More proof the liberals don’t care about anyone but big business.

BC is for sale

I’d like to know how much of the land in the ALR in Zones 1 and 2 are suitable for farming.

It’s one thing to love local food production (and people in the Okanagan and LML are fortunate in these regards), but it’s much tougher for people in the rest of the Province where many crops simply can’t grow.

If you are living in PG, what are your local options for fruit? We used to get vegetables from a local farm each week, but we always had to supplement it with the stuff that couldn’t be sourced locally. I doubt that would be required in other areas of the Province if you really wanted to source locally.

Just because there is a pile of land sitting in the ALR, it doesn’t mean it’s useful. Perhaps the Province would be better served to further develop the farming industry in those areas of the Province most suited to those activities and ensure that products can be more readily distributed.

The real problem in North Central BC is not so much as to what you can grow, its the lack of a market. Low population restricts local sales, and high transportation costs impedes selling in high population areas.

Farmers have some serious issues, not the least of which is finding someone to run the farm.

Allowing them to have 5 or 10 lots on their farm land for development, or some sort of commercial business **COULD** be a way for them to make enough money so that running a farm is viable.

Cattle, sheep, and hay, seem to be the order of the day at this time.

There are also restrictions on raising meat for local sale, along with restrictions for chickens, eggs, etc;, so its a big problem.

We need more than **lip service** to solve this problem.

Talked to someone the other day who had experience growing veggies in the best part of the north for such activity, the Peace Valley. Lots of stuff grows fine, the problem is market, people can not be bothered to support and buy locally, so he had to plow good stuff under. The potential for food production is there in the north , just not supported. We will pay for this short sightedness in the future, when the options of imported goods becomes expensive, or just not as available. We import over half of our food in BC, and this amount is growing as population increases and farmland disappears. Localized production and incentives could help resolve this but Christie and BC Hydro have dollar signs in their eyes, so will do nothing.

ALR,already has the ability to remove lands and a detailed process before removal this Bill is just aimed to make access easy for oil, gas, mining so cut the BS.

Palopu posts: “Low population restricts local sales, and high transportation costs impedes selling in high population areas.”

That explains why we get 2 pounds of strawberries selling for $3.99 at Superstore. Strawberries that come from Central California.

Did you know that there are vast tracks of land, for instance in the Santa Barbara area, that are grown in covered, controlled conditions, just as our interior tree seedlings are grown for planting, yet we cannot put some of that “waste” wood left in the forests to use heating greenhouses to grow ….. let’s see …. what was it now …. strawberries?

There is that saying …. where there is a will there is a way … seems that Californians have a will, but those of us living in the Cultural Mecca of the Central Interior don’t quite have it.
;-)

A trucker once told me that to send a truck from here to Central California costs the same as to send that truck from Central California to here.

Now that we have the transportation cost solved, let us deal with the real hurdles …. maybe NMG is onto something.

;-)

Gus. Your trucker was wrong. Sending a truck from here to California is what is referred to as a **Back Haul**, The **Head Haul** is from California to Prince George. Would be approx. $1500.00 per truck more expensive going South to North.

Much worse if you are hauling into the Yukon, or Alaska.

Greenhouses in San Augustin near Almería, Andalusia, Spain

http://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/greenhouses-in-san-augustin-near-almerc3ada-andalusia-spain.jpg

Guess what weather conditions they have there which causes them to require greenhouses in a warm climate, yet build so many of them in one place …..

It is the reverse if you were shipping goods north to south … ;-)

way way way better to have to ask Dave Barrett for his permission to utilize your property.

There are a lot of folks living on a few acres in the ALR who raise half a dozen chickens just to beat the tax laws, so I don’t think tinkering with the ALR rules is only done by big business and government.

long overdue. The usual “sky is falling” naysayers who know little of the issues are coming out of the woodwork. My concern is general property rights. Some unelected board decides what I can do with my land? It is obvious that much ALR is marginal at best for farming yet the ALR still clings to a decades old mandate that is clearly nonsensical in many cases.

Sell out to big business P Val? whatever. Many landowners effected by the ALR are hardly big business. Shouldn’t you be “occupying” something?

If you can grow something, anything you can be sure you’ll be under the thumb of some marketing board bureaucracy. Good luck with that. Let freedom rain.

Seems strange that we spend $1500.00 to bring produce from Californian but its expensive to truck from local producer’s to local retailers.

I would think there is no will for farming locally. Just to much work for the reward. Some just think being able to buy the Keg is just not reward enough.Its just more work.
Cheers

One can always purchase a $50 thousand dollar plus pick up truck and then go shopping and bitch about the price of cauliflower.

You have some “marketing board bureaucracy” putting the thumb on the farmer because of the current necessity to artificially ‘keep the price up’ to a level that is supposed to give the farmer a chance at recovering his ‘costs’. They do this by keeping produce that is plentiful, or could easily be, artificially scarce.

Trouble is, the consumer has to bear that increased price, (out of an income that often isn’t), and marketing boards are really counter-productive since there’s no way they can also control the farmer’s ‘costs’, which continue to rise.

