Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023 edition - Farming fun

🌤️ High 8C

Good morning!

I had fun writing today’s story. It features two agri-tourism businesses: one fairly new, one old and pretty well-known, and how and why they became the destinations they are today. In tomorrow’s newsletter, I’m going to round up a list of pumpkin patches in the Fraser Valley that you can go and check out for yourself.

– Grace

Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 You can check DriveBC’s highway cameras here: Highway 1 (Fraser Valley) | Highway 7 (Silverdale) | Coquihalla Summit | Fraser Canyon at Yale | Highway 3 at Allison Pass/Manning Park 

NEWS

Farming fun

Crops and livestock alone can’t always keep the family farm running.

When that is the case, creative solutions can take root. Some farmers try to replace fruits and vegetables with different produce—something a little harder to pack in a market basket, but perhaps just as sweet—and instead start farming family fun.

Across the Fraser Valley, visitors and locals alike flock to farms for pumpkin patches and corn mazes and flower-picking and goat-petting throughout summer and fall. Agriculture has been a popular tourist attraction for decades. Sometimes tours and farm experiences take place on working farms. Other times, agri-tourism outfits are created after other efforts to farm the land on small scales fail.

• Today, Grace writes about corn, pumpkins, flowers, and agri-tourism.

Related

Need to know

📗 Harrison Mooney’s Invisible Boy has been nominated for a Governor General’s Award [Twitter/HarperCollins]; The Current caught up with Mooney last fall, read that story here, and two of our updates from this year here and here [FVC]

🤠 The Aldergrove Fair needs more volunteers for next year’s events [Langley Advance Times]

🍇 A fairer migrant worker program would involve more oversight and more power in the hands of workers [The Tyee]

🚎 A drunk man on a bus tried to grab the steering wheel from the driver in Mission [Mission Record]

👉️ An inmate was assaulted at Matsqui Institution in Abbotsford [Abbotsford News]

💬 BC United Leader Kevin Falcon spoke about highway expansion and housing in Chilliwack [Chilliwack Progress]

📚️ The Chilliwack Rotary Club’s 39th book sale starts this weekend [Fraser Valley Today]

🏠️ BC's new plan to fast-track credentials for immigrants to address skilled-worker shortages would also make it easier for realtors from other countries to be accredited [Better Dwelling]

🎃 LEPS in Langley is hosting a spooky pumpkin walk [Langley Advance Times]

🏃‍♀️ Abbotsford Secondary Student Zoe Unger signed onto the UBC track and field team [Abbotsford News]

📸 Current Cam: Congratulations to Carla Soutar, who was the first to identify the Rosedale United Church as the location of yesterday’s Current Cam.

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The Agenda

Student boom in Abbotsford

Nearly 400 more students are walking the hallways of Abbotsford public schools than did so last year.

The school district had predicted enrolment would increase in 2023-24, but far more students than expected turned up, according to a report delivered to school district trustees last week.

Enrolment pushed past the 20,000-student mark, with 397 students more than enrolled last September. The district had been expecting an additional 222 students in 2023 and 2024.

Centennial Park Elementary, Colleen and Gordie Howe Middle School, and Abbotsford Senior Secondary saw the largest increase in enrolment.

(It’s not the first time the district has hit 20,000 students. It most recently hit that mark just before the pandemic.)

🗓 Things to do this week/end

🎭️ Play: Mission's Opening Night Theatre is presenting Anton in Show Business, a fast-paced comedy about theatre, on Thursdays through Sundays from Oct. 20 to Nov. 5. Details online.

🎸 Concert: Jon Pardi will play Abbotsford Centre on Friday, Oct. 27. Tickets are still available online.

🏒 Hockey: The Vancouver Giants will play the Kamloops Blazers at home on Sunday, Oct. 29. Tickets online.

Want even more? Insider members get a comprehensive events listing every Thursday, plus a weekly Saturday round-up edition with behind-the-scenes content. Becoming a member costs less than $2 a week and helps support the ongoing production of The Current’s newsletters and in-depth journalism. Become a member here.

Have an event to tell us about? Fill out this form to have it highlighted here.

Catch up

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