Shawn O'Hara: Hello everyone. My guest today is Steve Pearce, who is a multifaceted professional balancing roles in agriculture, athlete development, and insurance on Vancouver Island. He's the son-in-law of Linda Pendray and is involved with Pendray Farms in North Saanich, where he is committed to environmentally responsible farming practices, particularly in waste management that minimizes impact on the farm's high-end neighborhood.

Professionally, Steve is the Commercial Line Sales Manager at Seafirst Insurance Brokers, the largest general insurance broker on Vancouver Island, with multiple offices throughout the area. His community involvement is evident through his charitable initiatives, including a notable donation of nearly 450 pounds of grass-fed ground beef from Pendray Farm to the Mustard Seed Food Bank. He also rallied Seafirst Insurance to contribute 500 boxes of spaghetti noodles and 500 cans of sauce to the same cause. That must have been a big meal.

Steve's educational background includes studies in Social Sciences at the University of Victoria and Program Management and Sales at Camosun College, which have provided the foundation for his career in agriculture and insurance. He's also the past president of Think Local Victoria and has a few other businesses because Steve likes to create things.

Steve Pearce: Thank you for having me, Shawn. This is great.

Shawn O'Hara: You mentioned marrying into a farming family. How does running the farm work, and what are some of the issues you deal with related to various rules, laws, compliance, and so on?

Steve Pearce: Well, it's interesting when you said you marry into it. You marry everybody in the family. It's a lifestyle, and you learn quickly that obligation is in farming, especially when you're part of the food chain. You find out that there are so many regulations. It's a lot more difficult than just putting some seeds in the ground and then putting a little kiosk at the end of your driveway to say, “Hey, come and buy my carrots.”

When you're in, I'll call it industrial commercial farming such as dairy, the rules and regulations around production, food safety, food security, health of the animals, and health of the farm itself are crucial. The health of the soil is so important that all of those come together as one to produce an amazing product that you see on the shelf, be it cheese, buttermilk, ice cream, you name it. Eggnog hits around the holidays. Those are all things that start in the ground as soil turns into a plant, into food, goes into the animal, then they produce the milk. And then that goes to processing, then processing goes to packaging, and then packaging goes to delivery logistics and onto the shelves for people to buy. There are a lot of pieces and parts in there.

Shawn O'Hara: You've got a variety of different regulations and groups in there. Probably everything relating to the health and safety of the animals. That's likely at the federal level plus the municipal laws, bylaws, environmental impact there.

Steve Pearce: Exactly. Well, and each one has its own. You want to make sure you start at the top. Where does the licensing start? Or when it's the quota system, obviously in milk, what are the requirements to fulfill and be responsible for the quota and the production of that? Once you start to handle that portion, then you work down to the next level of, okay, now you have Health Canada and you have animal welfare, and then you have your local BC Milk Board, and then you have the next level down municipally. Can you farm in a way that falls into the criteria that your local government wants you to farm? Managing all of those causes a lot of friction sometimes because who is waving the power stick to say you have to do it this way to comply. So, it is a bit of a management.

Shawn O'Hara: With farming, there's a fair amount of waste that's produced, and that's one of the criticisms that people often have about, especially commercial farms. So how do you deal with waste management, and what are even the requirements at the different levels?

Steve Pearce: So there is an environmental farm plan requirement done federally, which then brings in provincially. ALC [Agricultural Land Commission] obviously loves that, and so does the local municipal government. It's all about whether you are improving or keeping the soil as is and the water systems around it. So, there's a lot of testing of water, a lot of testing of soils.

In farming, of course, people outside of the farm think that a dairy farm smells terrible. To the farmer, it smells amazing because that's something that's going back into the land to improve the vitality of the land itself in the soils. Here, when they first started on Pendray Farms in the eighties, the soil wasn't really ideal. But they were willing to take that challenge to grow and improve and put substance back into it. You have to keep down phosphate levels. You need to keep down bacterial levels that reach waterways.

But because of the way it's built out here and how the actual drainage and the tiling that happens on the fields, that water and those... people would think are pollutants, are not. Manure is a fertilizer, and it's a natural fertilizer. It comes out of the cows. So, when you put that in there, how does that water now that filtrates through the soil and the different levels through the soil and through the sandy portions and through the rocky portions, make it back to retention ponds? Well, here it actually comes out cleaner at that end than it did when it started.

So, we’ve had a lot of questions around what's going on into the creeks into, say, Patricia Bay there. We have five shallow wells that the federal government put in because they're doing testing in those creeks and saying, “Oh, well, we're having high heavy metals and different things showing up in there. Is it coming from the farm?” They want to show, is it or is it not? And we could show that it was not, not at all. It's actually cleaner coming from here than it is anywhere else because of the natural filtration. And we don't put heavy metals onto our farm.

