The sudden dissolution of the BC Tree Fruit Cooperative has left farmers in the Okanagan scrambling for alternative distributors for their produce.
In a letter to members Friday, the co-op — which has been selling and promoting the province’s fruit for the last 88 years — announced it was no longer receiving fruit, effective immediately.
The co-op said growers were advised to search elsewhere to market their fruit for the rest of the season, citing “extremely low estimated fruit volumes and difficult market conditions.”
Jennifer Deol of There and Back Again Farms in Kelowna tells CityNews that announcement caused “devastation and confusion” almost immediately.
“Since then, farmers are just scrambling to understand. We knew the writing was on the wall because [the co-op] had been mismanaged for so long. But I think the shock came that it happened mid season — no conversations with the membership that this was coming,” said Deol.
She says the timing could not be worse, given that most tree fruit farmers are now beginning or part way through their harvest. The co-op, Deol says, has not communicated with her since Friday.
“A lot of [farmers] probably didn’t even check their email. They just woke up, picked the fruit, shipped it to BC Tree Fruit and it was kind of like, ‘No. Our storage facilities are closed.’”
Apart from selling and promoting the province’s fruit product, the co-operative handled logistics like distribution and storage. Deol says that critical infrastructure is what most farmers are now struggling to replace.
“As soon as you pick a fruit off the tree, it begins to decay in a way. And you need to get it into storage that’s going to allow you to keep that product as fresh and crisp as possible. So they have the technology to do that through controlled atmosphere, storage facilities, which not everybody has. They dealt with the distribution; they dealt with the logistics of sales.”
She says the privately owned alternatives won’t compare to what a co-operative can provide. As members, Deol says farmers also became stakeholders and decision-makers for the co-op, granting them insight and control over pricing transparency, among other concerns.
“[The co-op] allows us to make decisions democratically. So, in theory, it was one of the best options for small farmers like myself, who are farmers, but we don’t necessarily understand or know how to sell our own produce ourselves,” Deol explained,
She says the provincial government has not done enough to protect fruit farmers through a challenging three years, including the 2021 heat dome, wildfires, and a deep freeze that killed many crops in the Okanagan earlier this year.
Deol says tree fruit farmers have been pleading with the provincial government for more help than is accounted for in a 2021 initiative called the Tree Fruit Industry Stabilization Plan.
“I don’t even think our elected officials understand the nature of that crisis and have certainly not offered any solutions for us,” said Deol.
In a statement to CityNews, Agriculture and Food Minister Pam Alexis says she knows this is a challenging time for B.C.’s tree fruit sector.
“Over the past few years, our government has been supporting the tree fruit industry through a tree fruit stabilization plan, which included supporting governance changes at the BC Tree Fruit Cooperative,” said Alexis.
“The plan with the tree fruit industry continues to be comprehensive and reflects our efforts to work directly with them to ensure they succeed and are in the best position to increase their efficiency, production, and profitability.”
Alexis says the ministry will continue to work with farmers and the BC Fruit Growers’ Association to understand the impacts of the co-op closure and help as much as it can.
Deol says the stabilization plan only tackled the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of the industry’s long-term sustainability.
“Our governments have an incredibly important role to play to provide a fair, stable price on apples. If we want to see apples and tree fruits not become an endangered species, the government needs to intervene and put in place a fair return on that commodity, and they have yet to do that,” she said.
Deol says her farm is facing a “huge” financial loss in the wake of the closure. She predicts “over $100,000 worth of produce” will be lost before she finds another distributor, adding she still considers her farm “luckier” than others due to its small, diversified yield, and deals with local markets.
“We can — we will recover something. But no individual can move 100 bins of apples within a couple of days. Because when you pick, you have to get it into cold storage; we don’t have a cold storage. So we’re looking at losing a lot of money because we just won’t be able to have a home for those apples.”
Deol says the biggest shock is that some executives of the co-op might have known the decision was coming “weeks in advance” and did nothing to prepare its members.
“They were allowing growers to come put in hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money into picking up the bins, picking up the supplies they use for packing, going and picking that fruit in the field,” she claimed.
“It was definitely devastating. What are you supposed to do?”
—With files from Emma Crawford.