Members of the Agricultural Land Commission executive were pressed with tough questions in Kamloops while meeting with farmers recently.
The session was one of eight around B.C. to get public feedback on how to protect and grow farmland.
One local land owner says there are no incentives from the province to help locals keep farming.
“What could you do for an incentive? Obviously there’s monetary incentives. Like when this land was first settled there were land incentives. This land wasn’t farming land magically by nature. They had to move trees and dig ditches, work the land. But they were rewarded for it,” the farmer says.
“I’ve heard this said a few times, ‘encouraging and facilitating farming,’ what are you planning for that, what’s your agenda for that? Because all I’ve seen are restrictions and things that make it harder for small farmers, and things that devalue land actually,” the landowner says.
After a long pause, Assistant Deputy Minister of Agriculture James Mack said the budget has increased for providing services for farmers, and says a campaign is going on to encourage people to buy B.C. products.
Meanwhile, the chair of the Agricultural Land Commission admits farmers in Kamloops and across B.C. are feeling a pinch from regulations.
Speaking on the NL Morning News, Jennifer Dyson called it a feeling of “regulatory overload,” which the ALC is looking to address after consultations across the province.
“As a farmer myself, the kind of regulatory overload – whether it’s the open-burning regulations, the Water Sustainability Act, it’s nutrient management, there’s so many things that affect our bottom line.”
Dyson says the goal is to make sure farms profitable while abiding by provincial rules and regulations.
Some farmers have protested changes to Bills 15 and 52 which have both been passed this year, which affect secondary land use and secondary dwellings on ALR land.
“A lot of concern about, what happens to farm dwellings that are already there? And believe me we are all about ensuring that second dwellings, third dwellings, fourth dwellings, there’s no limit to dwellings. If it’s needed for the farm or ranch, that’s very much a part of what we’ve been doing for years. But it’s kind of a new switch on the legislation,” Dyson says.