Shawn O'Hara: So there's another source of that.

Steve Pearce: Exactly. Roadways and wherever else.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, just the natural runoff. You were in a panel discussion where we first met at the Sidney Breakfast Club, and I'll put that podcast [Radio Sidney's Panel on Agriculture and Food Security S5E2] into the show notes. You mentioned about how well your dairy cows are treated on your farm. Could you elaborate on that? 

Steve Pearce: There's a lot of activists out there that see things on social media and everywhere lse, and people believe that the cows are being harmed in the barns. Everyone's seen the videos over time where you can see these cows here and there were mistreated, and so they believe that that means all cows are being mistreated.

But if you walk through the barns, you can see they have their own salon. There are actually these brushes that they can walk around; they clean themselves. Their bedding is changed a couple of times a day, they sleep 16 hours a day, and they get fed and have clean water and feet because we have alley scrapers that keep it so they never have to lie down in their own poop. 

Shawn O'Hara: You had mentioned too, in that discussion, that the dairy industry's undergone a 40-year attack, a lot dealing with the US and the way they do things. Can you elaborate on that?

Steve Pearce: Yeah, with regards to the quota system, it does protect quality. It protects the farmers, the processing, and the products because there are quality requirements as well as the management of how much is being produced as per the usage and purchasing within Canada. So, of course, the US is always not like that because it basically seems like free enterprise down in the US. You can have as many cows as you want, produce as much as you want, and attack the market as much as you want. They want to be able to sell to Canada just like anything else. They want to export because they produce more. It's expensive to ship liquid; it's expensive to ship heavy things that the dairy products are made of.

The attack is more so about we should be a customer of theirs. They produce so much of it, they should just accept our product. From a manufacturing standpoint, the carbon requirements that Canada had federally to reduce, they also looked at that saying, well, farming creates a lot of pollution, so why won't you also just transfer farming down to the US like you have your other manufacturing and just buy everything from us? We'll just consolidate.

There's a lot of ways that they can spin that conversation. When you can see the employment, the number of farmers across the country, how strong that dairy industry is, is that the farmers have fought back and said, “No, this is our… well, what are we going to do if we don't farm?” You know, what are we going to do? I did make the comment there's more cows in the mid-west of the United States than there is in all of Canada. That's also population-bound too. Their production is very different down there. How they produce, they maximize production. I would say that cow health is not as promptly important as it is in Canada. It's more about the production.

Shawn O'Hara: And I guess with all farm animals down there.

Steve Pearce: Yeah, exactly. Well, you see it in the swine industry too, for pork production, egg production, broilers with chickens, like whatever. Whatever the production is, it comes down to the processing and maximizing where processing is being done, and you have this central shipping. Of course, when there's so many people so close to the US border, they feel like, “Well, we could just send it back up to you. Why do it yourselves?” Again, they would prefer to sell to us than us sell to them.

Shawn O'Hara: So has the federal government’s, let's call it, concern about carbon emissions, been currently or potentially impacting your farm?

Steve Pearce: I think that's why the Environmental Farm Plan came about. What is it that farms are actually producing? Because it's a lot easier to put a gauge, an actual measurement gauge on a stack at a factory of what pollutants are coming out versus how do you measure pollution on a farm? How's that happening? Because they just smell manure, that doesn't mean it's environmentally harmful. What is the harmful portion? Is it the gases coming off?

We actually, on the farm itself, invested in what's called a manure separation system. Bedding Master is the actual name. So, all of the manure went through these pipes through a screen, and the dry material, the grass it still looks like, fell into this big drum. It takes 24 hours to turn, and then natural bacteria and the heat that is created from that kill all the bad bacteria, and then it spits out in the end, it almost looks like peat moss. We were using that because it was so clean, it was cleaner than sawdust for bedding the animals. You put that back into the bedding, and it reduced mastitis and other health issues that were happening with the cows. They're basically like, honestly, they're sleeping in their own manure, but it wasn't; it was clean. You can pick it up with your hands. It totally didn't smell.

The liquid all went into the pit. And then we used an injection system, so it looked like a big octopus, and it sliced an eight-inch to ten-inch hole in the ground, like little slices. Then it poured the liquid into these holes that were created, these lacerations. You weren't spraying it into the air; you were just dropping it right into the ground. Three things happened there. One is you don't have the same escape of the gases, so people didn't even know we were doing it. Number two is that because you were putting less wood, so sawdust onto the fields, you didn't need as much nitrogen to break down that carbon. So that was nice. That was a cost savings. And then number three was the neighbors didn’t know what was happening. They would always come over, they're going to have a wedding, and Linda would get a call and they’d say, “Hey, we're going to have this wedding. Can you shut the farm off for a few days?”

