How a BC couple turned drought-stricken land into a water-harvesting farm

Each day begins with a boisterous chorus of birdsongs at Rosebank Farms. At sunrise, Andrea Gunner — who owns and operates the farm with her husband, Steve — is outside doing morning chores on their nine acres of rolling pastures and woodlands in the north Okanagan's Armstrong valley. The birds are so loud that when Gunner takes a phone call, she's often asked if she's in an aviary.

There was a time when mornings were far quieter — when the farm, purchased in 1992, sat on a slope known as Drought Hill.

When the Gunners bought the property, they knew the pastures were weedy and rock-strewn. They invested everything they had to start a pasture-raised poultry operation, a production type well-suited to their thin soils and hilly land. But that first week, when Gunner turned on the sprinkler to irrigate the pasture, the shallow well ran dry within 10 minutes.

Chicks from their first batch began to mysteriously die. The Gunners soon discovered their groundwater was contaminated with nitrates at levels high enough to kill the baby birds. A deeper well yielded only a trickle — a quarter of a gallon a minute. In the early years, they trucked in water despite the cost eating into six per cent of their gross income.

"Seeking an alternative source of water became our quest," Gunner explained. "Keeping our farm depended on finding one."

Two years ago, the Gunners completed an elaborate water catchment system. Every building roof at Rosebank Farms is now metal so each drop of moisture — rain, snowmelt and condensation — rolls smoothly into screened eavestroughs and travels down a network of pipes to underground storage tanks. One cistern holds potable water processed through the farm's treatment equipment. Six more have a combined capacity of over 10,000 gallons, roughly the volume of a small backyard swimming pool. A final three underground tanks are filled with water at the far end of their property for fire safety. A complicated set of valves and switches manages water flows and ensures that if a leak starts in one tank, not all the stored water is lost.

Rosebank Farms has become a model for human resilience in the face of climate change at a moment when the Okanagan itself is ground zero for BC drought.

Over the past five years, the Okanagan region has experienced drought conditions in four of them, with forecasters predicting this year will bring more of the same. At the beginning of April, Okanagan snowpacks were at 58 per cent of normal — a concerning shortfall heading into summer. The picture ahead is darker still. Modelling of precipitation and temperature patterns projects warmer winter temperatures that will decrease precipitation falling as snow by 25 per cent over the coming decades. Less snow means earlier peak stream flows and less water available in summer.

Summers are changing too, trending towards less precipitation and more days with temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius. "We're seeing certainly more severe droughts, and we're certainly seeing them more widespread across the country," says Trevor Hadwen, an agroclimate specialist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, who has monitored drought patterns for 25 years. "Over that time, I've seen the issue grow."