Looking to the Future

BoskyWoods Organic Farm rambles at the end of a small rural road off a dogleg in a secondary highway north of the township of Langley in the Fraser Valley. In many ways it is a great location. It’s close to the #1 Highway, the Fraser Highway and fairly central in the Valley so there is good access to just about anywhere in the southern part of the valley. There is a pleasant buzz of small plane traffic on the flight path to Langley airport. An unusually warm March breeze swirls among the trees. The late afternoon sun slants across the landscape and glints off the standing water in a drainage slough. Jim Boughen sips homemade wine as we talk. Jim is by nature a quiet man who is more comfortable working on machines and inventing new rigs than talking about big issues. Yet he is quietly articulate, and a keen observer.

Jim grew up on a farm near Dauphin, Manitoba. His father set up a mixed farm with a nursery and fruit operation, vegetable gardens and livestock and raised six children through the Great Depression.

Jim reflects on the farming techniques of the 1930s, “my dad was basically organic. They didn’t call it certified then.” He thinks it is extremely misinformed to call farming using pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers ‘traditional farming’. From his perspective, farming using chemicals is anything but traditional. “In my opinion when they talk about growing traditionally, chemical [use] is not traditional—organic is. We didn’t use chemicals. We used sprays but they were all organic products. We always used sulphur and lime mixtures. Certain plants, if treated in certain ways, were deadly to certain insects,” he reminds me. He remains cynical about the claims of the chemical and seed companies. “I met a man after the war who started growing vegetables and said there was a chemical to control weeds without killing vegetables. He thought he’d be able to spray all the weeds and he’d just have carrots. But of course it didn’t work,” he chuckles.

The story of how Jim arrived here in British Columbia is long and convoluted and seems somewhat typical of many teenagers who went to fight in World War Two and came home to a changed and much less innocent Canada. He received his college education on a military scholarship after the war. He had wanted to study aviation engineering but due to enrollment restrictions he opted for his second choice: agricultural technology.

Jim worked for the weather service in western Canada for many years. He spent twelve years in Dawson Creek building and operating Grandview Nurseries. He designed and fabricated most of his own machinery for the garden centre and his landscaping business. Among all the trees and shrubs he grew a couple of rows of raspberries which he sold to the locals. 25 years ago Jim moved onto what is now Boskywoods Organic Farm with his wife Mary and there he started his current nursery operation—W. J. Boughen & Sons. When I asked him why he stated quite simply, “it just seems to be the natural thing to do.”

Jim didn’t start out trying to do things organically. “We did start off with fertilizers and sprays and stuff the first while. We don’t really do that any more. The only thing we use is dormant oil or sulphur,” he notes. He tried a variety of things and after much experimentation and observation settled down into a fairly minimal intervention approach.

“At first I had lots of problems, [but after] two or three years it seemed the soil started looking after itself, and so did the bugs. The ladybugs that I was killing along with everything else came back. Even the caterpillars I don’t have any trouble with anymore.”

There are broad lessons to be learned from this simple process. From his perspective, Jim thinks that the more mankind tries to assert control over nature, the more damage we actually do. As well, nature as such is not a static syste—it is totally dynamic and has many interacting parts. Without complete understanding of the system it is not possible to predict outcomes. He reflects on this and says, “I think that’s where man has failed. In that and in medicine too. To try to control everything, it’s just not possible.” About six years ago he joined the certification committee for the BC Association of Regenerative Agriculture (BCARA), the organic certifying body in the Fraser Valley, and is actively involved in setting standards for organic farming.

In recent years there has been an alarming increase in seed patents, gene patents, and genetically engineered organisms. What was once traditional, public knowledge has been patented and copyrighted. Some of the effects of this are being felt on the ground and in the farmer’s fields. “You know with the canola oil and Percy Schmeiser, he’s still fighting it. I wonder how the Americans can come here and sue our people for patents they have in the States that we don’t have in Canada. How did our legislators or our judges find them right and fine Percy and put him out of business? I don’t understand it.” Jim feels the Canadian Government is failing in its obligation to protect farming, and hence Canadians, from corporate interests. “It really perturbs me [that] the Canadian government is going to Bangkok to petition for Terminator [seed technology] field trials. It scares the heck out of me to think about it. We don’t know what effect that’s going to have on our health or anything else down the line. If our plants are mutilated, what’s going to happen?”

The majority of farmers in the developed world have bought into the promises of the agricultural corporations. However, the promises of better yields and increased profits has not materialized. Jim speculates about what the corporations are actually doing, “they want to control all the seeds in the world. They want to get control of the world’s food.”

Jim has witnessed a number of disturbing trends occurring in the Fraser Valley. There is an inexorable push by a growing suburban population to pave over more farmland every year—first for housing then for services and amenities. As well, as property values skyrocket in Metropolitan Vancouver and its immediate surroundings, industry is moving to cheaper lands adjacent to the small towns and cities of the Fraser Valley and are largely welcomed by the townships both for the tax revenue they provide and the potential for local employment. Development pressures aren’t the only forces in play however. The practice and practicality of farming in the Fraser Valley has changed very significantly in the last 20 years. The sprawl of the suburban population has raised property values in the valley to the point where it is almost impossible to purchase land for farming. Most retiring farmers are faced with the prospect of selling their land for development or at the very least selling it to hobby farmers. In the 1980s, competition from California’s almost overwhelming over-production of market crops forced major changes in agriculture in BC in general. In the face of such production local farmers had a difficult time meeting the California prices and competing in a geographically area where we had a much shorter season. The boom of the greenhouse industry in BC is one observable outcome of this situation. The big problem with greenhouses is that they have the potential to do great harm to the land they are built on. Jim reflects on some land near him saying, “there’s this guy who here who runs 80 acres—beautiful land and he just packed it down hard and put concrete over it, which makes me cringe. That piece of property is no longer prime land. I don’t consider a greenhouse farmland.”

At the age of 80 he is pondering what will happen to this valley, this farm, these trees. What will be here in 50 years? He explains, “that’s one of the reasons I wanted to make this into a co-op. I felt it would be divided up into small holdings or something stupid like that and it would never be farmed again.” Inspired partly by Fraser Common Farms Coop and Glen Valley Organic Farm Coop, Boughen is working to create a cooperative enterprise that will secure the land’s agricultural heritage. His major goal is to ensure the land is kept productive as farmland. He imagines having many shareholders owning the land cooperatively and running a number of different agricultural operations. He spends a good deal of his time working with the bank, potential shareholders, and other cooperatives to figure out how much money can be borrowed, what the share structure should look like, what sort of covenants can be put in place.

Jim Boughen sees rural farm life as a cornerstone of Canadian culture and heritage. Until recently, farmers carried a large responsibility and earned a certain respect for their work. They made sure everyone was fed. Jim sees that as a central value for any country, “that’s one of my strong beliefs: that we should be providing for our own people.” He extends the metaphor of the family farm outwards towards Canadians and Canada as a nation. Even in the context of a global economy he sees us as living here and calling Canada home, questioning the nature of our relation to each other and the larger world. Given all he’s seen he felt inclined to offer me this sage advice, “I remember as a child that when winter came what you had in your cellar was what you lived on.”

Michael Marrapese
Spring 2005