VANCOUVER — British Columbia is enduring a record-breaking dry spell, but farmer Amir Mann says the drought is far preferable to other recent weather extremes.
“You can always apply more water, but it’s hard to get rid of water,” he said, referring to B.C.’s historic floods last November.
Mann and others involved in agriculture say the downside of the drought, which has required some crops to be irrigated, is offset by benefits such as a longer harvesting period and little rot.
“There’s nothing better than having a dry fall for farmers to get crop out of the field and to manage crops,” he said in an interview.
“We had very adequate moisture, actually a little too much in the beginning. As long as they can get enough cover on the crop before the conditions start drying up, the moisture will retain enough to finish the crop off.”
Mann, who runs Mann Farms in Abbotsford, harvests a variety of crops including strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, pumpkins, corn, gourds, squash and grapes.
“Because it’s been so dry, we have very little rot and the quality is amazing,” he said, pointing to his pumpkin crop as an example.
“It’s beneficial in regard to having no fungus and we don’t have to spray pesticides. It’s the end of the season and what we’ve noticed is the pumpkin quality has been exceptional — nice, hard pumpkins (that are) bright orange, the stem is nice and strong, and there’s very little fungus.”
However, he said, irrigation is essential. Farms without sophisticated irrigation systems, that instead rely on rain to water their crops, have likely fared worse, he added.
Sean Smulker, an associate professor in the faculty of land and food systems at the University of British Columbia, said the impacts of a drought depend on its timing in the crop production cycle.
“What farmers are looking for is the total number of productive days over the summer period, and if it’s been impacted in the beginning or the end, that’s shaving away from that productivity and potentially impacting their yields and profitability,” he said.
“Ideally, you’d be dry on both ends (of the season) and you’d be able to compensate much easier with some irrigation.”
Vander Waal said he doesn’t foresee any major long-term impact on agriculture unless the drought extends through the winter, which is too early to predict.
“Our biggest concern would be what’s going to happen over the winter. The snowpack is critical in that it provides irrigation water for a lot of areas,” he said.
Vander Waal noted that government-imposed water restrictions could be a concern in some areas of the province, saying farmers should be prioritized.
“If we want to keep the food supply alive, we also need to make sure we have water for the food supply,” he said.
Mann said there are risk mitigation strategies farmers should adopt to prepare for extreme weather events. For instance, he said unfavourable strawberry yields led to the farm finding an alternative growing option: a strawberry greenhouse, which now allows the farm to harvest berries for 10 months of the year.
“Price fluctuations, market conditions and costs are all ever-changing, weather is always ever-changing, so as a farmer, you have to be able to provide either a consistent crop or high quality and you can’t do that based off the weather that we’re having. You have to be able to just do something a little bit above and beyond,” he said.
Smulker said farmers are working to “build farm resilience” to extreme weather events caused by climate change, including improved trench yard drainage and irrigation systems.
“Certainly there are a suite of technologies that can be deployed to make the farming system more efficient terms of labour, in terms of nutrients, and those all helped build resilience as well,” he said.
Vander Waal agreed, adding that the government should also adopt a more sustainable water storage system.
“In agriculture, the key to success is ultimately recognizing that these climate change events are real, and they continue to happen. So, if we recognize the fact that we have surplus water at certain times of the year, the importance is to make sure we’re storing that water so we can use it when we need it,” Vander Waal said.
“There’s this balancing act, and this is where government, from a policy point of view, can really, really can help.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 14, 2022.
MONTREAL – Quebec’s police watchdog says it has opened an investigation after the bodies of a mother and her son, both of whom went missing earlier this week, were discovered in a vehicle in Montreal.
Montreal police confirmed Thursday that the bodies of Lucia Giovanna Arcuri, 76, and Giuseppe Arcuri, 59, were found earlier in the day in an Infiniti SUV belonging to the man. They had been reported missing on Tuesday.
Since Montreal police were looking into their disappearance, the province’s police watchdog — Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes — has opened a file into how police conducted their investigation. The watchdog is mandated to investigate cases in which people die or are injured during interventions by Quebec police.
Montreal Const. Véronique Dubuc says the watchdog will investigate the work of city police, and provincial police will investigate the two deaths.
First responders were called at around 12:30 a.m. on Thursday to the vehicle in a parking lot. Despite attempts to revive the two people inside, both were pronounced dead at the scene, and Montreal police have described the deaths as suspicious.
Arcuri and his mother lived together in the city’s St-Leonard borough.
Giuseppe Arcuri was last seen Tuesday at around 9:30 a.m. in a restaurant in eastern Montreal. “Mr. Arcuri made disturbing comments before his disappearance,” police said in a bulletin announcing their disappearance.
The last contact with Lucia Giovanna Arcuri was also Tuesday morning. She was suffering from memory loss and rarely left her home. She disappeared without her medication or the cane she needs to walk.
Later, police put out a description of Giuseppe Arcuri’s SUV, which matched the vehicle in which the two bodies were found Thursday.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Residents of Florida’s Gulf Coast who weathered back-to-back hurricanes now have something else to keep an eye on -– a possible plume of harmful algae in the waters off the state’s southwest coast.
Satellite imagery shows a bloom of algae extending along Florida’s western coastline near Tampa, though researchers caution that Hurricanes Helene and Milton have delayed regular sampling to confirm the findings. Federal officials say there is currently “no risk of respiratory irritation” from red tide in Florida.
Red tides occur when algae — plant-like organisms that live in salt and freshwater — grow out of control and produce harmful toxins that can kill fish and sicken people and pets.
