Opinion: The Fraser Valley shows why protecting nature is essential to BC’s farming future

British Columbia’s agricultural sector is a powerhouse worth approximately $5 billion and supports tens of thousands of jobs across the province. If you include seafood, food and beverage processing, it’s over $18 billion. For those of us with a keen eye to the food and agricultural sector, we know that farmers are already leaders in land stewardship – reducing carbon emissions, conserving water and advancing sustainable practices that inspire confidence in the future of farming.

However, our agricultural resilience as a province hinges on protecting nature – and specifically our waterways. Careful water management in one part of BC means positive downstream effects and stable water supply in another. It’s critical for the long-term sustainability and viability of the entire agricultural industry.

Our ‘One Health’ approach at the University of the Fraser Valley helps us understand how the interconnectedness of people, animals and the environment improves health outcomes for all. Two areas of the university that once felt disconnected were agriculture and environmental studies.

For too long agricultural lands were not seen as part of nature, but rather as lands “sacrificed” to produce food. Yet, farmers know better than anyone that nature is at the very core of agriculture. BC farmers are already on the frontlines and feeling the full effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, development pressures and more. The climate-amplified whiplash of floods, droughts and wildfires pose a real threat to livelihoods.

But here’s what we know to be true: every time we protect headwaters, wetlands, riparian areas or mountain snowpacks, we’re helping shield farmland from natural disasters. Environmental efforts help to regulate water flow, which in turn mitigates both floods and droughts, and then provides on-farm benefits like improved soil and water quality. This is a great example of One Health.

As educators, we best support our environmental studies and agriculture students by having them learn side by side. In our agriculture program, real-world case studies show that the divide between the environment and production agriculture is an artificial one. Take the hedgerow program at Delta Farm and Wildlife Trust, where farmers have planted hundreds of kilometers of hedgerows around the edges of agricultural fields – creating native songbird habitat, sequestering carbon and buffering run-off from agricultural fields. Or the Fraser Valley Conservancy's barn owl program, which helps farmers conserve these important predators of rodent pests. In environmental courses, students similarly explore collaborations between habitat restoration projects and farmland management. When everyone sits at the same table to plan land use, the results are clear: less flooding, cleaner water and enhanced biodiversity. 

Students graduating in 2025 and beyond from agriculture and environmental studies programs will overlap in many ways over their working lives. Viewing food production through a socio-cultural justice lens that an environmental studies student brings, will help agriculture students understand that environmental concerns are not in opposition to the “right to farm.”  

Additionally, understanding the financial and logistical challenges of implementing climate smart farming practices helps environmental studies students see that farmers are not opposed to change. Underpinning all these learnings are the Indigenous agricultural and land care practices that have enabled sustainable food production in BC for millennia.

Using a collaborative One Health approach, we bring together all these different ways of knowing to ensure a resilient and thriving agricultural industry.

In this time of extreme climate realities, protecting the natural systems that farming depends on means securing a healthy future for this province.

By Dr. Stefania Pizzirani, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Environmental Studies program at the University of the Fraser Valley, and Associate Director Food and Agriculture Institute and Dr. Renee Prasad, Associate Professor and Department Head of the Agriculture Department at the University of the Fraser Valley.

The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Fraser Valley Current or its editorial staff.