Costs mount for Okanagan orchardists as unused fruit forced to landfills

An increasing list of red tape is making business costly for Okanagan farmers, and even burying their own crop can have expensive consequences.

One Summerland farm is facing a $15,000 fine for dumping more than 1,000 pounds of cherries into the ground on its own orchard. It’s the price it will pay for not taking the “non-grade” cherries to a landfill.

According to the BC Fruitgrowers’ Association, the preferred option of taking them to a landfill is also expensive.

Among the largest fruit packers in the Interior, they paid a collective $250,000 in landfill fees last season.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ That is a lot of money for waste, for apples and cherries to go to the landfill,” the association’s executive director Adrian Arts told iNFOnews.ca. “They can’t get treated, apparently, as organic waste, so they get charged normal landfill rates.”

Not including the cost of transportation, that’s typically at least $100 per tonne.

Sandhu Fruit Farms in Summerland was hit with the $15,000 fine earlier this month after an environment ministry inspection last year. It was the second time inspectors found the farm had buried cherries in a trench after receiving a warning in 2023.

iNFOnews.ca reached out to the farm for comment, but didn’t receive a response.

Sandhu Fruit Farms did tell the ministry that it would typically sell the non-grade cherries to a juice processor, and the decision to bury them was made by “unauthorized” staff.

Arts said the fine came from a new regulation introduced in 2019, which threatens enforcement against any farm waste that could leach into the environment, “lumping apples and cherries into the category as manure or whatever else.”

“(The fines) are serious,” he said. “This would be the same as if you had a big dump truck full of hog manure for fertilizer. You are required to move it and have it in a concrete container so there’s no leakage.”

The regulations, like new environmental restrictions, are something the association is often talking to politicians about, he said.

“We have a member who often says he no longer farms fruit, he farms paperwork… So, it’s just one more layer of bureacracy,” Arts said. “We’re here to produce food and fill bellies.

“It feels like BC’s current regulatory framework is quite harsh and very onerous for agriculture.”

As for landfill fees, Arts said the association has hired a summer employee specifically to study those costs for Interior farmers and to study the cost of production broadly.