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Working Lands And Industry · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Casey: Hey there, good to be here. Today on Working Lands & Industry we've got Lorne Doerkson, the Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA-elect on track to be premier, and the Chilean and Argentine lithium and rare earth deals that put mining waste and furnaces in the spotlight. We also hear from Leon Passmore, seeding cereal rye by drone into standing corn near Aylmer. Then we dig into who really holds the value a mine or a farm produces, and who gets to call themselves local. Stick around.
• 0:40
  Casey: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Casey. It's Tuesday, October 27th, 2026, and today's theme is Working Lands & Industry. Here in the Cariboo, on the traditional and unceded territories of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations.
• 1:00
  Riley: And I'm Riley. We're looking at the mines, ranches, farms and mills, and at who ends up holding the value they produce. Out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's foggy and around zero, with a high of 2 and a low of minus 1 today. Slight snow showers are forecast through the day, with an 87 percent chance of precipitation, about 4 millimetres. Across the Cariboo, 100 Mile House is around minus 2 and partly cloudy, Williams Lake is around minus 2 with fog, Quesnel is around minus 1 under overcast, and Hanceville is around minus 2 in fog.
• 1:35
  Casey: Thanks, Riley. Mind the fog on the way into Williams Lake, and we'll start with the news.
• 1:40
  Riley: Most of this morning's news is about land, and a good share of it is ours. We flagged the Esler Road prescribed burn on Thursday, and it starts today, north of Highway 20 and west of Williams Lake. The burn covers about 10 hectares and may continue in stages until November 10th. Smoke and flames may be visible along Highway 20, Dog Creek Road and Bond Lake Road, and smoke from the edge of the burn can linger for up to 24 hours after ignition. Firefighters will stay on site until the fire can't spread, then return for mop-up.
• 2:14
  Casey: The Williams Lake Tribune profiles Lorne Doerkson, the Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA-elect who led the BC Conservatives to a resounding victory on October 24th and is on track to become premier, the first from the Interior since 1986. Most people outside his riding didn't know much about him before the vote. The riding runs from just west of Kamloops to west and north of Anahim Lake in the Chilcotin, which is a lot of highway for one MLA to cover.
• 2:41
  Riley: A riding that size is a lot of miles before anybody learns your name.
• 2:46
  Riley: Doerkson spoke at a news conference in Vancouver on Sunday. He says the Conservatives are more united than ever, and he called his interim leadership status an administrative detail. He says the formal process to make him permanent leader is coming imminently. He hasn't ruled out a return to the legislature this fall, and he's considering an abbreviated session. Elections BC won't officially close the election until it returns the writs on November 18th.
• 3:15
  Casey: Yesterday in Quesnel, the Tŝilhqot'in National Government held its Lhatŝ'aŝʔin Memorial Day. The ceremony honours the six War Chiefs whose hanging marked the end of the Chilcotin War. This year is the 162nd anniversary. Five were hanged in Quesnel, at the site that later became G.R. Baker Memorial Hospital. The sixth, Chief ?Ahan, was hanged in New Westminster on July 18th, 1865. First Nations from Quesnel and Williams Lake joined the day. Chief Francis Laceese of the Tl'esqox First Nation called what happened genocide, and said that genocide is still present today. The Tŝilhqot'in Women's Council sang and drummed.
• 3:53
  Riley: Out east in Ontario, farmer Leon Passmore is using drones to seed cereal rye into standing corn, for the third straight year. He's doing it near Aylmer through the Living Labs Ontario program. The point is getting a cover crop established earlier, when late harvests and fall weather leave too little time for a tractor. Passmore runs a mixed farm with a black Angus cow-calf herd, so the rye doubles as cattle feed. After a good first year, he expanded the acreage.
• 4:21
  Casey: Who pays for the drone, and who's still flying it in year five?
• 4:26
  Casey: The USDA started a new regional cash cattle price report this week, covering Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. It was set to begin Monday. The reason is that negotiated cash purchases fell from more than half of transactions in 2005 to less than 18 percent in 2025, as formula-based buying expanded. Fewer negotiated sales make it harder to publish a useful price without exposing confidential deals. The new report draws on data already collected, so packers don't have to submit anything new. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association says it should give producers more price information.
