Photo by Ronda Payne
Jason Smith
Jason Smith on his Matsqui farm.
Given his family history, it’s no surprise that Jason Smith was born with a keen interest in high bush blueberries. As the saga goes, Smith’s mom went into labour with him in August, right at the peak of berry season. She spent two days in the hospital after giving birth, then returned to help with the harvest. Those berries weren’t about to wait any more than Smith would wait to be born.
Perhaps it was that experience, coupled with the hard work involved in farming a perennial crop, that led his parents to try to sway Smith to another occupation.
“All my life I’ve been doing it,” he says of berry farming. “When I was getting out of high school, I’d been saying I wanted to farm blueberries. My mom said, ‘nope, nope’.”
Smith took a cursory look at a mechanic’s course. “I like to throw wrenches around,” he says, but despite his skills with engines, and his parents’ attempts, his future was cast. His parents gave in to the inevitable and Smith took the Agriculture Technology program at the University of the Fraser Valley. It’s certainly more education in agriculture than his great grandfather had in the late 40s or early 50s when he planted what Smith believes is the first blueberry crop in the Matsqui region of Abbotsford.
Now, still in Matsqui (about a five-minute drive from his ancestor’s former farm), Smith is a fourth-generation blueberry farmer with his wife Melissa and daughters Sophia and Charlie. He also works as a berry consultant as the co-owner of Pier Management and Consulting (with small-fruit consultant Mike Boot) and serves as a director and the finance committee chair for the BC Blueberry Council along with his involvement in other berry community advisory groups.
Smith farms about 115 acres of Duke, Reka, Bluecrop and Aurora blueberries under his company Fraser Berry Farms Ltd.
“I planted my first field in ’96 and my second one in 2003,” he says. “I’m leasing more land now.”
One of those leased plots is his dad’s. They keep their operations separate, but do take advantage of certain economies of scale that working with family can bring.
“He has his own farm, I have my own farm,” he explains. “We’ll buy equipment together. It’s hard to justify the expense for just one.”
This also helps keep costs down when Smith is looking for new forms of technology to make the farm run more efficiently. Seven years ago he invested in a Hortau weather station complete with soil moisture probes after doing a farm management plan. Probes are set to 12 and 18 inches and take the guesswork out of irrigation for Smith.
Photo by Ronda Payne
Blueberry field
Jason Smith farms Duke, Reka, Bluecrop and Aurora blueberries
“It texts me about a day before I need to water,” he says. “It helps me to manage my irrigation better. It helps me to better understand why my crop is doing what, when. It’s all about fine tuning things.”
The system delivers data on soil moisture, wind, rainfall, temperatures, evapotranspiration and other essential details. Because there is a data record, Smith has the information he needs to prove specific events in his field. This is important if there is ever a need for him to access crop recovery insurance as an insurer might only have access to data from a different region in the community.
“We have so many micro climates in the valley,” he explains.
During heavy rainfalls, Smith’s fields that are close to the river experience far more seepage and flooding than those of fields further south.
“Last year was a curse because I’m so close to the river, I get so much seepage,” he says.
As the technology advances and researchers are working towards understanding pest and disease pressures better, Smith hopes there will come a time when a field device will have all the information it needs to help identify times to apply crop protection.
“I’m hoping to get to a point of using the weather station as to whether I need to put on crop protection or not,” he says.
The only downfall is that cell service is essential and on one of his leased fields, cell coverage is spotty at best. He’s hoping there will soon be satellite internet available for regions like that going forward.
Another technological advancement Smith has a keen interest in is a robotic weeder from Eleos Robotics. He is an investor in the project which has been slowed somewhat by COVID-19, but the benefits are worth waiting for, in his opinion.
“Weed management costs me quite a bit per year,” he says. “Just labour for hand weeding, herbicide costs, I’m at $800 plus a year per acre. It adds up. It’s always something where you’re playing catch up.”
He sees the autonomous weeder that microwaves weeds and returns to its home base for charging as a potential cost saver that doesn’t harm the environment. All things being equal, he’s going to lean towards environmentally beneficial methods, but obviously, equal means those solutions can’t be excessively priced and must have the same levels of efficacy.
“I use a lot of organic-based crop protection products too, where I can,” he says.
Machine harvesting has been another time saver and last year about 98 per cent of Smith’s crop was machine harvested before it went to Berryhill Foods for IQF production. The late season Aurora made up the two per cent that was hand-picked for fresh. This year, he hopes to increase that amount.
“Ideally I’d like to do the first pick hand-picked,” he says of the 45 acres of Aurora. “Is it going to go that way? I don’t know.”
As he gazes around this field, which is the acreage he leases from his dad, he contemplates whether his daughters will become fifth generation blueberry farmers in Matsqui.
“At times I try to sell them. I tell them, ‘you could be the only fifth-generation blueberry farmers’,” he says.
At age 12 and 14, his daughters still have plenty of time to decide their future plans and Smith is quick to assure them they don’t have to take on everything he has with farming, consulting and being part of the support associations.
One of the girls has already said she’d like to be a doctor. Or maybe a blueberry farmer.
