Comox Valley Agriculture: La nouvelle Provence
Often it’s said that men personify their vehicles, and the three professionals standing in a fallow field near the Oyster River on Vancouver Island definitely do. Lifelong farmer Patrick Evans’s truck is littered with leftover hay, mud covers the sides and there’s the distinct aroma of cow manure.
His appearance matches that of his truck: with bed head, dirt-crusted jeans, Carhartt work jacket and a five-o’clock shadow on his round, smiley face at 11 a.m. “These are my clean clothes,” he says with a laugh.
Jay Oddleifson’s Honda Ridgeline pickup, on the other hand, looks like it just rolled off the showroom floor, with a cargo bed clean enough to be used as an office desk, which it often is. Oddleifson looks as neat as his truck, in gold-rimmed shades, a crisp windbreaker and pressed slacks.
As for James Street, well, this city slicker doesn’t own a truck of any description. The chef’s sporty car wouldn’t make it down the potholed farm road, let alone across a field, so he caught a ride with Evans. He looks ready for a night on the town, in a bright orange T-shirt, black shiny shoes, black pants and slicked-back hair.
This farmer, former ski-hill CFO and chef are an unlikely trio to be making small talk in a field – let alone conspiring to make profits in farming. But then, farming ain’t what it used to be. By combining their talents and passions, these three are working to find new ways of making money from the rich soil and favourable climate of the east coast of Vancouver Island. It’s just the kind of synergy the Comox Valley Economic Development Society (CVEDS) wanted to encourage when it decided, in 2006, to brand the region stretching from Hornby Island to just north of Evans’s Evansdale Farm as the “New Provence.”
In Provence, France, locals, cooking schools and restaurants use high-quality locally made produce, cheeses and meats. The idea is to do the same here, but with a B.C. twist. The hope is the food and food-processing investment push will increase the $27 million in farm receipts pulled in by Valley farmers in 2005. Launched in October 2006, the branding strategy is already bearing fruit, with more than $10 million in new investment planned for the Valley in everything from wineries to a multimillion-dollar berry-processing facility.
To answer the question on the lips of almost everyone: yes, there is money to be made in farming, especially in the food-processing side of agribusiness. It’s just like any other business, say agriculture consultants; if you do all the little things right, you can do well. Details such as direct marketing and adding value make a big difference, and Oddleifson plans to do both. The former CFO of Mount Washington Alpine Resort was looking for a way to satiate his desire to own a vineyard when he met a Scot who had heard Vancouver Island has great potential for whisky, thanks to its clean water and barley-growing climate. The two started looking for land. The CVEDS economic development officer matched Oddleifson and his Scottish friend with Evans, who was looking for innovative new ways to use his pastures.
“When we got here,” Oddleifson says, looking across the field to the waters of the Strait of Georgia lapping at its edge, “everything else [we] looked at went to a distant second place. The whole atmosphere fit in with our vision.” Evans partnered with Oddleifson and his Scottish partner, Andrew Currie, to grow the barley and build the Shelter Point Distillery on his farm. News of the planned distillery tempted Mike Nicolson, an ex-master Scotch distiller from the famed Lagavulin distillery, out of retirement. “He’s been making Scotch his whole life,” Oddleifson says. “He lives in Victoria and couldn’t let this happen without being involved. We’re really lucky to have him.”
This year, Evans, a long-time Comox Valley landowner, will plant 16 hectares of barley to produce about 25,000 litres of alcohol, which in turn will be processed into 40,000 bottles of single-malt whisky. “The ability to grow barley here is unsurpassed,” Evans says. “People don’t grow it here because the ground is worth too much for the value you get from barley. You have to add value to it.” As the first few crops distill, whisky will be brought in from overseas and sold with the Shelter Point label. After about three years, partway through its distillation process, the immature booze will be mixed with Evans’s milk to make Irish Cream or added to local chocolate makers’ truffles. “Here we have a way of taking something grown here and combining it with something else from the farm to create something special,” Evans says. “That’s better than condos.”
The two kilometres of oceanfront on the farm are a developer’s dream in this booming retirement region, but “you can’t create an economy on condos,” says Evans. “If you develop the farmland, you lose it forever. So we have to diversify.” Heeding his own advice, he’s looking beyond dairy and whisky to cheesecake. Evans and Street, the sharply dressed chef, are contemplating opening a cheesecake factory that would use the farm’s dairy and the berries Evans plans to plant.
It’s this kind of talk that makes CVEDS executive director John Watson smile. Wearing an expensive-looking suit and tie – and looking slightly out of place considering Courtenay’s casual vibe – he commands an air of importance. Although not the originator of the phrase, he has been at the heart of the New Provence brand since its inception. The brand was developed during a brainstorming process started in 2004.
The CVEDS is under contract to the Comox Strathcona Regional District to review its development strategy every five years. “It needs to be built on science,” Watson explains, “versus a desire by us.” In two phases, with the help of Synergy Management Group Ltd., the CVEDS narrowed its focus to six main areas: air transportation, environmental technology, tourism, capitalizing on the 2010 Olympics, encouraging more value-added wood processing, and the focus of the New Provence campaign: food and beverage processing.
“In business you look for gaps to fill,” Watson says. “In our area, you couldn’t have asked for a more amazing opportunity than for farming.” In the Fraser Valley, 96 per cent of farmland is in heavy use. Even on southern Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley and Saanich Peninsula, virtually every acre is covered by orchard, vineyard or pasture. But of the Comox Valley’s 44,000 hectares of identified potential farmland, only one-third is in use for agriculture. The rest is forested, unused or underused. Land prices here are a fraction of those in other agriculture regions: in Chilliwack, an acre of grassland would cost about $40,000; in the Comox Valley, it costs only $15,000.
What makes the opportunity even more startling is the climate and variety of soil types within those 44,000 hectares. Government mapping in the 1980s identified six different soil types in the Comox Valley, as varied as peat bogs (perfect for cranberries) and sandy grape-growing soils like those in France. The climate is equally diverse, with huge ranges in the number of frost-free days per year, and the amount of rainfall and sunlight across a geographic region that takes only 30 minutes to traverse by car and is less than 15 kilometres wide.
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