You're like, well, you can't do that. That's not how it works. And I'm sorry you built your $14 million home across the street on the water, but the farm was here first. Do your investigating before you decide that's going to happen. But it's true. So, there is a real investment, and that's why I said when you live in a neighborhood like this in a fishbowl, it was really important to Linda and Dave Pendray to invest in the farm, to reduce the attraction to them. They didn't want to be in fights with their neighbors. They wanted to farm properly, and to farm properly, they used technology and found ways that worked for everybody. So it worked for the municipality, worked for BC, worked for the milk board, worked federally, and ticked all the boxes.

And that costs money. That takes time and effort. You ruffle a few feathers, and then they come back, and you're saying, well, you know, we've been doing everything we can here, and now you're worried about this thing. Well, these are the efforts we've made there. So, people will give you some leniency sometimes because they see what you've invested into it.

Shawn O'Hara: That seems like a fantastic technology there.

Steve Pearce: Yeah. There is actually an advancement out there if you want me to share it.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah.

Steve Pearce: The advancement of this Bedding Master and injecting into the ground is that in between, because cows do produce methane gas, we could have captured even more methane gas by putting in what's called a digester. It was a big balloon that you put on top of the actual manure and catchment tanks. From there, that gas can be extracted and it goes through a system that can then be captured.

There were two things that were looked at. Fortis really wanted to do some work with this because they collect a biogas surcharge; people can say, “Yes, I want to pay into that.” So, they have this fund. This fund was also to help capture different types of methane gas. They do that for the Panorama Recreation Centre for the digester that's down in the septic facility just below, I guess, the highway and Lochside there. They capture gas there and use that gas to fire up and warm up the pool.

That was the same thing we were looking at here. This conversion unit that would be owned by Fortis would be on the farm. We capture the gas; it goes into there, and then they would inject it into the natural gas system in the peninsula. The amount of homes and the airport, I believe it was 150 homes, and the airport would run off of the 300 cows that were being milked here, the amount of gas to be captured. The problem is that you had to agree to a 25-year commitment to that. So that 25-year commitment meant you needed North Saanich to say yes. You needed, obviously, would the milk quotas still exist? Could we continue farming? What is the family farming situation? As well as would that 25-year commitment also be Fortis committing to that for 25 years for being able to pay for itself and make that happen?

So, of course, thank goodness we didn't do that because now they can't put any more natural gas builds in; everything's electric push. If we had done that, we would've been throwing away millions of dollars, but we could have captured so much methane and made it. So you can see how you have these requirements to capture and do, and then someone makes a decision outside that they don't like natural gas or natural gas is a pollutant, so we're not going to use that anymore. That would've put us in a very tight predicament.

Shawn O'Hara: Wow. That seems like a brilliant technology and a beautiful technology with a ton of potential, but maybe it comes from people who just don't even know where natural gas or, rather, electricity comes from. They just think it comes out of the wall and that's it, without realizing all the implications of and where that can come from.

Steve Pearce: And that's very true, Shawn. You know, people see milk on the shelf, and then once they see the farm where it comes from, they're like, “Oh my gosh, that's disgusting!” It's not. It's a beautiful thing. It is absolutely amazing. What do you think people did 60 years ago, 70 years ago? They just put it into the milk jugs, right out of the bucket, and drank it. We've been doing that for thousands of years; just because the last 60 years this has changed, I don't think the human body knows any different, and we haven't evolved that much.

Shawn O'Hara: Yep. Used to heat greenhouses with manure. Just bring it in because it produces heat and compost. I love the thought of a closed system like that.

Steve Pearce: Yeah. Only makes sense. Honestly, common sense, scientifically, financially, only makes sense.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah. We also seem to have this mindset of massive projects or getting the energy from somewhere, even if it's a huge dam in the interior, instead of like those homes in the area. I would know, “Look at the farm. Wow. I'm getting my energy from there.” This is incredibly local, so if there's something that takes out the grid, it doesn't affect your neighborhood.

Steve Pearce: Well, exactly. I could have even had a pool in my backyard heated by the cows, and I'd even let them in it once in a while.

Shawn O'Hara: I really like the concept of those closed loops. That would take a change of attitude for one in favor of natural gas. That's an issue that Fortis would be struggling with; that and LNG and so on, and people wanting off anything that burns, not to use anything that burns.

