There鈥檚 still rain in the forecast, and probably will be for the next couple of months at least.

Though the winter got off to a wet start, a relatively dry January brought the total rainfall back into the realm of 鈥渘ormal.鈥� From there February has been slightly wetter than in the past decade or so, with just 99.8 mm of rain according to Environment Canada data. Though media reports indicated the Valley was a few centimetres short of normal, as of March 1, the Vancouver Island snow pack was about six per cent higher than it was on Feb. 15. All of that info should mean that local farmers are looking at a relatively decent summer.

So why are farmers like Jaclyn Kirby concerned? And what are they doing about it?

The way farmers access water in the Valley is a bit more complex than just diverting it from local streams. Natural groundwater belongs to everyone and has an enormous effect on the local ecosystem. This includes water from wells, dugouts and natural sources like streams and rivers. In B.C. all non-domestic groundwater users need to have a water licence. This includes water used for irrigation and commercial and industrial purposes. The problem is, with the trend towards drier summers every year, fewer farmers get access to groundwater licences.

Kirby's farm is called Yellow Boot Farm. It's located just south of Black Creek in the Comox Valley. Kirby has been farming there for three years, but she doesn't have a water licence on the property, a problem common to newly established farmers. Kirby was paired up with the owners of her land through the Young Agrarians program. However, the opportunity did not come with a licence to either the existing groundwater wells on the property or to any body of water nearby. The landowners did invest in a rainwater catchment system for Kirby's use, but even the best systems can fall short in a particularly dry season.

"In the process of setting up our farm, we discovered that there new water license regulations that had been in place like a month after we got the farm," Kirby said. "We did apply to try to get a water licence, but they basically said I could not get a licence because we're on an aquifer of concern ... at the time there wasn't any information about whether we could still farm or what we could do while waiting, so we decided to just capture rain water."

Kirby鈥檚 is not the only farm on the Island that has to rely on the rain. More and more farmers in the Pacific Northwest are turning to dry farming or learning how to adapt to drier conditions without irrigation. Kwantlen Polytechnic University is hosting a research program to see how viable dry farming is on the coast. When Kirby heard of the program, she signed up.

"We got on board to try this dry farming to help other farmers and to see if they could use less water as well," Kirby said. "Everyone's well is running dry, and collecting rainwater is really expensive, digging a pit to collect runoff is not really feasible for this size of farm."

Naomi Robert is a Senior Research and Extension Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at KPU. She is helping manage the KPU program.

"If you think of a way of our our our our season's work, we have a rainy season, the end of the rainy season," Robert said. "It is the beginning of the growing season and at that point in time, our soils are filled with water. So the goal of dry farming is to preserve that soil moisture, use that to grow crops as much as possible and reduce our reliance on irrigation."

KPU partnered with the Dry Farming Collaborative from Oregon after the end of the particularly dry growing season of 2023. Since then, they have been exploring ways B.C. farmers can grow food in drought conditions. The project Robert and Kirby are involved in is to work with three Vancouver Island and Gulf Islands farmers to establish trial sites with specific crop varieties and practices. Kirby is one of those farmers.

This spring, Kirby will be receiving seeds from KPU and will be monitoring their progress through the year. She will also be installing water monitors to measure the amount of moisture in the soil.

"So they're going to start the plants," Kirby said. "We're going to plant them hopefully all in the same way and then kind of see along the islands who is more successful with dry farming and different strategies that we have."

The thing about dry farming, though, is that it's not a one-solution approach. It has to be specific to the site.

"Dry farming really, really depends on the health of your soil and how much water you're able to retain through the summer," Kirby said.

"It's a suite of practices and it's very place-based; we can't just take what they're doing in Oregon and do it here because it has to work with our climate and our soils," Robert added.

While Kirby is relatively new to farming in Black Creek, some of the other farmers in the project have seen their wells dry up and become unusable over time.

"The memory and baseline of how things have been for a long time gets eroded," Robert said. She said that the farmer from Salt Spring Island "grew up on her property, and knew how it used to be. When she came back, she realized that it had changed. When you're not on the land and are moving around so much, you just think 'oh, it's just dry here,' but that's not the history. It's not easy to realize if you're new to the place."

While the dry farming project is an experiment and is funded in part by the province, Kirby said that there is something people can do to help farmers who do not have access to that provincial funding.

"If you want to support local food, go to the farmer's market. The local farmers take the risk, and for other farms to take it on in the future ... it is a risk for them because so much depends on the soil," Kirby said. "If we want to change course for all the farms, we just need to buy local as much as possible and not worry about the price."