For as long as Ashley Anderson can remember, she has wanted to be a police officer. When she was a little girl, she would sing along to Bad Boys every time the Crime Stoppers ad would come on TV.
Budding farmer gets chance to grow Keremeos dream orchard thanks to land-matching program infotel.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from infotel.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This year, Kanver Brares will be tending his own fruit trees in the Similkameen Valley a dream he has had since childhood thanks to a budding provincial program matching new farmers with land.
Agricultural land is notoriously expensive in B.C., making it hard for new farmers like Brares to enter the industry. That s worrying: Most farmers in the province are nearing retirement. Already, more than half the province s produce is imported, leaving it susceptible to everything from drought to political upheavals.
In 2016, the provincial government partnered with Young Agrarians, a network for young and new farmers across the country, to help them overcome the financial hurdle. The B.C. Land Matching Program has since linked about 100 farmers with land to grow their crops in Brares case, a 25-year-old orchard, farm, and B&B. He’ll be leasing the business and land from Old Tower Farm in Keremeos. It s an exciting shift for the 21-year-old, who realized an office job wasn t for
Churches violating COVID-19 rules should lose tax grant, says Township of Langley councillor
Churches in the Township of Langley could lose property tax grants after being fined for breaking COVID-19 rules if a local councillor succeeds with a motion presented to council this week.
Social Sharing
In the 1990s, sweet cherries were a fledgling crop in B.C. with only $500,000 in annual sales. There weren’t many varieties in the province, and B.C. was locked in competition with Washington state, the biggest producer of sweet cherries in North America. And it was losing the battle.
But when the research centre, which has now bred 80 per cent of the sweet cherry varieties being grown around the world, released the Staccato variety for commercial planting in the 2000s, it changed the game for the province.
With a deeply red skin and sweet taste, Staccato cherries are not ripe for picking until August much later than the harvest season for popular varieties from Washington state. This opened up a whole new market for B.C.’s sweet cherries and transformed them into a multimillion-dollar industry. Today, almost all of Canada’s sweet cherries are grown in the Okanagan.