In the end they create the very conditions they were supposed to alleviate ~ a concentration of small farms into a few very large factory farms selling their produce into a protected market which gouges the consumer with artificially high prices. And continually leads to these organisations getting larger and larger and more monopolistic as time goes on, necessary to keep their own increasing costs within the bounds of their continued profitability.

It’s a completely ass-backwards solution to a very real problem, (one that’s not unique to agriculture, either, but pervades our whole industrial system, causing essentially the same detriments).

The solution isn’t to make what’s ‘physically’ plentiful scarce, but rather to make what’s ‘financially’ scarce plentiful~ ‘money’ itself, or rather the purchasing power it’s supposed to have. Which should be vastly increasing with each advance of technology and genuine efficiency, but currently on an overall basis is definitely not.

Bill Vanderzalm said he was gonna get rid of marketing boards. Meh, politicians, eh?

Politicians are great for only wanting to deal with half of every problem. That’s what Barrett did when the ALR was brought in. It protected farmland but did nothing to protect the livelihood and viability of the farmer.

Would’ve made more sense to have had a Soils Preservation Act, where a developer wanting to use farm land classified with good growing soil on it was required to remove that soil and replace it with non-arable material.

The notion that there’s something renewable about much of the agricultural land the ALR was primarily aimed at protecting is nonsense. The Fraser Valley farmlands have all been diked, and it’s only under an unusual condition that they’d ever flood over like they once did. They’re no longer like the annual flood of the Nile in historic Egypt renewing the delta with new soil from upstream. Most of the soil that goes down the Fraser heads right out into the Straits of Georgia, or whatever we’re calling that body of water nowadays.

The main reason Barrett put in the ALR was to drive up the price of all the lands not included in it, which it did, so he could tax them more. Which he did, too. (And we sank deeper in debt with each increase in those taxes ever since.)

And speaking of Barrett and agriculture, he was just his generation’s perpetuation of that little ‘corn racket’ one of his co-religionist ancestors worked on the ancient Egyptians way back in the days of Joseph, that Biblical ‘coat of many colors’ fellow.

The one that saw the Egyptian farmers paying (being taxed) ‘in money’ to buy back their own corn crops they’d given up a portion of ‘in kind’ each year of bountiful harvest to provide sustenance in the poor crop years that followed.

They paid for their own land’s dispossession into the ‘name’ of Pharaoh, a convenient front for the real power behind the throne, and their new slave-master.

Retired is your home on what used to be farm land? How’s your hockey debt down there? They catch the arsonists in lotus land yet?

This is nothing more than land arbitrage. Buying cheep land that is supposed to be protected under the ALR for the viability of farming, and then taking it out of the ALR and developing it at a market value. Its land speculation at its worst.

Its future generations that loose out as they no longer will be able to afford to buy farmland at the fair market value of developed land.

If this is the game played then it would only be fair to have capital gains paid on the difference of assessment values, and property taxes paid at fair market value for its development potential like any other land.

Attacking the farming industry in the north through this change to the ALR comes at the worst possible time. A time when we have signed free trade agreements with nations like South Korea where the biggest gains for Canadians is supposed to be the removal of trade tariffs on Canadian cattle, which incidentally the land in the Interior and Northeast is prime land for this type of farming.

You can grow vegetables on a small plot of land like they have in the Okanogan or the Lower Mainland (and more easily absorb the full cost of that land if not in the ALR), but if you want to grow a herd of cattle you need the protection of an ALR to make the land cost viable for an operation to work.

Those that complain about the ALR should buy land that is not in the ALR, or pressure government to sell crown land that is not on prime ALR soil. But to attack the future of viable farming in the north is reprehensible IMO.

A very insightful comment Eagleone.

I think the Oil & Gas industry are now running BC just like they are running Alberta and now the Harper Government.

Hate to see BC end up like Alberta, but that’s where we are headed. Access to our ALR and now our Parks. Like Alberta, landowners here in BC will end up with very little rights.

http://www.alc.gov.bc.ca/Commission/oil-gas_ALR.htm

http://action.sumofus.org/a/bc-parks-open-oil-gas-mining/

Landowners already have very little rights when it comes down to it, Peeps. But this goes back to colonialism. It’s got nothing to do with your usual favorite targets.

eagle, with the proposed changes it does not gut the farming sector. It still has to be approved by the alr. IT does however change the system from one size fits all to one where local concerns and conditions can have influence on the outcome. This is a necessary evolution and I struggle to see the fight against it.

and then there is peeps, posting under another username. whats this, 3 now. Are your trolling fees on a contract basis? New contract, new username? May I suggest your fourth username be “village idiot”.

Don’t know who everyone is talking about, but calling someone a “village idiot” is name calling and should get you kicked off this site!

As for taking away individual land rights, an all controlling Alberta Conservative Government is doing exactly that.

If you do not have the patience to read the entire Alberta Landowners Council handout, skip to the second last page and read the National Post article titled: “Alberta passes draconian laws abolishing property rights”

http://www.landownersagainstbills.com/ALC-Mtg%20Handout%20Package_Jan%202012.pdf