• 5:02
  Riley: Under 18 percent negotiated means most price discovery happens somewhere else.
• 5:09
  Riley: Farmers in Northern Ireland are using AI cameras to track cattle health, robotic milking systems, and apps that keep farm records. Lantmännen, the Swedish agriculture company, says AI can speed up crop breeding and improve how farms use fertiliser, crop protection and water. Its majority-owned subsidiary Cgrain uses image analysis to grade grain quality. Lantmännen's Per Arfvidsson argues farmers must keep control of their data and their strategic decisions. A FarmDrive developer, Gareth McDonald, put it this way: "We don't want the AI making the decision for the farmer." A meeting in Nairobi today will look at how to pay for digital farm tools once development funding ends. An investment study tracked $4.39 billion in agtech funding across 17 emerging markets from 2023 through the third quarter of 2025.
• 6:01
  Casey: Who keeps the data when the app company gets sold?
• 6:05
  Casey: Uganda's agriculture minister told Parliament on October 21st that the country plans to deploy 10,000 tractors over five years. The strategy proposes 21 mechanization centres and a cost-sharing model with government, commercial farmers and producer groups. Since 2018, Uganda says it has deployed 1,080 tractors and 1,350 walk-behind tractors, and trained 2,036 operators and technicians. In the United States, drone-treated acreage rose 59 percent in 2025, from 10.3 million acres to 16.4 million. Kubota and the autonomy company Agtonomy are extending a pilot to automate orchard work like spraying, mowing and underplant cultivation.
• 6:48
  Riley: Count the trained operators, not just the tractors. Those are the people who keep the machines running after year one.
• 6:57
  Riley: Ecologist Jonathan Lundgren is running what is probably the largest real-world study of U.S. farms. It's called the 1,000 Farms Initiative, and he runs it from a pole shed in South Dakota. His teams of about eight scientists have reached roughly 2,000 farms, collecting 500 data types at each operation. The question is whether regenerative practices measurably change fields, pastures and orchards, and whether the results hold on other farms. Lundgren put it plainly: "We had to know whether this was real, whether this was scalable, whether this was transferable."
• 7:34
  Casey: Scotland's summer of 2026 brought earlier harvests, heat stress in spring-sown crops, and falling water levels. The Scotsman cites provisional UK figures showing 40 days above 30 degrees, and July received 35 percent of its average rainfall. Research also shows extreme day-to-night temperature swings have become more frequent since the 1980s. Jie Yang, lead author of that study, says "What we're seeing is a growing instability in daily temperature patterns." A Swedish research project is testing a retention-irrigation system that stores water during dry periods and releases it during floods. In Spain, agricultural cooperatives say farmers can adapt, but adoption depends on profitability and on funding in the next EU farm-policy reform.
• 8:19
  Riley: Forty hot days is a different farm than the one most insurance was written for.
• 8:25
  Riley: At the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, Nutrien Ag Solutions' Thaddeus Bates described drones as both scouts and applicators. A drone captures crop imagery, identifies where treatment is needed, and returns to spray targeted spots. Bates sees the best use on hard-to-reach acres, where conventional equipment struggles. Nutrien already runs drone applications in Southern California. The open problem is accuracy, as drones get larger and faster.
• 8:53
  Casey: Hard-to-reach acres are often the marginal ones. Who services the drone out there?
• 8:59
  Casey: The Northern Miner reports the BC Conservatives led in 63 of 93 ridings in Elections BC's preliminary count, against 28 for the NDP and two for the Greens. Final counting is scheduled for November 6th. Mining groups are hoping for faster permits and stronger exploration incentives. The Association for Mineral Exploration's Todd Stone said the government has made mining a priority. The same party has plans to repeal the province's Indigenous-rights law. Red Cloud Securities warned that repeal could shift the uncertainty from the legislature to the courts.
• 9:33
  Riley: BASF Canada lead Joel Johnson talks with RealAgriculture's Shaun Haney about breeding innovation, whole-farm systems and crop margins. The discussion starts from a familiar problem: some acreage has reached its natural rotational limits, so single-product fixes are running out. The argument is that yield and profit need a whole-farm approach.
• 9:54
  Casey: A seed and crop company telling you the answer is the whole farm. Remember who's selling the catalogue.
