Many children who attended school in Vernon during the 1990s and 2000s had the chance to visit Farmer Val at her Coldstream property.
Val Buchanan started offering farm tours to children in 1989, somewhat by accident, when her daughters were in preschool. Word quickly spread to other schools in the district, and they began booking visits so students could experience firsthand the importance of the natural and animal worlds.
Visits included collecting chicken eggs, holding baby chicks, and petting and feeding llamas, alpacas, donkeys, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, and more. The experience always ended with a pony ride. Classy, the patient pony who gave these rides for over 20 years, passed away in 2015 at the age of 36.
Farmer Val took great pleasure in the inquisitive nature of her young visitors, but in 2016, was quoted as saying she would not have been able to provide these tours without the support of her parents, who lived on the property in a historic farmhouse
The farmhouse was built in 1907 by A. W. Giles and featured the Colonial Revival style, with a side-gabled variation rare in the Vernon area. In addition to tending his fruit lot and apiary, Mr. Giles was manager-director of an insurance company in Vernon and later became a Municipal Clerk for Coldstream. To honour the heritage value of this property, Farmer Val later added a butter-churning activity to her tours.
In 2016, Farmer Val concluded her farm tours in preparation for a move to Alberta, and her animals were rehomed. In a Morning Star article, Farmer Val expressed her gratitude, saying “thank you, teachers, parents, and my family for realizing the importance of the farm and animals in children’s lives and to all of the kids who have come and shared it all with us.”
Gwyneth Evans, Archives Manager