“It’s so dense that it actually discolors the water, right? Hence the red tide name,” said Beth Stauffer, a professor of biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
According to researchers, the main species responsible for the blooms along Florida’s Gulf Coast is Karenia brevis, a single-celled organism that produces a potent neurotoxin that can be suspended in the air near beaches and make people sick when they breathe it in.
“(It) not only impacts some of the fish and manatees and some of the other marine mammals, but can impact human health through the toxin being aerosolized and hurting folks who have respiratory or autoimmune issues,” Stauffer said.
Scientists say Florida’s back-to-back hits from Hurricanes Helene and Milton could be fueling the growth of toxic algae that was already present before the storms slammed the coast.
Here’s what to know about red tide — and how hurricanes could affect it.
What is red tide?
Red tides, which scientists refer to as harmful algae blooms, occur when aquatic microorganisms grow out of control, producing toxins that can kill fish, make shellfish unsafe to eat and leave the air difficult to breathe.
Many different kinds of microorganisms cause toxic blooms in fresh and saltwater around the world, but researchers say the culprit behind southwest Florida’s cyclical blooms is a species known as Karenia brevis.
Florida typically sees red tide off the state’s southwest coast every year in late summer or early fall when warmer temperatures and wind conditions are more favorable to algae growth.
Hurricanes don’t cause red tide – but they can make it worse
Experts say there are a lot of factors that can influence a harmful algae bloom, from the availability of nutrients to wind conditions to the powerful underwater currents that help power the ocean’s food chains.
While the researchers who spoke with The Associated Press didn’t agree on whether hurricanes can disrupt a harmful algae bloom, they did say that these powerful storms can make them worse by churning up nutrient-rich water that fuels the growth of the microorganisms.
“Hurricanes do bring up deeper water in the Gulf of Mexico, which has more nutrients. They also could produce a lot of rain. You have runoff from the land, which also adds nutrients,” said Richard Stumpf, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It tends to intensify a bloom that’s already there.”
Hurricanes can also steer blooms ashore, even pushing them hundreds of miles up the coast, according to Stumpf.
“We saw an extreme case with Katrina, which of course didn’t really affect Florida, but it was such a big storm, it actually took a bloom that was off southwest Florida and put it on the Panhandle,” he said.
What are the health concerns?
Harmful algae blooms can pose a deadly threat to aquatic animals, with some causing massive die-offs that choke beaches with rotting fish. People who breathe in the toxins may experience symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath or dizziness.
“It’s like an instant cold. Go down to the beach, start coughing just as you cross over the dune and then eyes start watering and nose running,” Stumpf said.
“Once I leave and 10 minutes later, I’m fine,” he said. “It’s so odd.”
Those with asthma or other respiratory issues may experience more serious health effects or even need medical attention. Some pets that have come into contact with harmful algae have become seriously ill or even died.
What are conditions like now?
According to a red tide monitoring map maintained by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, medium and high levels of Karenia brevis concentrations were detected in some coastal locations near Pinellas County, home to St. Petersburg, between Sept. 26 and Oct. 3 – just as Hurricane Helene crashed ashore in the Big Bend region and in the week that followed.
A NOAA forecasting tool shows there is currently “no risk of respiratory irritation” from red tide algae in Florida.
Researchers say that some efforts to gather and analyze data have been delayed due to the storms.
“It looks like the hurricane actually helped facilitate what is an evolving red tide bloom along the coastline,” said Robert Weisberg, an emeritus professor of physical oceanography at the University of South Florida. “The caveat is we have not gone out to sample it yet so we don’t know exactly what’s out there.”
___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
WINNIPEG – A long-promised $600-million flood prevention project in Manitoba is now under review, and the provincial government has opened the door to redesigning it with no timeline for starting construction.
The NDP government said it has asked Ottawa to pause a decision on the plan, in order to fully consult First Nations and consider possible alternatives to the design. It would currently have two large outlet channels built to drain water from Lake Manitoba into Lake St. Martin then into Lake Winnipeg.
“The federal government had already expressed significant concerns,” Lisa Naylor, Manitoba’s minister of transportation and infrastructure, said Thursday.
“If the federal government had withdrawn the licence because of the environmental impact, the project would be dead. And so, I don’t want to see that happen.”
The project has been talked about for more than a decade, following severe flooding in 2011 that forced thousands of people from their homes.
The former Progressive Conservative government promised in 2016 to build the project quickly but butted heads for years with federal regulators, who called for more consultation with First Nations that would be affected.
In 2022, a Court of Queen’s Bench judge ruled the government did not consult properly before setting up a right of way on Crown land for preparatory work, such as groundwater monitoring.
A report in June from the federal Impact Assessment Agency said the project’s environmental effects could be addressed, but it would have significant impact on Indigenous land use. The federal environment minister said he would refer the issue to cabinet for a decision.
Seeking a pause on that process will give the province time to address concerns of First Nations communities and Ottawa, Naylor said.
The Tories, now in Opposition, said there was consultation and the project needs to move ahead to prevent another disastrous flood in the region.
“I think there were hundreds and hundreds of consultations that have been done with First Nations,” interim party leader Wayne Ewasko said. Technical documents, including papers translated into Cree and Ojibway, were posted online and shared with community members, he added.
Naylor said the pause will also let the government consider changing the project’s design.
“A number of smaller mitigation projects have taken place over the years that may change what the outcome ultimately needs to look like,” she said.
The province is signing a memorandum of understanding on next steps with the Interlake Reserves Tribal Council, which represents several communities in the region.
Cornell McLean, chief of Lake Manitoba First Nation, said he’s pleased with the government’s commitment because there has been no meaningful consultation to date.
“There has been none, and they say there were text messages, phone calls, faxes. And I said, ‘Well, that’s not consultation,'” McLean said.
“If you want to have true consultation, it’s face-to-face, meaningful consultation.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
