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The quick read: More than 135 farmers, Indigenous leaders, food producers, business owners and community organizers packed into Okanagan College's Kelowna campus on Tuesday for a sold-out summit on the future of food in the valley. The Region of Plenty: Okanagan Food System Summit tackled local food production, food access, and the processing, storage and distribution infrastructure the region needs to feed itself.

Sold out is the right word for it.

More than 135 people from across the Okanagan gathered in Kelowna on Tuesday, October 20, for the Region of Plenty: Okanagan Food System Summit, a full day — 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. — at Okanagan College's Kelowna campus, according to Kelowna's 103-1 Beach Radio.

The crowd was the point. Farmers sat alongside Indigenous leaders, food producers, business owners and community organizations, all talking about the same question: how does the Okanagan grow, process and share its own food, rather than depending on supply chains that stretch across the continent?

What was on the table

The program included a session on Indigenous food sovereignty — the idea that Indigenous communities should control their own food systems, from land to table, on their own terms.

It closed with a discussion of regional food infrastructure: processing, storage and distribution. That is the unglamorous part of the food system, and arguably the most important. The Okanagan grows plenty. What it has often lacked is the local capacity to process, store and move that food to the people who live here.

Why it matters beyond the room

Food security is one of those issues where everyone agrees on the goal and argues about the means. This summit's answer leaned local: back the farmers and producers who already live here, build the infrastructure close to home, and keep more of the food dollar — and the jobs that come with it — in the valley.

That is a common-sense approach worth watching. A region that can feed itself is a region that is harder to push around, whether by distant supply chains, price shocks or policies written far from the orchard.

The test now is what happens after the summit. Sold-out rooms are easy. Processing plants, cold storage and distribution routes take money, permits and patience — and the people in that room will be judged on what gets built, not what got discussed.

More information on the summit is available at okanaganfoodsystem.com/summit.

Sources: Kelowna's 103-1 Beach Radio, October 19, 2026.

Photo credit: Photo by Anne Preble on Unsplash