MARKET REPORT - SEPT. 9, 2015
Summer is back!
Friday’s report talked about a repeat performance from the week earlier, with another remnant Pacific Hurricane (Ignacio) headed towards BC. Unlike a week earlier, Ignacio floundered and hit somewhere up the Central Coast, in a diminished fashion. But it was strong enough to pull the year long high pressure ridge back into place, so we will now go back into drought mode and above normal temperatures from the Coast through to Alberta. Hopefully that will speed up some leafy greens back to normal production, and kick interior tomatoes and cukes back into gear as well.
Little change on the apple front – although Honeycrisps already tightening up. 80% of Gala’s are being picked to go into long term storage. Good supply of Mac’s coming on, and we’re just a week away from seeing a lot more varieties hit the list – Golds, Reds, Spartans are next in line, as well as some small lots of heirlooms. Grapes are the big ticket right now with a stunning crop of BC table grapes. Our varieties are far different than typical green, red and black varieties – they are specifically grown for our northern climate, and although the actual fruit is very small compared to those giant Peru and California varieties, they have fabulous taste and sugar, and we are going to have a great season on these – the harvest is in full swing and there’s lots of fruit on the vine. Ursula sent out pictures of those gorgeous California mangos on the weekend – this is the end of the global season for organic mangos, and California is the last place to harvest before we wait patiently for the first Ecuador crop to come on in 10 weeks, and the cycle starts over.We are in great shape on peaches as we move into the last BC varieties – O’Henry. Now, to be honest, this variety usually suffers from cooler weather in mid to late September and isn’t that sweet, and quite small, but this year of years, with the entire stone fruit crop coming on so early, this year’s O’Henry harvest is great, with lots of big fruit, and great flavour – finally a year where this variety can shine! Little change in the plum scene – we’re down to the latest varieties, but there is strong supply, and with variable ripening times these Italian and Friars have an extended harvest period – expect to see plums on the list for another few weeks. Specialty pears now being harvested, including the small but sensational Comice.Many, many years ago Destin Lydiat (Destiny Lane Farms), as his story goes, was sitting in a café in Belize, doodling on a piano, and wondering what to do with his life. Well, for many of us, that would have been an easy decision, but not for Destin - he left Belize and decided to go to Cawston and grow carrots. We’ve been selling Destin’s premium carrots for so long we can’t remember and we’re happy to have them back in stock again.TIME FOR A RANT from RandyOn a completely different issue with food production – the current chatter around the Federal election campaign is the Syrian Refugee Crisis.Here is my take. There has been an extreme drought across 50% of Syria, as well as south-eastern Turkey and much of Jordan. This wasn’t a desert drought. This was productive farmland that has turned to desert, by the hundreds of thousands of hectares. Millions of people – the first great wave of climate refugees in known history - farmers, their families and the entire populations of rural villages migrated towards Damascus in the west, looking for food and shelter. Caught up in an on-going civil war, Turkey and Jordan accepted hundreds of thousands of these people, along with a million more people moving away from the civil war in western Syria and the urban landscape of Damascus only to join them in squalid refugee camps littered across the borders. Syria could simply not handle this situation. Europe has opened its doors to tens and tens of thousands of these poor, mostly farming families who are now flooding desperately into Austria and Hungary and Germany. As at the end of 2014, Canada had processed 6. Six. I heard that on the CBC, so it must be true.We have a farm labour shortage in Canada. We import temporary workers from across south-east Asia and Latin America every year, by the tens of thousands. We don’t do background checks to make sure we aren’t admitting terrorists or cartel members on the temporary workers program.So my opinion? We’re a big country, and we have big hearts, and these people are suffering and dying, yet we need them – we need their agricultural experience, and work ethic, and their hard-working hands on farms across the country - but no one is talking about this in the context of this election campaign. And I bring this up because I have heard, far too many times this season, how local farms had to walk away from crops – blueberries, corn, etc., for lack of harvest labour.Time to get educated – Steve, Justin, Tom – let’s tell the whole story – we don’t need to bicker about how many and when, and this being an act of charity. Let’s bring them in by the boat load, show them how gracious we are as Canadians, and help them re-populate in the rural towns and villages across our agricultural landscape where we need them desperately, from coast to coast, as desperately as they need a new place to call home and get their hands back in the soil."Some of you know the underlying story of what caused the gates of hell to open in Syria," said former Vice President Al Gore in a speech he made on July 9 at Toronto’s Climate Summit of the Americas. "Our hearts are heavy when we even think about the tragedy in that land - a climate-related drought that destroyed 60 per cent of their farms and killed 80 per cent of their livestock and drove a million and a half climate refugees into the cities of Syria, where they collided with another million and a half refugees from the Iraq War.