B.C. towns, farmers dealing with severe drought finding ways to cope as record heat persists

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Eugen Wittwer has been pondering on how he can get his 250 head of cattle through this year, as feed has become scarce because of significant drought conditions across British Columbia.

One option is for the rancher, located in the province’s Bulkley Valley, to sell 80 per cent of his herd by fall.

“It really hurts,” said Mr. Wittwer, who has been operating the W Diamond Ranch for three decades. He said he has been breeding his animals for resiliency to the terrain and the climate: “If I have to replace some, it will take me another 10 years before I’m really back where I’m at now.”

Even so, Mr. Wittwer considers his situation better than some of his neighbours who are out of feed already and forced to sell their animals early.

The Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako, or RDBN, spanning more than 70,000 square kilometres in central northern B.C., is among the hardest hit by the province’s severe drought created by a combination of record heat, early snow melt and low levels of precipitation.

As of July 27, two-thirds of British Columbia’s 34 water basins – regions that are used by the province to manage the levels and flow of water – are at Drought Level 4 or 5, the worst on the province’s scale. Areas under Drought Level 5 could see impacts to fish habitats, irrigation and water supply in some local communities. The number of basins experiencing the highest level of drought increased from four to nine between July 13 and July 27.

The drought amounts to a second natural disaster in Northern B.C., as the majority of the province’s nearly 400 wildfires are burning in the region.

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“We’ve never experienced a drought like this, at this level,” said Mark Parker, RDBN chair. “We had some dry spells, but usually we’re fighting that in August and September, not in May, in June, and fighting fires in May.”

He said the district hasn’t seen significant rain and snowfall within the past year, and farmers in the region are particularly feeling the pain.

B.C. Livestock Producers Cooperative Association holds live auctions weekly at four stockyards located in Kamloops, Vanderhoof, Williams Lake and Okanagan Falls. According to Mike Pritchard, Vanderhoof yard manager, around 500 head of cattle would be sold in July in a normal year.

But this month two auctions are scheduled in the district municipality nestled in the Nechako Valley to accommodate roughly 2,800 head. Mr. Pritchard said it’s “absolutely abnormal” to see the pairs auctioned at this time of year since they are usually sold in the fall by producers.

“You just never see it, unless there’s something like this, which is a drought,” he said.

Many farmers are also anticipating crop loss. Kelsey Oosterhoff in Bulkley Valley said the farm run by her and her husband will only yield a quarter of last year’s crops. The couple is crunching the numbers, trying to figure out how many cows they’re going to be able to keep over the winter.

“It’s going to be touch and go, I think, for a lot of people in the valley,” said Ms. Oosterhoff, who is also the president of Bulkley Valley Cattlemen’s Association.

Mr. Parker said the local government was working with the province to ensure recovery and assistance in RDBN.

Earlier this week, the provincial government announced that it’s partnering with the BC Cattlemen’s Association to match farmers and producers in need of feed and hay with suppliers elsewhere, including the United States.

Fort Nelson basin in northeast B.C. is also at the worst end of the provincial drought scale.

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Danny Soles, acting mayor for the Northern Rockies Regional District, where the Fort Nelson community is located, said a number of showers over the course of the last month helped slow the usage of water overall in the storage ponds. He noted the area has about 40 days supply on hand, and if the weather continues to be very dry, the community may start pumping from the river nearby.

Many parts of the province saw rainfall between last Saturday and Tuesday, including the North Coast, Central Coast and Vancouver Island – the latter experiencing Drought Level 5. But Jonathan Boyd, a hydrologist with the River Forecast Centre, said that while the precipitation will provide some temporary relief, the impact won’t be lasting.

“If we were to get two to three more of those events, especially province wide, we may be able to get out of the drought, but typically that’s not what happens at this time of year,” Mr. Boyd said at a news conference on Thursday. He said the seasonal forecasts from Environment Canada indicate the likelihood of continued warmer-than-normal summer temperatures.

With the recent rain, fire officers are seeing a shift of the wildfire threat from the northern part of the province into the south, said Cliff Chapman, the director of provincial operations for the BC Wildfire Service, at the news conference.

Zafar Adeel, executive director of the Pacific Water Research Centre at Simon Fraser University, said individuals, communities, and particularly government agencies are not fully grasping the consequences of “this new normal” of extreme weather events. For example, the drought response plan released by the province last April is still very much a response mode, as opposed to being more proactive to prevent the impacts of future droughts, he said.

“Our practices on how we manage water, how we manage drought, how we manage our food supply, and resources, all of those have to change,” said Dr. Adeel, who’s also a professor of Professional Practice at the School of Sustainable Energy Engineering at SFU, in an interview. “Understanding what those changes are, informing the general public about those are all long-term strategies that needs to be implemented.”