With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1181452
18 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER 2019 SOURCES: GOVT. OF B.C., DESTINATION BC, WHISTLER BLACKCOMB, MNP, MOUNTAIN EQUIPMENT CO-OP, HELICAT CANADA, CANADA WEST SKI AREA READ THIS In 2014, after 25 years in HR roles for companies like Microsoft, Nokia and Virgin, Caroline Stokes founded Forward, a Vancouver-based executive headhunting and coaching firm. Now she has written Elephants Before Unicorns: Emotionally Intelligent HR Strategies to Save Your Company. The best defence against an unpredictable future is strong, agile teams of people with advanced EQ and communication skills, Stokes says. She calls them unicorns: magical individuals who will turn a company around or guide it through turmoil. But there are also large, lumbering obstacles: elephants. To help companies deal with them, Stokes examines blocks to progress, from recruiting without empathy to resisting work trends. Entrepreneur Press 220 pages, hardcover, $32.95 • visitation: 2.4-2.6 million skiers and snowboarders annually and area: 8,171 acres of skiable terrain 75% of B.C. is mountainous ( the informer ) 58% is forested With the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival ringing in the ski season Novem ber 14-19, we carve out some numbers on B.C.'s alpine economy by Melissa Edwards Membership of MOUNTAIN EQUIPMENT CO-OP when founded in Vancouver in 1971: 6 Today's membership: 5 million+ Each year from 2016 to 2018, B.C.'s 41 heli- and snowcat skiing operators lifted an average of 41, 457 skiers $257 Average daily spending per snowmobiler Whistler Blackcomb is North America's largest ski resort by both B.C. has 13 ski resorts 20 local ski hills 50+ Nordic skiing areas $299.2 million Annual economic impact of snowmobiling in B.C. 18,000 km of snowmobiling trails Powder Play G O F I G U R E tially in the next few years. EFB first appeared in eastern North America before making its way to Oregon in the late 1980s. There, farmers began to find black spots, or cankers, on tree branches. What they didn't know then is that by the time the fungus becomes visible, the tree has already been infected for a year or more, slowly dying from the inside out. Oregonians jumped into action, developing sprays to ward off EFB while researchers bred a blightresistant variety, which took 16 years. These ef forts avoided a total collapse of the state's hazelnut industry, which contributes 3 to 5 per cent of global production and projects major expansion as farmers plant 8,000 acres of trees every year in the Willa mette Valley. The fungicides developed in Oregon weren't permitted in B.C., so Andres and his fellow farmers did what they could to fight EFB, but ultimately they had to move on or start again. "I wanted to be proactive about it, so I went to Oregon State University and I arranged a program with them to bring blightresistant trees," Andres recalls. "But in order to get them across the border, we had to bring them in test tubes be cause we can't bring a [hazel nut] tree over the border." Andres was one of the first to plant blightresistant B.C. trees in 2011, but it can take five years before a hazelnut tree is ready to harvest, a long wait for most farmers, who could be investing in fast growing crops like blueberries. To give the struggling hazelnut industry a boost, last July the provincial government an nounced that it was allocating $300,000 over three years to subsidize cleaning out old or chards and growing new trees. The subsidy is meant to help farmers start growing hazel nuts, but the cost of trees isn't the only deterrent; there's also the cost of tying up the land while they wait for the harvest. Cornel Van Maren, who leases part of his father's 75 acre farm in Chilliwack, has planted 20 acres of hazelnut trees and plans to add 50 more. Without the family connec tion, getting into farming and planting a longterm crop like hazelnuts would be unsustain able, he says. "Our neighbours aproached us to buy their property, and they said the price to beat is $100,000 an acre and I can't pay that, so the big guys just keep getting bigger," Van Maren explains. "Basically, it's impossible for young people to start farming right now." Kevin Hooge sees a future in hazelnuts, which is why he recently bought Western Canada's only processing plant for the nuts, Fraser Valley Hazel nuts in Chilliwack. But the industry is going through an awkward phase, given that obtaining blightresistant trees takes so long. "Right now, the biggest challenge is the supply of trees, and it's turning people off," Hooge says. "They want to go for it, but the hesitancy is the four to fiveyear wait for crop and a twoyear wait for trees. A lot of these people are retired farmers or people who want to slow down, and if they are in their early 50s, they won't see a crop until their 60s, which is a deterrent." Still, the provincial Ministry of Agriculture reports that as of last fall, farmers had planted 8,254 EFBresistant trees on 38 acres, bringing the B.C. hazel nut industry back up to 200 acres. That may be a far cry from past glory, but it's a slow and steady recovery. As demand for North American hazelnuts increases in countries like China, the top importer from the U.S., all that planting could pay off in the long run. Meanwhile, global confectionery giants such as Nutella maker Ferrero are tak ing steps to reduce their depen dence on Turkey as a supplier. According to the Agriculture Ministry, the company has been sniffing around B.C. •