A LIE THAT HARMS 1,000 FARMS
If you’ve ever wondered what it is like to farm in BC, the answer is, “It is great until the BC government touches you.” The provincial tribunals are poison to farmers that do not practice industrialized farming. We reclaimed and fed thousands of pounds of apples last year to our hogs. The government calls it abnormal.
We simply feed high volumes because we have a large herd. We are being penalized for having a large number of animals.
Without factory farms, there would be food shortages, granted fact. Many rules and standards have been created because of problems caused by factory farming. Trying to apply these rules and standards to traditional farming is wrong. Calling traditional farming abnormal is dishonest.
If you aren’t feeding a commercial manufactured diet of pellets containing soy meal, cornmeal, salt, and synthetic vitamins to your hogs, you are someone the government doesn’t like. This is not an exaggeration or imaginary. We currently have a ruling against us for feeding “an abnormal amount” of apples from the British Columbia Farm Industry Review Board (BCFIRB).
BCFIRB is like dog crap… once you step in it, you’ll never get your shoe clean. I say this because BCFIRB has essentially given the complainant a license to continue taking pictures of my wife while she works outside on the farm under the guise of documenting our farm practices.
www.bcfarmindustryreviewboard.ca
We are now beginning our legal defense. Just to obtain the transcript of the hearing, which was open to the public, will cost us $3,700. An audio record that should be provided under the Freedom of Information Act is kept secret. Guilty until proven innocent is the order of the day.
The entire Fraser Valley can smell like sour manure, but if one vindictive lady on your street is willing to lie about the smell of fermented apples and say she has “burning eyes, nausea, and coughing” from 400 feet away, the small farm gets nailed to the board and skinned… She even copied the symptoms directly from the BCFIRB guidelines for odour complaints.
To the wannabe Sherlocks intent on “getting to the bottom” of this misleading post by running to BCFIRB’s published judgment… don’t bother, because unless you read the transcript, the original complaint, and the report from the site visit of the “Knowledgeable Persons,” you will only get the biased ruling designed to humiliate and keep a small farm from speaking up.
1,000 farms is symbolic… many small farms will get their faces pushed in the mud because of this decision. Ground feeding, although a normal farm practice, is not protected from odour complaints—even when odour cannot be found. Complainants have no burden of proof of odour or symptoms.
My actual neighbours, a father and son who live across the road ONLY 80 ft from where I feed the apples, both wrote letters supporting me. Numerous neighbours who walk their dogs past our property and ride bikes by wrote us letters. A 5th-generation apple farmer came and inspected our property and confirmed there was no issue. The small-scale meat producers association vice-president came and found no issues. The BCFIRB Knowledgeable Persons found no issues, and that is published in their report. I don’t believe the panel read any of our evidence, and guess what… I was not allowed to read from it during the review.
Many farmers are leaving British Columbia because of the cost of acquiring land and the overgrowing bureaucracy, which implements the full Global Sustainability Agenda, including water restrictions, even when the lakes are full of water. This makes farming very difficult, and many farmers are on the edge of survival.
www.freeshuswap.com/canadian-politburo/
What we need in British Columbia are leaders with common sense, practical real-life skills, and the courage to challenge the common narrative and agenda. We can still do it!
Farmer Jonathan, DB
