BY STEVE MARTINDALE
DRIFTWOOD CONTRIBUTOR
When her father died in 2016, Skye Larmour moved back from Victoria to the family farm on Salt Spring, where she struggled with how to make a living from the land in the face of water restrictions and the rising cost of irrigation.
“Water’s actually very expensive here and agriculture uses a lot of it,” says Larmour, noting that irrigation wasn’t something that her father Mike Larmour ever had to concern himself with, as the family property had previously been blessed with abundant well water.
“If you’re used to just turning on the tap and water comes out, you don’t give it a second thought. But the moment that tap starts to drip a little bit and it doesn’t flow, you realize what an incredibly precious resource we have.”
Experimenting with dry farming, Larmour founded an online seed company based on her hands-on research into how best to adapt to the changing climate. Tardigrade Seeds now sells drought-resistant varieties of common staple crops all across Canada, as well as heat-tolerant plants from around the world.
Larmour was the host and featured speaker at a recent one-day seminar held on her property on Beddis Road, in which dozens of local farmers and gardeners gathered to learn about the principles and techniques of dry farming.
“People really want to figure out how they can stretch the amount of water they have further,” says Larmour, “to either grow food with less water or to grow more food with the same amount of water.”
The term “dry farming” is a bit of a misnomer, as it’s really about retaining soil moisture for as long as possible throughout the growing season. The basic premise is this: crops are planted in the spring when the ground is still wet with rain, and as the soil dries out they send roots down to continue accessing deeper moisture throughout the summer months. With the added protection of mulch, ground cloths, cover crops and wind breaks to reduce the speed at which the soil dries out, drought-resistant plants ideally won’t require any supplemental irrigation.
“Drought is a slow-moving emergency — from day to day it’s sometimes hard to notice,” says agricultural researcher Naomi Robert. “Water stress is an issue throughout B.C., particularly in agricultural contexts. Even in places that historically had wetter summers, like here on the coast, we’re seeing that change, so we need to adapt to it.”
Noting that 2023 was unusually dry, Robert recalls how a provincial protection order in response to low stream flow levels — which threatened spawning salmon — resulted in irrigation licences being suspended for forage farmers in the Comox Valley.
“That was a wake-up call for a lot of folks to start thinking seriously about water management and drought preparedness, so we organized a dialogue session on drought for farmers in the Comox Valley,” says Robert, “and this dry farming initiative came out of that as a whole-farm approach to drought management that can be one of the tools for drought resilience.”
Pleased with the turn-out for the Salt Spring seminar, Robert has found people on the Gulf Islands to be extremely engaged in the subject.
“There’s a lot of interest in different strategies for drought management. People are really interested in how dry farming as an agro-ecological practice can support climate resilience broadly, and what that means for our future.”
Originally from England, Chris Lampl attended the seminar to learn about water-reduction techniques that might be applied at Foxglove Farm on Mount Maxwell, where he lives and works.
“I’ve been curious about a different way of farming that uses less irrigation,” says Lampl. “With farming you always think about irrigating, you always think the plants need water and you have to water to take care of them, so it’s interesting to think about people doing things in a different way. Especially as it seems like things are getting drier and drier most places around the world, it feels like a good skill to know.”
With an off-grid permaculture farm on Mount Tuam which she and her son have been developing for the past decade, growing a broad spectrum of food crops, seminar participant Nomi Adamson is acutely aware of the perils of drought.
“Most of our irrigation comes from water that we save during the rainy season,” she says, “so conserving water is always essential, particularly given the unpredictability of weather patterns.”
Having moved to Salt Spring from Victoria just last month, Phanh Nguyen immediately signed up for the seminar in order to meet other people interested in minimal-input farming, which she has tried over the past 15 years — with mixed results — in three different countries: at a farm near Victoria, in Croatia where she lived before emigrating to Canada, and in her native Vietnam.
Currently restricted to container gardening on the deck of her new home on Fulford-Ganges Road, Nguyen has previously experimented with growing food crops such as peppers in containers with enclosed water reservoirs in their bases, which don’t require watering from above.
“There are a lot of things to consider,” says Nguyen, “but if you work with what you have, that’s what makes gardening interesting, as there are tons of things for you to play around with.”
The seminar included a tour of Larmour’s property, one of three dry farming demonstration sites established this year as part of a regional research project, which include Yellow Boot Farm in the Comox Valley and the Sandown Centre for Regenerative Agriculture in North Saanich.
One of a series of workshops conducted by the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, with funding from the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and the B.C. Centre for Agritech Innovation at SFU, the seminar provided an overview of the research results from all three trial sites, a complimentary lunch by Sweetgrass Food Co., and demonstrations of tools such as moisture sensors (known as tensiometers), which measure and monitor the soil’s water retention at various depths.
“One of the reasons that I’ve taken this journey is that I need a sense of hope for myself,” says Larmour, looking back on her family’s intergenerational experience farming the land and looking ahead to an uncertain future as the climate continues to change. “With all the craziness going on in the world, I hope that the community can find some hope and agency in these approaches as well.”