By Cheryl Jahn

UNBC Looks To Agriculture

Jul 3, 2018 | 12:49 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – UNBC is looking to branch into agriculture. It has launched the UNBC Agriculture Research Network Pilot Project, with alumnus Serena Black as the Specialist tasked with the job of coordinating the resources at UNBC to look at the opportunity.

“The project is really about building UNBC’s capacity to provide research resources for the agriculture sector in creating for research and education opportunities for students to participate in agriculture,” says Black.

The Pilot Project has a two-year mandate and some of the questions it plans to answer at the end of that time is the best model for that research, being through a centralized research station or a network of research stations. And issues like climate change and food security have been a large force behind this move.

“For the last few years there has been an informal working group trying to get a minor in agriculture to start with so that we have that structure for students to pursue it further,” says Black. “On the ground, UNBC students have already pushing food security and agriculture significantly for the last seven years.”

For the university, it fits nicely with its commitment to sustainability. That alongside climate change and food sustainability and UNBC sees a golden opportunity.

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“We’re kind of taking climate change and looking at it from another lens,” says Dr. Geoff Payne, the Vice President of Research at UNBC. “What are the changes that are occurring in Northern British Columbia in relation to climate change? And how can we look at agriculture as one of the downstream effects of climate change? And so we’ve been partnering with a number of communities and stakeholders to look at the changing demographics of agriculture.”

He equates it to making lemonade from a lemon in terms of opportunities to grow food here that has never been tried.

Agricultural research is not foreign to Prince George. For years, the federal government had an experimental farm off Old Cariboo Highway. It operated from 1940 to 1985 before it was shut down. It sat idle until it became part of treaty negotiations with the Lheidli T’enneh in 1994.

“A lot of this work did start with researching the old experimental farm,” says Black. “So UNBC has been actively looked into the history of the experimental farms, the role they played for local producers and what the closure has meant. A lot of what I am doing in moving forward is trying to replicate the best parts of the experimental farm.”

Current projects range from crop feasibility trials, vegetable variety trials, provincial weather station gap analysis, provincial database infrastructure development, and agroforestry.