Thank you for having me here today. My name is Madeleine Van Roechoudt. I'm a third-generation apple grower from Winfield, which is half an hour north of here. I completed my degree in agriculture at the University of British Columbia, and am about to start an online MBA through Athabasca University, next month.
In the interests of time, I have narrowed challenges in my sector to three.
Number one is the high cost of land. Here in the Okanagan, land goes for $80,000 to $100,000 an acre.
Number two is low returns to growers. When you're paying a mortgage for really expensive land and you're not making much money, that's a pretty challenging life.
The third challenge is an inability to brand produce. Produce doesn't come in the store with a package that explains its virtues or its origin. If you read next to the price, it might say “Product of B.C.”, but so often when you actually look in the bin--with apples, anyway--they're Washington state apples.
Even if a consumer was wanting to buy local, they'd really have to look. With the new stickers that go on apples, with the bar code for traceability and ease for cashiers, the little logo that says where it's from is so small that I think you'd have to get your magnifying glass out. How can you promote your product when the consumer can't even identify what it is?
With these challenges, we don't have a competitive advantage. We were making money growing premium products, but as I've mentioned, we are obviously not a low-cost producer. So how are we to compete with the rest of the world in a global marketplace?
With those things in mind, the question that comes to my mind is this: is it important for Canadians for us to be producing Canadian food? If it's not, then we'll just let the global market run its course, and those without a competitive advantage will die out. If it is important, then what programs do we have to help farmers?
Existing programs that are helpful are the replant and removal programs. These help farmers pull out old orchards and replant with higher densities and newer varieties. That helps with the rejuvenation of the orchards here.
AgriStability is helpful, but I think it's designed mostly for markets where prices are fluctuating up and down. When you're having diminishing returns year after year, it's not going to help in the long term if it's not solving your problem of decreasing returns.
Research is essential to stay leaders in our industry, to have new varieties, and to have solutions against pests and diseases.
As for programs that we don't have that we need, there are no programs for young farmers here in British Columbia. I wasn't aware of any, so I did a little research. I didn't find any.
I found one that helps guarantee loans up to $500,000. Well, $500,000 in the Okanagan doesn't buy very much. At $100,000 an acre, we're looking at maybe five acres. That's not including any machinery or buildings.
We need a program that's going to match young farmers to landowners who want to lease their land long term. There are people in the Okanagan who move here--they're wealthy, they have money--and they want the rural lifestyle but don't want to farm. They have the land. How can we match young farmers to these people who have the land but who don't want to farm? If they're willing to agree to long-term leases, then that gives the farmer the ability to plant something like tree fruits that take several years to be established and get going.
Another program we need is for marketing and branding. We need a way to exclaim the virtues of our products to consumers, to have “buy local” campaigns to know that farms are bringing benefits such as environmental stewards and carbon sinks and green spaces. That's on top of the jobs that farms are providing into the local economy. So we need these buy local campaigns to identify those kinds of attributes, but then also to be able to identify local products in grocery stores. Without that, how are you to buy something local even if you wanted to?
Those are my main points.
Sorry if I rushed; I was trying to stay within my time constraint.