BCFWA board member Julia Smith is a rancher and agricultural communicator based in the Thompson–Nicola region of British Columbia. Her experiences during the 2026 wildfire season — and her call to action — are recounted below.
There are still helicopters flying overhead as I write this but most of the BC Wildfire Service crews are pulling out tomorrow. Since late July, Spray Creek Ranch near Lillooet has been a base of operations for fighting the Riley Creek Wildfire, which caused more than a little bit of excitement around here last month. Hay fields became staging areas and helicopter fill stations, kilometres of hoses and sprinklers were laid, infrastructure and forest burned and irrigation ground to a halt. This was just one of many, many farms and ranches directly impacted by this season’s wildfires, and every one of them has a version of that list. There will certainly be stories to tell and it will be really important that those stories are told well.
In the midst of some of our most chaotic days, with the fire burning on the edge of the ranch, we received at least one call from the media. I know that this was also the case for other farmers and ranchers. I absolutely see the value in covering these stories, and I know that competition for people’s attention is fierce and a dramatic sounding headline is hard to resist. But I think these stories are too important to be told by shooting from the hip. There are so many lessons we need to learn, emotions to process, difficult decisions to be made, experiences to reflect on, and none of this will be captured in the literal heat of the moment. Most of us couldn’t have told you any of it at the time even if we’d wanted to.
There’s a piece of this that tends to get missed, which is that when the crews leave and the fire is out, the story gets treated as finished. It isn’t. Disturbed ground needs to be rehabilitated and protected from invasive weeds and erosion. The loss of breeding stock that had to be sold because of decreased forage availability will be felt for years, long after anyone has stopped asking. Danger trees will fall. Unstable slopes will slide. The impacts outlast the emergency by years, and the emergency is typically the only part that gets covered.
The smoke is clearing now. Many producers are just starting the process of taking stock of the devastation and turning their thoughts to the future. By the winter they’ll be able to tell you what it actually means for them. They have stories to tell and it is more important than ever that there are reliable, trustworthy story tellers to bring them back to life in a way that we can all learn from. That’s the work I’d ask you to take on, the follow-up call that nobody else is competing for.
We cannot continue to just survive these disasters. They are no longer the exception but the rule and we need to learn to live with them. It is a big responsibility and will probably be hard to listen to sometimes. People are raw, emotional, angry, frustrated, sad and grateful all at the same time. Agriculture is really struggling. We need champions who can stand up for us and help us turn stories into actions and build the resilience this industry so desperately needs.