Fraser Valley farmers won't know for weeks how floodwaters have affected prized soil

Six days into the flood, Harman Kaur and her husband took a drive past their acreage and found thousands of their ruby-red blueberry bushes were still completely buried in the murky, brown floodwater.

Leaking pesticides swirled around the field. Garbage and gas tanks floated past. The smell of fuel filled their noses.

"There was a complete layer of oil on top [of the water], and we're talking what I could just see from the road," said Kaur, 29, whose family has owned their farm in the Arnold area of Abbotsford, B.C., for more than a decade.

"We don't even know what's gotten into the plants and the soil.... God knows."

Kaur and her husband are among the farmers worried for the health of the valuable soil in the Sumas Prairie, now that hundreds of acres have been sitting in muddy floodwater for more than a week. 

Images of oil, garbage and jerry cans drifting through the water create the impression of an agricultural nightmare, but experts say it will be weeks until assessments can confirm exactly how the water has affected some of the most prized farmland in the province.

Much of B.C.'s food production happens in the Sumas Prairie, a low-lying part of the Fraser Valley about 90 kilometres east of Vancouver. The area is irresistible to some of the largest agriculture operations in the province for a combination of reasons: the fields are flat, there's a temperate climate year-round and it's close to the big city.

But the soil stands out, too. 

The prairie was a shallow lake until it was drained in the 1920s, which makes the soil — sandy at the lake's edge and clay-like toward its centre — especially nutrient-rich and suitable for dozens of varieties of vegetables, berries and livestock.

The city has warned the water now on top of those fields is not safe.

"It's full of gas, diesel, fertilizer, manure ... it smells like gas," said Kevin Estrada, director of the Fraser Valley Angling Guides Association, whose team has been taking waders and jetboats through the floodplain to help with disaster response.

"It looks like a war zone out there."

Experts won't speculate on how contaminated the soil might be until testing can be done, but they know extreme flooding — toxic or not — will disrupt the ecosystem within the soil.

"There are lots of different things going on … it's going to be a long road," said Rose Morrison, professor emerita at the University of the Fraser Valley who's studied soil science and lived in Chilliwack, B.C., for more than 40 years.