Recent political promotion of local farming, in this intemperate climate, is just another example of the tunnel vision endemic to the area west of Sooke.
The best places to farm have such good climates that food grows plentiful enough, and so easily, that it can be actually flown here in some cases and still remain very reasonably priced for us long distance customers.
I notice locally, that no one has ever tried to commercially hydridize the ubiquitous salal, salmonberry or Oregon grape, they always set their sites on say — watermelons, or some other self-imploding enterprise.
The best you can expect out here is hobby farms. In fact, I know of large commercial farms in actual farming parts of the country, where the farmers don’t even grow their own food, they can’t, they both have full time jobs in the city to pay for the farm operation. What could you possibly expect from our climate?
This is why we farm trees here. You do realize that the trees here are not forests, they are tree farms. Just like on the prairies, all those plants you see, they aren’t the wild plains grasses, they are wheat farms.
The communities west of Sooke are being crippled by a self-defeating, non-success attitude, which manifests itself as wishful thinking, suppressing simultaneously anyone with any ounce of real initiative. West of the Sooke success it is all a sort of cargo cult that if everybody just smiles hard enough together with a big “green” smile, the money will arrive. Sort of Mickey Mouse out here in the environmental section of Disneyland — California Dreaming west of Sooke — in Otter Point, Shirley and Jordan River.
N. S. MacNab
Shirley