Steve Pearce: Yeah, exactly. And where does the information come from for people to make their decisions on that? Of course, it comes from big business, we know. The investment into Site-C Dam and up in Oak Falls as well. And the amount of effort that government has put into it. They have put a lot of money into the electrical infrastructure. So, of course, they want people to use that power and to use it responsibly. So if everybody was shifting over to, say, Fortis, and everyone went natural gas, there is that side saying, “Yeah, well, there are environmental impacts there.” When you weigh them out, I think it always comes back to the people are going to support where they put their money, where they put their efforts and their money. They want to make sure there's a return, and they want to make sure that the public that they're doing this for understands that that's the most important thing because we ask for it. I don't know if we asked for it. We needed it.

I'd love to get in the room. If you put everybody in the room, scientists and everybody, and said, “Okay, let's develop the best ecological environment on the peninsula. What would that truly look like? What could we do here?” Well, we don't have any water falling. We have some sun. We've got some wind. We've got some tidal. Well, that wouldn't be enough to power everything out here. So, what would we need? We'd probably need some natural gas. Well, farming, we create this. We could be self-sustaining, I'm sure, if we put it all together and we did the math, so that makes sense.

We could grow the food, could raise the animals. Well, I guess the animals and food are one and the same, but you need the animals to produce manure so you can grow more food too. So, it's this evolution of moving around and what do we do? And the workers here, there's enough workers here that could do that. If you'd be okay with getting your hands dirty. So, the question at first, “Are you excited to grow food? Are you excited to see that food is grown here locally?” “Yes.” “Okay, are you willing to get your hands dirty?” “Well, I’ll get my hands dirty.” “Okay, now are you willing to do that for eight hours a day to fourteen hours a day in the summer, seven days a week?” “Oh, no, that's not what I, you know, work-life balance.” “Well, no.” Farming is work-life balance. It is the lifestyle. So here's where we're at now.

Shawn O'Hara: So it starts with the will. The will that people have to want to do it and want to accept and have to view it positively.

Steve Pearce: Exactly. And it's fun to be outside. You just have to make sure you have a good sunblock supply or something. I don’t know if that occurs naturally here, other than covering yourself up.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah. The hot and the cold. I like the concept, and I've come across instances of communities that could become very self-sufficient, even in energy. But there is, and I guess it is the, but there is some regulation, and some people would say we have to protect the environment at all costs.

And I am, to an extent, I could agree, but to another extent, I could say we've got to look at what's going to work and what makes a community more resilient. Every disaster movie, the power grid goes down, and then within a few days, we've turned to cannibalism, it seems.

Steve Pearce: Yeah, the strong survive it, the strong or the strong-willed who are willing to stay alive. And what is that? What is that gauge? Where's the path when we're talking about the gauge or this path of the difference between suffering and struggling? So you have a catastrophic event. Oh, that meter moves real quick. What was considered suffering yesterday, today is a welcoming thing.

“What do you mean we get to eat macaroni and cheese today?” “Well, that's all we got.” “Ah, that's terrible. Unbelievable. Why can't we have mangoes and pineapple?” And then, of course, a big catastrophic event, and everyone's like, “Oh my goodness, I don't have to eat ants and dandelions. Today I found some macaroni and cheese.”

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah. Like I've often told people that in the event of an earthquake, when there's a real issue, you can, you've got the toilet, the tank. You can use that water, and I know people who think, okay, as soon as the ground stops shaking, I'm running in with my straw. That's not what I mean at all.

Steve Pearce: Exactly. In these banning of burning. There's a responsibility around burning wood. But, if everything shuts down, it gets pretty cold pretty fast. If you can't burn wood, we don't have any other backup. Propane, I guess, but you don't want to bring propane inside. The carbon dioxide and everything else comes off as, well, people won't be alive for very long, let's put it that way. They’ll be sleeping.

Shawn O'Hara: That's right. I have a wood stove and eleven Douglas fir trees, so the wood stove's rarely used, but in a long-term outage, I would be burning in there to keep warm and to cook.

Steve Pearce: It's outstanding how quickly people change their environmental protection to survival and being able to dial… Well, at leftBrain Performance, we measure people's skills around attitude, behavior, and characters that, are you, do you have the skills in, say, coaching and learning to be curious and adventurous, or to learn sophisticated or learn through aestheticism of beauty or to learn through the openness of someone else's opinion? If you had those skills, you're going to be way more resilient if there was change. To be able to listen to someone else to help you move along, but people get very close-minded into their own ways and what their passion project is. Passion project versus living are two different things.

