operators. “You tend to make friends that aren’t right here.”


It’s a shift from 2008 when an open house attracted 900 people to the farm to see what was considered a state- of-the-art operation. The family had planned the move carefully when it found it couldn’t expand in Matsqui. The farm drafted an Environmental Farm Plan – something it hadn’t had in the Fraser Valley – to guide its work. A flush system, common at some of the province’s largest operations, was chosen to clear manure. An earthen lagoon 500 feet by 300 feet, with a volume of


The dairy farm near Armstrong at the centre of concern regarding water quality. PETER MITHAM PHOTO


3.3 million cubic feet, was constructed. Similar to municipal sewage lagoons, the facility was equipped with a liner in accordance with provincial standards. All manure cleared from the barn undergoes mechanical separation into solids, which are dried into flakes for use at a farm in Lavington and liquid (effectively, grey water) that’s reused for flushing the barn.


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Any excess liquid is deposited in the lagoon and used on the fields.


The liquid effluent is less dense, typically with 10 pounds of solid per 1,000 gallons rather than 30 to 40 pounds per 1,000 gallons. This makes it easier to pipe to the fields than solids, and the nitrates are more readily


absorbed.


However, the critics don’t see it that way.


Brian Upper, a retired


livestock vet who oversees the Steele Springs Water District, and the Save Hullcar Aquifer Team (SHAT), a local advocacy group headed by retired


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