• 10:01
  Casey: Sweden's 2025 grain harvest is nearing 5.9 million tonnes, according to the Swedish Board of Agriculture's August forecast. That's up from Lantmännen's July estimate of 5.5 million. Yields and quality are good overall, but low grain prices and high input costs, after two weak seasons, have left crop profitability squeezed. The big crop also strained grain receiving and delivery capacity, and some farmers are weighing expanded storage to hold sales until prices improve. Some livestock producers are considering forage piles in place of wrapped bales, partly because plastic has become more expensive.
• 10:38
  Riley: Sweden's Board of Agriculture checked its valuable meadows and grazing lands. Of 300,000 hectares identified as valuable, 260,000 have been fully inventoried. In 2020, about 175,000 of those inventoried hectares received environmental management payments, 8,000 more than in 2018. Repeat surveys taken 10 to 20 years apart found most sites are still meadows or pastures. The sites that lost value were the ones left unmanaged and overgrown, and restoration recovered value elsewhere. The agency says continued inventories are needed. A separate review of 222 studies found airborne LiDAR useful for forest structure and satellite imagery useful for forest connectivity, but neither reliably tracks forest-bird indicators.
• 11:28
  Casey: Unmanaged land overgrowing is the whole argument in one line. Upkeep is the cost nobody budgets.
• 11:35
  Casey: Hesse's sugar-beet harvest faces steep, uneven losses, with isolated total crop failures expected in southern Hesse. In the Wetterau, yields could come in as much as 40 percent below the long-term average, and some areas could fall more than 50 percent below normal. The farmers' association blames drought that weakened root growth, along with pests and fungal rot. Affected beets are also hard to store. Small harvests leave farms short of the revenue they need to cover diesel and fertilizer. The association also flags the reed glasswing cicada, and the diseases it transmits, as a major problem for growers.
• 12:11
  Riley: Polish agronomists are urging farmers to finely shred corn stalks after harvest. That removes winter shelter for the European corn borer, whose larvae overwinter in stalks. Feeding damage can also open the door to Fusarium infections, which contaminate grain with mycotoxins. A high-yield grain-corn field can leave 8 to 12 tonnes of dry residue per hectare. Typical borer losses run up to 30 percent, and untreated infestations under favourable conditions can destroy more than half a crop. The guidance also warns against working wet soil, which compacts it.
• 12:47
  Casey: Shredding is cheaper than losing half a crop. Somebody still has to buy the chopper.
• 12:52
  Riley: Before the deep dive, a local organization that puts the working landscape in front of visitors.
• 12:59
  Casey: The Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association promotes the Cariboo, Chilcotin and Coast as places to visit. It supports rural businesses and outdoor recreation across that whole stretch, from the lakes and trails to the towns that depend on visitors. If you run a business in the region, or you're planning a trip, check landwithoutlimits dot com.
• 13:18
  Riley: Visitors are part of the working economy too, and they don't always get counted that way.
• 13:23
  Casey: Back to the mine numbers, and who collects what comes out of the ground.
• 13:28
  Casey: Where does the money from a mine actually land? At the hole in the ground, at the refinery, or with whoever holds the paper? And when a crew member moves to town for a job, does that person earn a place here the same way a family with three generations on one operation does?
• 13:43
  Riley: The paper, mostly. Argentina is a clean test. A Plusmining analysis, reported by Mining.com and IndexBox, puts China's equity share of approved mining investment under RIGI, Argentina's incentive regime for large investments, at 9.2 percent.
• 13:58
  Riley: That's about one share in eleven. Count the indirect interests at Rincón, Fénix and Los Azules and the footprint grows, but even the broadest calculation stays far below the 70 percent that some project counts imply.
• 14:12
  Casey: The 70 percent comes from counting project association, which is a different thing. And the Mining.com piece concedes the point that matters: offtake agreements, processing arrangements and battery-chain integration don't show up on a cap table.
• 14:26
  Riley: Then measure control directly. At Los Azules, Chinese indirect interest falls to about 1.8 percent, because Rio Tinto's Nuton holds a stake in McEwen Copper, a subsidiary of McEwen Inc. Western capital is sitting in the middle of that project.
• 14:42
  Casey: Sure. And Argentina Lithium has agreed a $100 million deal in which Lanshen could earn up to 30 percent of ALESA, the subsidiary holding the Rincon West project.
