Helicopter flies above cherry orchard.
A helicopter flies a pattern above a cherry orchard early morning after a rain storm in an orchard tucked below Kirschner mountain in SE Kelowna. Houses on Black mountain can be seen in the distance. Down draft from the rotors helps dry the cherries to prevent splitting following a rain storm.
Life can get very hectic in the cherry farming business and sometimes it’s noisier than your non-farming neighbours might like.
“I have eight helicopters in the air right now,” was David Geen’s initial reply to my interview request. The right to work those helicopters was recently validated by the Farm Practices Industry Review Board, responding to a complaint against Geen and his Coral Beach cherry growing business.
Thanks to the work of Geen, his staff, and a good number of industry members across the Okanagan this past year, the right of farmers to work with the machines that they need to conduct their business has received more protection against the complaints of their urban neighbours.
Often referred to as “The Right to Farm Act”, The Farm Practices Protection Act exists to permit farmers to do their business.
However, the Act also states if a person is aggrieved by any odour, noise, dust or other disturbance resulting from a farm operation conducted as part of a farm business, the person may apply in writing to the board for a determination as to whether the odour, noise, dust or other disturbance results from a normal farm practice. The issue before the panel this January was “Is Coral Beach Farms operating frost fans, turbo spray fans and helicopters on its farm in accordance with normal farm practice?
“This is certainly not a process I would like to go through again,” says Geen. “It chewed up a lot of my time and a lot of Gail’s (horticulturalist Gail Krahn) time and a lot of lawyer bills over the course of last summer and through the fall and winter.
“It is not something you can take likely,” he adds. “I took it very seriously and worked very hard to defend our practices.”
Geen notes that he had a lot of help from other growers. “We had to demonstrate that our practices are not any different from what other growers do,” he explains. “We had support from people like Hank Markgraff (Field Services Manager) at BC Tree Fruits, who testified that yes, what Choral Beach is doing is not any different from what a lot of other growers are doing.”
The troublesome part of the whole process for Geen is the low fee for launching a complaint. “For the couple of retired gentlemen who were the complainants in my case, with lots of time on their hands, they can cause a lot of grief for 100 bucks,” he says. “At the end of the day their complaints were completely dismissed, but I had to go through this whole process.”
The other side of the coin are the benefits of the Farm Practices Industry Review Board and the Act, Geen says. “It does immunize a grower from nuisance lawsuits and it does immunize a grower from the Municipality to put in noise bylaws or other obstructive measures that could interfere with farming,” he points out. “So, if one sits back and looks at it philosophically, it is not a fun process for the grower, but at least it is the only recourse that somebody that doesn’t like farming has.
“They can’t sue me, they can’t go to the municipality, so now that we have been through it, hopefully that will be the end of it. I think it will be for me,” Geen says. He adds that it should also be a valuable precedent if other neighbours of orchards in the Okanagan valley decide they are going to launch a complaint. “The FPIRB panel doesn’t necessarily need to hear it, if there are no new issues being heard. But a farmer can’t say, oh I’ve got right to farm, and I’ll do whatever the hell I want,” Geen points out.
The grower has to be able to demonstrate that he has a minimum threshold of consideration for his neighbours by adjusting his practices, he explains.
“In our case we have a practice that we don’t spray immediately next to our neighbour’s homes in the middle of the night, we use lasers rather than propane cannons for bird control, we have buffer trees at the edge of the orchard to minimize spray drift,” says Geen. “This is just being a good neighbour.”
“But it is not reasonable for your neighbour to say you don’t have the right to protect your crop and there shouldn’t be any noise at night,” Geen says. I think if growers are farming responsibly the risk of a farm practices case dramatically impacting them is reduced.”
