Opinion: Wouldn’t it be interesting to pick up a box of oranges and see this headline on the box? Why isn’t it possible? I’ll bet it is possible if we put our minds to it. Hey, I’m no gardener; if anybody knows less than I do about gardening, they don’t know anything about it at all!
What I do know is this: Northeastern BC looks quite far north in terms of latitude compared to southern California and Florida, where most of our oranges probably come from now.
But the Peace country has great farmland, long, long days in the summer and lots of natural gas, which could maybe make up some of the difference in latitude. Some research might even bring some new hi-tech greenhouse designs for northern climates, and who knows what might be grown there.
And if we can figure that out, while Donald Trump says he doesn’t need our lumber, we might not need his oranges either!
But Canada is loaded with natural gas. If we could convert natural gas to heat and use the heat to turn huge greenhouses into tropical gardens, we would be converting natural gas to food that we would no longer have to import nor pay the associated freight costs.
We might have to import an orange orchardist to show us how to do it, but that’s fine; there are no tariffs on orchardists!
Oranges might be a stretch; maybe we couldn’t grow oranges, but there is likely a good amount of other fruits and vegetables which we could grow here if we were determined to do it. And if we saved some money buying stuff grown in Canada, where the freight costs would be less, we might have a little left over to buy oranges in Japan or Equador or Lebanon.
A week or so ago, CBC had a website story on what is called ‘vertical farming.’ I might have some of the details wrong here, but what it was about was very large greenhouses with walls inside which had shelves attached to them and controlled light and water management.
Soil was obviously in some kind of containers that it could grow plants. It was much along the lines of what I’ve been saying above. Except that they are already doing it in more than one place in Canada. The guy they interviewed either is or is planning on doing it in Newfoundland, a province which, I am sure, today imports almost all of its fruits and vegetables.
What’s this all about?
It’s about reducing our vulnerability. Remember that word that I’ve been saying we need to memorize and do what we can to reduce the degree of it on our side of the US border. We need to be serious in the long term and cut our reliance on the US for our markets and chains of supply.
I worry that we will get past this tariff spat that Trump has initiated, stay with our present system of buying everything from the US and find ourselves in the same pickle ten or twenty years from now, when Donald Trump Junior is President.
We need to have a national plan for our own independence of any other countries. Not just the US. Furthermore, we need to have a provincial plan for the provincial independence of other provinces.
And it would be good if we could have a community plan for community independence as much as that might be possible. Towns and cities in Canada of any significant size all have schools, we all have hospitals, we all have arenas. Why couldn’t we have a huge greenhouse?
Wouldn’t it be interesting if, not in 2025, but in 2125, someone could be showing a friend around Golden and be heard to say, “there’s our school, there’s our hospital, there’s our arena and there’s our greenhouse,” without any surprise on either of their faces. That conversation today would bring looks suggesting somebody had three eyes!
Stranger things have happened!
I know this is all speculative, and it could be done very stupidly, just as it could be done very well. It could be done poorly by the government throwing money into grants and subsidies which could be wasted, so it needs to be managed well and scrapped if it isn’t making sense.
A natural criticism of an idea like this for our Golden area is that we don’t have natural gas, and that’s right. But forty years ago, Vancouver Island didn’t have natural gas either.
And many who live in Golden today may not know that there used to be an electricity generating station at Spillimacheen, which produced the lowest cost power in British Columbia. It’s my understanding that it’s used for another electricity purpose now, but it may be an indicator that there are other energy alternatives besides natural gas.
And who knows, natural gas may be here one day.
Canada has to become more self-sufficient in lots of things besides food, but food is on the list. In the federal election that we are in right now, stuff like this won’t be talked about, but it should be.
It could be the kind of thing that saves our country.
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