• 14:52
  Riley: Thirty percent of one project is a minority stake. The analysis says that share could rise as new lithium projects come online. The number moves. It doesn't flip.
• 15:02
  Casey: It doesn't need to flip. Ask any small seller whether the buyer with the minority share and the offtake contract sets the terms. The buyer does. Ownership is the wrong word, but the say is real.
• 15:13
  Riley: Control and ownership are different claims, and the narrative keeps blurring them. Beijing isn't owning Argentina's output.
• 15:21
  Casey: Nobody's claiming it owns the output. The question is who sets the terms of processing and sale. That's the same question a mill crew asks about its own town. Who gets a say in what happens to the thing that comes out of the ground?
• 15:35
  Riley: Chile is the same problem with a different bottleneck. A study reported by Mining.com flags refining, not mining, as the constraint on Chile's rare earth ambitions. The piece points to a new metals plant and untapped mining waste as possible feedstock.
• 15:50
  Riley: Mining waste is the part I'd bet on. You're already paying to move that material. If it becomes an input, the cost of new supply drops.
• 15:59
  Casey: That assumes the waste is cheap to process. The study says processing costs are the hurdle. Waste that's expensive to refine is still expensive.
• 16:08
  Riley: Which is why the US relationship matters. Chile signed a bilateral accord with the United States in March to strengthen rare earth cooperation, aimed at supply chains outside China. Codelco and ENAMI have been discussing smelting and refining synergies since late 2024. That's existing furnace capacity.
• 16:28
  Casey: A joint statement is easy to sign at a podium. BNamericas reports the agreement sets up technical consultations and the identification of joint projects, with a first meeting planned within about 15 days. That's a meeting. None of the reporting attaches a dollar figure to it.
• 16:44
  Riley: No dollar figure yet. But a processing node starts with furnaces that are already running, and somebody has to decide to build on them.
• 16:53
  Casey: And who takes the processing risk? Processing is where a project loses money even when the ore is good. The Natural Resource Governance Institute has raised governance questions about Chile's lithium contracts. A country with that record should write the terms down before the furnace goes in.
• 17:10
  Riley: Writing the terms down is an argument for building it right. It isn't an argument against building it.
• 17:15
  Casey: Written terms don't keep a plant running in year five.
• 17:18
  Riley: No. Crews do. The people who know that furnace are what keep it running.
• 17:23
  Casey: Then the crews are the local question, and that's where I'd push. A panel in Seville made the European version of this point. Speakers said Europe needs purchase guarantees, public investment and stable policy before companies will build mines and processing plants.
• 17:39
  Riley: That's the state carrying the risk the companies won't carry alone. The useful question is who writes the purchase guarantee, and whether it outlasts the government that signed it.
• 17:50
  Casey: Governments change. Mine crews live with the outcome for thirty years. Nobody at that panel was talking about who relocates to the town when the contract is signed.
• 18:00
  Riley: The gap is real. Jobs are coming to the Cariboo's mining sector, and employers have to find people to fill them.
• 18:06
  Casey: Take the test straight. A crew member who relocated for a mine job after the 2008 slowdown pays rent, buys groceries, sends kids to the local school and shows up in January when the roads are bad. A ranch family with three generations on the same land has the title, the name on the mailbox, and the memory of every bad winter. Only one of those is on a payroll.
• 18:28
  Riley: Staying through bad winters is the strongest claim there is. A crew that stays three winters has earned something. The ledger should count it.
• 18:36
  Casey: The ledger doesn't count it. Nobody writes down who showed up to the pit in a cold snap. The family's claim survives on memory, and the newcomer's survives on a tax form.
• 18:46
  Riley: Then write it down. A roster with start dates and attendance gives you a record. Records are how you stop deciding who belongs by who remembers you.
• 18:55
  Casey: A roster records who was on shift. It doesn't record who gets invited to the Christmas dinner.
• 19:01
  Riley: That's a social fact, and no hiring plan touches it. But a worker who's been on the same crew through two slowdowns has a record a neighbour can check.
• 19:10
  Casey: Checkable doesn't mean accepted. Some small towns take a generation to decide someone is local. Some never do, even with a good record.
