What’s happening with the weather in BC? As a representative of Quebec’s farmers through general farm organizations, milk and beef boards, I have had the opportunity to visit Canada’s provinces and make life-long friends from east to west. Although completely different, I thoroughly enjoyed the two extreme west and easterly provinces.
Until this past week, I had given the nod to . . .
BC as the province with the nicest climate and most spectacular views. After a heat dome settled over BC’s largest city this summer which caused many people to die from heat exhaustion, sitting in the shade under a big maple in Pontiac County seemed like a pretty nice place to live. Then, after watching the number and gravity of forest fires in BC escalate over the past few years, the TV views of hundreds of thousands of hectares of beautiful fully-grown forests burning uncontrolled, outweighed my thoughts of the beautiful Rockey mountains of BC.
In the middle of November 2021, we watched helplessly as torrential rains caused flooding of towns and farms, mud and rock slides that destroyed roads, railroads and washed out bridges. This left BC cut off from its own food supply and unable to move food and other supplies which left many thousands of residents relying only on helicopters to bring necessities, and Canada unable to get exports like grain to its only western seaport.
My first trip to BC was a week-long organized ‘educational holiday’ trip to visit some of the most progressive dairy farms in North America. Many of those very progressive farms are in that same Fraser Valley that was flooded when a dyke that had never been breached before couldn’t withstand the flood of water that not only came south from the Rockies but also north from Washington state.
Those dairy farms that were flooded provided more than three-quarters of the BC milk supply. Even though everyone in that flood zone was ordered to leave, the dairy farmers refused to leave until 11,000 cows were moved out of their barns to higher ground. Those farmers worked day and night in sometimes shoulder-deep water with the aid of high tractors, boats, jet-skies and sometimes just leading animals to safety. Some smaller animals were too short to keep their heads above water and drowned before they could be evacuated. No mention was made of any members of PETA being there to help rescue any animals or birds.
There has been no estimate of what the clean-up cost will be, or even the cost of getting those sixty plus dairy farms back to producing most of BC’s milk. BC’s dairy cattle have the highest milk production per cow in Canada.
From standing in very cold water for days before being rescued, many of those animals will have pneumonia and some will not get better. Animals treated with antibiotics to bring them back to good health means that their milk must be discarded for many days. The milk loss alone will be more than $5,000 per farm per day.
So why did this happen? Many of us haven’t noticed a gradual change in temperature but farmers now grow grain corn, soybeans and even grapes for wine in Pontiac County where half a century ago none of these crops could be found. Why was that heat dome over Vancouver this summer? Why have the numbers and intensity of forest fires been noticeably increasing in the past few years? Why did this enormous rain flood so much of BC in November? Maybe practices of timber management contributed to more clear-cutting and trash being left in the forest for fuel to make forest fires easier to start and harder to stop? Large clear-cuts and massive areas that were burnt bare, and even into the ground to burn roots, have contributed to less water-holding capacity as well as the ability of the forests to uptake surplus water and diminishes the ability of grasses and trees to stabilize steep slopes and slow down runoff from mountain slopes.
No estimate has been calculated for the cost of forest fires, or clean-up and total costs related to the recent flooding in BC, but it will be an expensive lesson in economics that the people in BC and Canada may attribute to climate change.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
