British Columbia farmers lost $ 456.9 million in 2024, according to Statistics Canada, and a Lobby group said there are multiple reasons why the agricultural sector of the province suffered the greatest net loss in Canada last year.
Statistics Canada data show that BC Farms, as a whole, has not obtained profits since 2017, and the agricultural sector has seen a larger net loss every year since 2020.
The BC Agriculture Council said that the cost of finding adequate agricultural land is prohibitively high in BC, and the average farmer in the lower continent has millions of dollars in debt.
In addition, a series of climatic disasters have wreaked havoc on the BC farms, including the floods of 2021 in the Fraser Valley that affected 1,100 farms and led to the fact that more than 60,000 hectares of cultivation lands, the president of the Agriculture Council, were lost.
The Council is asking the Government to increase its compensation programs for those affected by climatic disasters, as well as the update of the 52 -year -old agricultural land reserve (ALR) in the province to ensure that farms can survive in the next decades.
“BC is the most expensive province to cultivate in Canada,” said Woike, owner of a farm on Vancouver Island that deals mainly with eggs poultry.
Woike said that one of the greatest obstacles to the sustainability of farms, especially for farmers who do not have intergenerational wealth and land to trust, is the cost of the earth.
“You cannot simply build a poultry farm in a ground package of five acres. It doesn’t fit,” he said. “Therefore, finding those large surface are few and distant from each other, and they are expensive.”
Climate change, last obstacles rates
Woike said that climate change was a “complete chapter” in itself when it came to how farmers in the province have fought with profitability.
In 2021, an unprecedented heat dome led to fruit crops “cooking” in the branch in the valleys of Okanagan and Fraser, followed by thousands of crops submerged by floods in autumn.
Two years after that, the province saw its worst drought and seasons of forest fires in registered history. In 2024, a historical snapshot of cold led to the destruction of one -year crops in some areas.
Woike said that he appreciates the climate mitigation programs of the province and disaster help, but the application processes were often bogged down in the bureaucracy.
“These programs were not designed to make the full farmer. You know, sometimes they only cover up to 70 percent of the losses,” he said.
The BC wine industry faces catastrophic losses of wine grape crops this year. As Brady Strachan reports, a prolonged cold snapshot in January has damaged the vineyards through Okanagan.
A new obstacle that farmers face this year is the possibility of US rates, with the time that says that BC farmers depend on imports, since the province simply does not produce the correct type of fertilizers and pest control products that farmers need.
“The interruptions in these global supply chains, from the pandemic, have increased these costs of 30 percent to up to 100 percent,” he said.
Province that works to update ALR
In addition to asking the Government to increase compensation rates for help on climatic disasters, Woike said that he would like the government to update the ALR.
The program was established in 1973 to protect the land with main agricultural conditions for agriculture and livestock. He currently protects approximately 4.6 million hectares of cultivable land in BC, and Woike said he would like to see him updated.
“ALR himself says that there is still hope for future generations to pay farming lands, because it is preserved only for farms. That is very important,” Woike said.
In a statement, BC Agriculture Minister, Lana Popham, said the province is working together with farmers to build a sustainable food system in BC.
“I have heard farmers and producers about the challenges they have faced, including high costs, climatic impacts, intensified global competition, access to work and the potential impact of tariffs,” he said.
“Earlier this year, we responded to an industry application and established a new prime minister working group that is working on the most pressing problems for the agricultural and food sector, including profitability and competitiveness.”
The BC government said it provided $ 175 million to trees fruit producers through climate -related financial programs between 2020 and March 2024, and also designed specific recovery programs for large -scale climate disasters.
He added that he advocates the changes at the federal level to ensure that financing can be distributed to farmers more easily during disaster situations.
“The BC government supports the increase in food production in the ALR,” said a ministry spokesman.
“We also know that it is necessary that more lands carry out processing, and we are actively working on a renewed inventory of the ALR so that we can make better political decisions that support agriculture.”
