ENDERBY, B.C. – A lot has changed in British Columbia’s Mabel Lake Valley over the past 85 years and rancher Len Bawtree has been there to see it all.
When Len was a child, only a handful of farms and ranches dotted the mountainous landscape north of Kelowna.
Now, there are houses every few hundred metres along the Mabel Lake Road and developers are always looking for new opportunities.
The Bawtree name has been a fixture in the valley for more than a century.
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A great uncle of Len’s was among the first settlers, arriving in the 1880s from England and stopping briefly in Calgary before moving west to homestead in the rugged but picturesque Okanagan.
By 1890, two more Bawtrees followed and by 1892, Len’s great grandmother made the trip with four more children.
Today, Len and his wife, Ruth, reside in the home built for Len’s grandmother in 1908.
Their daughter, Angela, lives a short drive away and is the fifth generation of the family to reside in the valley.
“The area around the house was cleared with oxen, and over the years Dad cleared more land and built it up quite a bit,” said Len. “I helped clear it too when I got old enough.”
The Bawtree family’s roots run deep in the Enderby area.
Len, a decorated air force veteran and former B.C. legislator, was involved in farming and logging until he left Canada in 1942 to serve in the Second World War.
He remembers milking cows as a child on a small, family-owned dairy and shipping the cream to market.
In January 1946, he acquired more land under the Veteran’s Land Act, expanding the ranch’s private land base to about 1,000 acres. Len diversified the operation and assembled a small beef herd to augment the dairy operation.
Twenty years later, he sold the entire dairy herd and moved into beef cattle.
Len married Ruth in England in 1945. Although she swore that she would never marry a farmer, she joined her husband in Canada after the war.
“I saw all of Canada from a train window as I came across and I did not appreciate Manitoba, Saskatchewan and a lot of Alberta,” she said. “It was too flat.”
Her impression of Mabel Lake area was more favourable.
“I love this area,” said Ruth.
The Bawtrees now keep about 200 cows on 1,000 acres, growing silage corn and alfalfa. The rest is used for grazing.
Alfalfa crops normally produce three cuts a year and total yield can be as high as 4.5 to five tonnes per acre per year.
Winter feeding takes place on tilled corn stubble.
Because the area gets moderate winter temperatures and a heavy blanket of insulating snow, tilled land is often the only land that will freeze in the winter, said Len.
Calving in the dead of winter reduces mud and minimizes disease problems. Steer calves are normally sold in October, with cull cows and bred heifers sent to market in December.
The Bawtrees also lease crown grazing land on the mountain slopes.
By May, grazing is well underway at the lower altitudes and in June, the cattle are gradually moved higher up the mountain slopes, where they find greener pastures, cooler temperatures and fewer insects.
By late July or early August, the herd is usually grazing in the high alpine area. Len makes frequent trips into the high alpine to check on the herd.
In winter, Angela acts as herdsperson and oversees calving. A full-time employee also handles a wide variety of ranch duties.
Len, who served as an MLA for the B.C.’s Shuswap riding from 1975 to 79, is actively involved in governing the B.C. cattle industry.
He served as a director of the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association in the late 1960s and early 1970s but gave up his directorship in the mid-1970s after he was elected to the B.C. legislature.
He returned to the cattlemen’s association in the late 1980s.
Len said the biggest challenges facing the Canadian beef industry include excessive bureaucracy and government regulations, market volatility related to health issues such as BSE, trade barriers and restrictive policies such as country-of-origin labelling.
Growth in the U.S. beef sector will be severely limited over the next few decades as water becomes more scarce and demands on limited water supplies grow, he said.
Len said a similar phenomenon is occurring in the Okanagan Valley, where farming and development interests are competing for limited supplies of land and water.
If B.C.’s interior experienced a drought similar to the one that occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Okanagan region would be in serious trouble, he warned.
“The water supply at that time was a heck of a lot less than they’ve got now yet their population is probably at least 10 to 20 times what is was then. If that happened again, there wouldn’t be enough water.”