• 19:18
  Riley: Then the rules are unwritten and the outcome is slow. That's a design problem, and it has a design fix: make the work visible enough that a bad winter counts as evidence.
• 19:28
  Casey: Local standing has an older layer too. The Tŝilhqot'in National Government held its Lhatŝ'aŝʔin Memorial Day in Quesnel yesterday. That claim to the place predates every payroll and every title on this table.
• 19:40
  Riley: Agreed. And it's the claim the repeal fight would put in front of the courts, because it's the one that's written into law.
• 19:47
  Casey: Which brings it to the election. The Conservatives' win raised mining's hopes for faster permits and stronger exploration incentives, according to the Northern Miner. The Association for Mineral Exploration already says the government has made mining a priority.
• 20:02
  Riley: Permit speed is what moves a project from a drill program to a production schedule. Production is what puts crews on the road into Williams Lake.
• 20:11
  Casey: The same win sets up a repeal of the province's Indigenous-rights law. Red Cloud Securities says that moves the uncertainty from the legislature into the courts. A mine waiting on a court ruling has no schedule.
• 20:24
  Riley: Courts are slow, but they're a known slow. Investors can price a known slow. What they can't price is a repeal that gets challenged and then reversed.
• 20:33
  Casey: Known to lawyers. Not known to the crew waiting on a start date. Ask a worker with a mortgage which timeline they'd rather plan around.
• 20:41
  Riley: The mortgage answer favours a stable permit, I agree. So I'd rather see the repeal debate happen in the legislature, with a bill on the record that people can read.
• 20:51
  Casey: Jobs are the part that gets promised first. Reclamation is the bill that arrives later. Who pays it when the owner changes?
• 20:58
  Riley: The bonding formula is supposed to answer that. In August we suggested a records request asking whether B.C.'s reclamation security formula has been updated since critical minerals expanded. That's still the right request.
• 21:12
  Casey: And Mount Polley is the local test. The tailings went into Quesnel Lake in 2014, and the cleanup questions there are still debated. A decade later, the place is still paying for it.
• 21:23
  Riley: A bond sized for the disturbance survives a change of owner. A bond sized for the announcement doesn't.
• 21:29
  Casey: Survives on paper. Ask whether the company that posted it still exists in year five, and whether the people who'd have to read the monitoring data still have jobs.
• 21:39
  Riley: That's the right test, and none of the mining stories we read today showed a reclamation number. No bond amount, no formula, nothing to check.
• 21:48
  Casey: So the same ownership question keeps coming back. The farm version is in the Northern Ireland coverage, where Lantmännen's Per Arfvidsson says farmers must keep control of their data and their strategic decisions.
• 22:00
  Riley: Right principle, and a FarmDrive developer added that the AI shouldn't make the decision for the farmer. A farmer's cattle records are value too. If the app holds the herd history, the farmer holds a login.
• 22:14
  Casey: Control on paper and control in practice are two different things. If the data sits on a server the company owns, the farmer has a promise and no copy.
• 22:23
  Riley: Then the fix is an export right in the contract, and a copy the rancher holds. That's a clause, and it costs almost nothing to write.
• 22:31
  Casey: It only works if someone reads the contract before the sale. Most people find out what they signed when the company is sold, and then it's too late to renegotiate.
• 22:40
  Riley: Which is an argument for reading it first, while the terms are still open.
• 22:44
  Casey: So we're stuck. Riley's bet is that written rules fix the ownership problem. Mine is that a change of owner tests every rule, and nobody has tested that here yet.
• 22:54
  Riley: The bond settles it on paper. The change of owner settles it in practice. I think the paper comes first, and the next step is making it public so a newcomer and a three-generation family can both read the same terms.
• 23:07
  Casey: I'd rather have a copy than a promise. We don't agree on which counts more, and I doubt the material settles it.
• 23:14
  Riley: Then the open question is the one we can check. When a mine or a refinery changes hands, who holds the liability, and is the bond sized for the mine or for the press release? If you have a reclamation document, an answer to a records request, or a correction, send it to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 23:33
  Casey: Send the paperwork, not the press release. That goes for the cattle data, the mill crew and the furnace in Chile too. Same question each time: who owns it when the terms are tested?
• 23:44
  Riley: Have a great rest of your day.
• 23:45
  Casey: And bring a scraper.