Shawn O'Hara: Okay. Can you elaborate on that since I'm thinking about it?

Steve Pearce: Someone can be very passionate about a belief, and it can be scientifically there as well. They're so passionate about it, such as environmental activism or environmental, the importance of being environmentally responsible. What is the difference between those two? So, living through and always being responsible to the environment versus the passion that the environment is the only thing that matters. So, every time something happens, all you're doing is measuring. You're so fixated on it that you forget what the relative impacts are to everyone else around you in the community and the rest of it. So are you open enough to understand and hear somebody else out? Or are you just so strong in your stance that it doesn't matter? You're just focused on this one thing, which causes conflict, and conflict removes communication and collaboration. So those that are at each end of either side of the spectrum will never speak to each other because they're so fixated on this one thing. “Don't tell me what to do.” “You have to do this.” “I'm going to do it this way.” “No, you can't.”

If they just start asking whys and impact and what would be the problem if there was a little bit of 10% change in finding some common ground, that would be very different, especially with compliance, and that's where we run into, people say, “There's so much red tape.” Is there? You can call it red tape, or you can call it boundaries.

There's a foundation in municipal, provincial, and federal law that has been created because something happened at some time to create what people are calling red tape. No, it's a flag to say, “Is what you're doing within compliance, and what is the long-lasting effect of what you're doing? Is that consistent with the 80% or are you in the 20% right now?” That's why they have variance committees. That's why they have variant commissions that get put in place to look at the whole story afterward. But people get so fixated on the red tape, they don’t sit to look at the process that needs to happen.

Shawn O'Hara: All rules happen as a result of… I deal with a lot of trades, and one of the things that comes out is WorkSafe and how they will go through job sites and be what they would call very restrictive and have all of these rules. But we do have, I think statistically, it's almost a worker a day who dies in BC, so they're certainly justified because any death is not acceptable. So that's why they are the way they are.

Steve Pearce: Exactly. I heard a stat the other day. I had to go and look it up. Did you know that more people are severely injured or killed by a vending machine falling on them than a shark bite, than a shark attack? That is amazing. So why should you strap the vending machine to the wall? Because there's been more people killed by vending machines than there have been sharks.

Shawn O'Hara: Yep. And I notice now here they're all, all the ones I see are very securely bolted to the wall. They're not going anywhere.

Steve Pearce: Yeah. Yeah. It's not because they don't want you to shake it. Well, it's 'cause they don't want you to kill yourself by shaking it and climbing on it or whatever else people have done. Oh. It's just crazy. That's a pretty important safety measure.

Shawn O'Hara: Yes, as everything else is. In that panel discussion at the Sidney Breakfast Club, you had mentioned that we must do an inventory of our land. What do you mean by that?

Steve Pearce: So, there's land protection and then there is land production. So, if there was an immediate need for producing food or to have animals or the infrastructure required, water, whatever it may be to be able to start producing. And what is that timeline also to get it up and running? The inventory, is that inventory accessible? Is that inventory usable and is that sustainable? If we took an inventory of the land right now, are people willing to allow accessibility to it, first off? And is that accessibility to that land useful from a sense of being able to work it quickly? So if we wanted to produce food for people to eat, well, if we're eating lettuce and spinach, you know, you have about, you know, a couple of weeks is kind of coming up, but you pick it all, you're done.

It's not going to grow any faster. You’ve got to leave it for a few weeks to make that happen. If it's carrots or something else, it's a little longer. If you're raising cattle and getting cattle, you can’t just kill them. You’ve got to raise calves to raise for meat or chickens. It's a little quicker. We still have to find the chicks and keep them in a safe environment.

And then water. Is there access to water? So, are there wells on site? Are there systems on site that allow for that? Because if infrastructure was broken, the water that comes here from the Sooke Reservoir and everything else, you need to make sure that water security is there to make that land. And are you putting back into the land? Is that plan ready to go so that we understand that you could grow there for more than just a couple of years? That's what I mean by inventory.

Shawn O'Hara: And we can continue another time.

Steve Pearce: Yeah. If you find that, if there's some interest there. I mean, I love to talk about different things from a lens and bring people into it. And I love to hear people's feedback on it. But I do come from a position of, let’s be curious, let's understand science, let's understand sophistication. Let's understand people's passions, and how do we help those work together and bring them together?

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah. Fascinating. I have to have you back.

Steve Pearce: Well, thank you for reaching out. This is fabulous.

Shawn O'Hara: Great. Thank you so much. My guest today has been Steve Pearce, and that's a wrap.