4 Taking stock


There’s a lot of concern across BC about how the provincial government should be supporting farming. Various legislative and policy changes have resulted in confusion about what’s allowed on farmland, whether what was allowed is still allowed and what may not be allowed in the future. BC agriculture minister Lana Popham presents figures on the opposite page suggesting that farming in BC is thriving. Total farmgate revenues rose 6% in 2018 to $3.4 billion. Total agrifood revenues, including seafood and food processing, also increased 6%, to $15 billion. The result was an additional 2,000 jobs in an industry that employs 63,000 overall. But down on the farm, there’s a much-publicized shortage of domestic


workers and rising costs. According to the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council, BC brings


in more than 10,600 foreign workers each year to fill positions many domestic workers consider low-paying or beneath them. Most of those workers are productive enough to pay for their presence, but labour is among the biggest cost on the province’s farms. The rising minimum wage isn’t making workers any cheaper to hire, and automation represents a significant capital investment. Small wonder, then, that the BC agriculture sector as a whole lost $11.3 million last year, the first year of negative net income since 2014. Rising revenues are great, if they cover costs. Ottawa has its own plans to boost agrifood revenues to $75 billion by 2025, something we expect the new government in Ottawa will continue to support. The food our farms produce is a good news story, one we’re willing to swallow. And what government bites the hand that feeds it? Concessions on trade deals certainly bite, but Ottawa has promised the supply-managed sectors compensation deals. It recognizes support is needed when times change. It’s the kind of attitude many growers in BC say is needed here as land costs outstrip revenue growth on the country’s most expensive farmland, and new rules focus landowners on farming before considering agritourism, processing and other uses.


COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • NOVEMBER 2019


Canada enjoys the peace and freedom fundamental to success. We


remember the cost each Remembrance Day, and the sacrifices made fighting to ensure others enjoy freedom, too. With a new government in Ottawa and a provincial government that’s pledged to hear farmers’ concerns, we hope the sacrifices of farmers – financial, physical and emotional – won’t be taken for granted. All governments have their battle plans for growing agriculture, but its farmers’ boots on the ground in the battle to deliver safe, high-quality food.


Remembering Aunt Dolly, and others To my brother and I and 13 of our cousins, she was Aunt Dolly. But she


wasn’t really our aunt. My mother called her Aunt Dolly, but she wasn’t her aunt either. She was my grandma’s cousin. Aunt Dolly was a McLeod, but her mother and grandma’s were both Buchanans.


As kids we would see Aunt Dolly


The Back Forty BOB COLLINS


several times a year. In some ways, she was like another Grandma. She always seemed happy to see us and would quiz us at length about our health, interests and progress at school. Our answers were always polite but brief. We were far too


busy with our own little worlds to spend time chitchatting very much with a lady who was older than our grandma. She loved us anyway. She always remembered our birthdays with a card and a dollar and there was a present from her for each of us under the tree every Christmas. We probably didn’t deserve the Christmas present, unappreciative little swine that we were. She sent the same present to all of us each year, and she sent the same present every year: monogrammed handkerchiefs. Handkerchiefs were an awfully long way down any of our Christmas wish lists and we were all a little too young to appreciate the hours she must have spent stitching our first initial flawlessly into the corner of every one. The handkerchiefs were too perfect for everyday use. Mine piled up in my


sock drawer and only came out on Sundays when one would peek out of the breast pocket of my church suit jacket. As I grew older, I began to look forward to Aunt Dolly’s handkerchiefs. They became a predictable Christmas tradition, like the cardboard star that crowned the tree every year. Gradually, I came to realize that Aunt Dolly’s real gift to us was her time. She could just as easily have shipped us a cheap hankie right off some dime store shelf, or she could have just stuffed a dollar into an envelope with our name on it. But she didn’t. She spent hours embroidering her affection into those handkerchiefs, making each one unmistakably our own. Eventually the handkerchiefs stopped coming. We kids were growing up


and Aunt Dolly was growing old. It wasn’t until after she died that I really stopped to wonder why she had been so fond of us, her cousin’s grandchildren.


“Because she had no children of her own,” Grandma said. “Why not?” “Because her young man was killed in the war.” “Her young man” was Grandma’s way of saying fiancé. I never knew Aunt Dolly except as an old lady. But, of course, she had once


been young and carefree and in love. Her marriage was postponed when her “young man” marched off an Ontario farm and on to the war in France. He never came home. Aunt Dolly was left with the memory of their last lingering kiss on the train station platform and the broken promise of his return. She never found another young man. Didn’t look for one according to Grandma. But even if she had, the cruel tally of the “war to end all wars” left young men in short supply. Eventually, Aunt Dolly took a job as the town clerk in rural Saskatchewan. Decades later, she moved on to BC where she spent her retirement years doting on her cousin’s grandkids. I can’t help thinking about Aunt Dolly at this time of year. About how the war changed her life. About her young man and their unborn children. And thinking of her makes me wish for a lot of things. I wish that on Remembrance Day, everyone could spare a thought for Aunt Dolly and everyone like her who lost a “young man” to war. I wish I knew her young man’s name. I wish he’d come home, and I’d never even met Aunt Dolly because she was still in Ontario spending her love on her own grandchildren instead of stitching it into the corner of hankies for her cousin’s grandchildren. I wish I’d appreciated those handkerchiefs more when I was young. And I wish I still had one now. Bob Collins raises beef cattle and grows produce on his farm in the Alberni


Valley. This column first appeared, Bob figures, in 1997 (about the time he started writing for Country Life in BC). Every year since, he’s been called upon to read it at Remembrance Day ceremonies in the Alberni Valley.


Publisher Cathy Glover


The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915 Vol.105 No.11 . NOVEMBER 2019


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