This is part 8 in our series Peace River Site C Dam.
In 1920, Renee Ardill's grandparents arrived in the Peace Valley with nothing more than a milk cow, saddle horse and team and wagon. They chose a piece of land on the banks of the Peace River, built a cabin, hunted moose and grew what they could.
"They built everything from the ground up," Ardill says. "Imagine being able to pick your piece of land and make what you wanted out of it."
The Ardill family has been here ever since, running a cattle ranch on the banks of the Peace. But their days could be numbered if BC Hydro's Site C hydroelectric dam gets the go-ahead this fall from the provincial and federal governments.
The panel tasked with reviewing the project found BC Hydro failed to prove that the energy from Site C would be needed within the time frame set out in the proposal. The panel's report, released in May, also found that there are cost-effective alternatives to building a new dam, but the province has failed to adequately investigate options such as geothermal.
If built, the dam will flood 107 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries - impacting 13,000 hectares of agricultural land, including flooding 3,800 hectares of farmland in the Agricultural Land Reserve, an area nearly twice the size of the city of Victoria.
That flooding would put the Ardill's ranch underwater. Thirty-three other farm operations would also be affected by the project, according to the panel's report.
"This is the best piece of land in the world. My grandpa picked a good spot. And I'm damned if I'm gonna give it up," Ardill says.
According to agriculture expert Wendy Holm the Peace Valley has the ability to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for a million people.
"It's not about what's economic today," Holm says. "This is land that forms part of the commons. This is part of the natural capital of our country."
Yet the joint review panel's report found that loss of agricultural land would not be significant in the context of B.C. or western Canadian agricultural production, while acknowledging "this loss would be highly significant to the farmers who would bear the loss, and that financial compensation would not make up for the loss of a highly valued place and way of life."
Eveline Wolterson, a soil scientist who gave expert testimony during the review process, says the panel missed the point in its analysis by looking at the current use of land (largely forage production) instead of the potential of the land.
"The reality is that the reason that land is in forage production is because most of it is owned by BC Hydro or it's in the flood reserve, which means that at any time BC Hydro could expropriate those lands," Wolterson says. "That has discounted the value of that land, as well as discounted the amount of money landowners are willing to invest in a piece of property."
Wolterson points to the Okanagan Valley's now booming wine industry as an example of how the panel has failed to think of the future.
"In mid 1970s, the likelihood of agricultural use of those [Okanagan] lands would likely have been low. But because we saved those lands and left them, the use of those lands is extremely high right now," she says.
The productivity of the agricultural land in the Peace River Valley is unique not only in the region, but in British Columbia and Western Canada, Wolterson adds.
Take potatoes, a main production commodity in the Lower Mainland, for example. In the Lower Mainland, yields are about 10 tonnes per hectare. In the Peace Valley, yields are 30 per cent more at 13 tonnes per hectare due to more daylight and ideal conditions in the east-west valley, Wolterson says.
"The area that they are proposing to flood is approximately equivalent to the agricultural land base in Delta, so it'd be like flooding all that land, taking it right out of production," she says. "It's almost tragic."
The David Suzuki Foundation recently released a report looking at the economic benefits of keeping the Peace River region's remaining farmland and nature intact beyond the market value of agriculture in the region.
The Peace Dividend found that the ecosystem services (such as providing clean air, clean water, carbon storage and habitat for wildlife) provided by farmland and nature in the Peace River Watershed are conservatively worth an estimated $7.9 billion to $8.6 billion a year.
Ken and Arlene Boon, owners of Bear Flats Farm and log home builders, know the value of the valley all too well. They regularly see mule deer, moose, elk, wolves and black and grizzly bears on their land.
The Boons host the annual Paddle for the Peace on their farm, where they can grow everything from corn to cantaloupes due to the unique microclimate in the valley. If the dam is built, they will lose their best farmland and their home.
In their submission to the panel, the Boons wrote: "As we write this submission, we feel like a prisoner trying to save his life by writing a statement that will hopefully save him from the death penalty."
The 1,100-megawatt Site C dam has been on the books for 30 years and was turned down by the B.C. Utilities Commission in the 1980s. This time around, the B.C. government has exempted the project from a utilities' commission review, despite calls from local politicians and the joint review panel itself to have the project reviewed by the independent regulator.
"Life has to go on for us, because grandpa was told in the '70s that he was going to have to move because they were going to build it," Arlene says. "He passed away without seeing the project happen. I'm sure that our grandkids will be having the same discussion."
But she hopes her grandchildren won't have to fight this fight again. "Our push this time is to try kill it once and for all," Arlene says.
Solar panels on the Boons property feed energy back to the electricity grid.
"You can generate electricity many ways, but you can only grow food one way," Ken says. "What we can't afford to do is to be flooding farmland anymore."
For Esther and Poul Pedersen, it's a similar story. Their 65 hectare (160-acre) property is right above where the Site C dam would be built and is within the zone that could slough into the reservoir.
Located just five minutes outside of Fort St. John, it's the perfect place to raise horses and give riding lessons.
"It's really hard to replace," Esther says. "We feel that the valley is precious."
To mitigate the lost value of agricultural economic activity, BC Hydro proposed a $20 million agricultural compensation program to support projects in the region, in addition to farm mitigation plans for directly affected agricultural operations.
But as Esther looks out over the Peace River Valley, she - like so many others - says what her family has is irreplaceable.
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