Definitely abattoirs, as I brought up, present a hurdle for anyone trying to do livestock care. We used to have a very vibrant dairy industry. We had a lot of quota for chickens and cows. Those have left the island for a variety of reasons. A major one was changes in regulations that were just too prohibitive for the small-scale farmer to run their own little processing and their own abattoir, when they would need a bathroom separate from the farmhouse. I even heard they would need one bathroom for the girls and one for the boys, but that might have changed.
When the processing regulations shifted a few years ago, we lost a lot of abattoirs right off the island completely. Definitely processing is the number one hurdle, especially with poultry and beef, which is mostly what is raised here, and again there's the kitchen capacity of a small-scale farmer. Maybe they just want to grow potatoes and not a huge amount of vegetables.
There isn't storage here. There are no cold storage facilities here in Cowichan at all. That's another thing that would be part of our hub.
Also, to be honest, there isn't a lot of manpower. Labour is expensive, so one of the services we want to set up in our new kitchen is a processing service so you can drop off your vegetables. You've already worked all day. You've harvested all day. Maybe you've been at two or three farmers' markets. You can drop off your excess, and we'll process it for you and give it back to you with a fee for service. One of the things I'm hearing from farmers is, “I don't have time to process”, so we're hoping to provide that service as well.
Then there's competing on price, as I said in my presentation. It's very, very hard to grow an organic carrot and sell it at a price that has value for you and your family, when carrots in Walmart are dirt cheap.