4 Inside information Consumers have put local food on the agenda of government and made


heroes of the farmers who produce it. The knowledge of those who work the soil to feed politicians and prisoners alike has a prophetic weight in the public square, at least when it chimes with social priorities. But over the past month, all levels of government have demonstrated that


local knowledge doesn’t always get the hearing you might expect. This was the message the interim report from the committee charged with suggesting ways to revitalize the Agricultural Land Commission sent when it recommended scrapping the regional panels introduced in 2002. While former ALC chair Frank Leonard felt the panels gave property owners a fair hearing and showed that the commission wasn’t just handing down decisions from the confines of an office in Burnaby, the committee deemed local perspectives a threat to the integrity of the commission’s decisions. The province’s agriculture minister seems to think so, too, based on comments before and during her term in office. Meanwhile, over at the environment ministry, work is ramping up towards


creation of a national park reserve in the South Okanagan where ranchers have been managing the land for generations. Several tracts are also in the care of conservation groups, and the two are set to become unlikely allies as the federal and provincial governments work with the Okanagan Nation Alliance to create the reserve. Conservation groups and ranchers alike don’t see any need for government interference. Ranchers note the species government wants to protect are likely those that have found a home on their range since time immemorial. Conservation groups say government needs to work with existing land managers, because they have property knowledge (not to mention property rights) that demand respect. Ironically, the importance of tapping local knowledge was foregrounded in the independent report on the province’s handling of the 2017 wildfire season. “Local citizens brought not only energy and resources, but also an intimate knowledge of their lands,” the report said. While there’s been some improvement this year, frustrations were on the rise by late August as wildfires burned into new areas. Many regional districts


COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • SEPTEMBER 2018


have yet to learn the lessons of 2017, contributing to confusion and wasting energy better spent putting out fires on rangeland rather than in the chain of command. Agriculture ministry staff, by all accounts, were on the ball. This begs the question: if local knowledge can help fight wildfires, why not use it to manage the land under normal circumstances? Going local is big business, as anyone courting consumers knows. The inside


information farmers and ranchers have about their land should be the go-to resource government consults if it wants to put agriculture first in rural land use decisions.


Quantum change in the barn and kitchen


I milked my first cow in the summer of 1960. I was 11 years old and the technology at hand was a bucket, a stool and an old bicycle tire. The bicycle tire seemed to me a particularly clever innovation. Placed over


the cow’s hips and hung around her hind end, it spared the milker from the incessant lash of the cow’s tail and any unwelcome foreign matter it might have on board. Four summers later, I was


The Back Forty BOB COLLINS


milking 35 registered Ayrshires several afternoons a week. It was a far cry from the stool and bike tire, though there was


still a bucket involved. Cows were milked three at a time with Surge bucket milkers that hung from surcingle straps slung around their middles. The milk was poured from the milking machines into a pail which was lugged into the dairy and weighed on a carefully calibrated spring scale. The net weight of the contents was fastidiously recorded on the daily ROP (record of production) sheet before the milk was poured into a strainer sitting on top of the bulk tank. The last year for milkcan pick up in our neck of the woods was 1964 and it was the year that most of the local dairymen either expanded or called it quits. What impressed me the most, all those summers ago, was the moving chain that cleaned the Ayrshire’s gutter at the end of the day. Little did I understand that mechanizing the gutter was ultimately futile because the gutter itself was obsolete. I wonder what some of those old-timers who threw in the towel back in 1964


would make of today’s farms. They would surely be surprised to find that an AI technician isn’t necessarily someone lugging a tank of liquid nitrogen from farm-to-farm. Robotic milkers would seem as far-fetched as pocket-sized telephones that work without wires and take pictures without film. They would be hard-pressed to comprehend the scope and pace of the technological change that has transformed the industry. For some sense of their challenge, try to predict the changes the next 50 years will bring.


Mechanization in the last half of the 20th century dramatically magnified


productivity. Fewer and fewer farmers grew larger and larger crops. Digital technology, wireless communication, global positioning systems, robotics and artificial intelligence are on the cusp of creating an entirely new agricultural reality, to the point that large numbers of farmers will become as redundant as the gutter chain I marvelled at over 55 years ago. Quantum change is underway all around us. In 2015, it was estimated that 96% of the world’s population had access to a mobile phone. (Canada, at 85%, was below the global average.) Many of those people are in constant engagement with their phones. They are everywhere, often oblivious to their surroundings, doing the zombie shuffle while they stare at a handful of pixels. Driverless cars are on the verge of hitting the highways and lifelike robotic


androids are already on the market. Nursing robots, programmed to care for the elderly, are under development as a solution to the aging population in Japan.


While we may see the technological displacement of humans in the


workplace as a long-running inevitability, it is the appearance of androids on the home front that might give us pause. Robotic companions are set to move in. Several advanced models are already on the market. Anatomically correct, inevitably young and attractive, these androids have a full range of facial expressions, can speak, converse, remember, laugh at jokes, and engage in activities from the routine to the romantic. Their personalities can be chosen from several programs and can be further customized to be moody, jealous or unpredictable so they will be more authentic. One manufacturer predicts that buyers will be hard-pressed not to fall in love. Apparently, he might be right. In April 2017, a 31-year-old robotics and artificial intelligence engineer from Hangzhou married a robot named Ying Ying that he had created. The wedding was attended by the man’s family and friends. Apparently, none of the bride’s friends or family attended. One of the man’s friends speculated that the absence of a mother-in-law would strengthen the relationship. The groom has indicated that he will continue to work on his bride so that she will become smarter, more useful, and be able to walk. I’ll bet none of those folks from 1964 saw this coming.


Publisher Cathy Glover


The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915 Vol. 104 No. 9. SEPTEMBER 2018


Published monthly by Country Life 2000 Ltd. www.countrylifeinbc.com


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