Minister of Agriculture
The Ministry of Agriculture’s Plant Health Laboratory is celebrating 50 years of performing state-of-the-art plant health diagnostics and surveillance of plant health in British Columbia.
The laboratory was originally established in Cloverdale by the ministry’s plant pathologist, Dave Ormrod. The first official record of submission was dated Jan. 16, 1967 and was handwritten in a spiral notebook. In 1995, the laboratory was relocated to the Abbotsford Agriculture Centre, a facility equipped with advanced tools to help identify the cause of plant-health problems on more than 200 different commercial crops that are grown in the province.
The laboratory provides its services primarily to commercial growers and agribusinesses serving the commercial industry. The total recorded number of commercial crop samples diagnosed since 1967 is 30,000 and an estimated 150,000 slides have been examined in the past 50 years.
Plant samples sent to the laboratory range from berry crops to landscape plants. All samples submitted to the laboratory are voluntary and provide an avenue for surveillance of invasive pests and diseases in B.C. An electronic record of each sample has been logged since 1987. This provides valuable information of pest and disease detections and trends that have occurred over the past 30 years.
