DELTA,B.C – There are few places where farming is more contentious than in the Fraser River delta in British Columbia.
Located beside the sprawling city of Vancouver, farming in the urban shadow is a day-to-day challenge.
To preserve this valuable agricultural and wildlife space, the Delta Farmland and Wildlife Trust was set up as a co-operative between farmers and conservationists. With money from the Canada-British Columbia Green Plan for Agriculture, the Canadian Wildlife Service and others, the group promotes the idea that farming is good for wildlife around Delta.
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“Farmland provides other goods besides food … in an area like this, it is also providing habitat,” said Art Bomke, a trust member and soil scientist at the University of B.C.
Pay for the benefits
“As a person living in Vancouver, I feel it’s part of my responsibility to help pay (through tax dollars) for the environmental benefits that farmers are providing for us in terms of cover crops and habitat enhancement,” he said.
A big task for the trust is to educate the 99 percent of the B.C. population living off the farm about the environmental benefits of farming, said Bomke during a farm tour of the area.
Constraints on this land are both political and agronomical. Soil in some areas is badly degraded and, until recently, there was little political commitment to preserve the area for farming, said Bomke. There are also land tenure disputes between farmers and government, as well as pending aboriginal claims.
In B.C., where arable land is precious and fought over for human habitat and for wildlife, people living on the delta want to preserve what they can for the future. Agriculture is diverse in this region and provides about a quarter of all the farm cash receipts for the province.
Delta is also a unique wildlife area where 1.5 million migratory birds land annually, many of them setting down at the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary.
In this wildlife refuge, farmers work the land through contracts and sharecropping. The land isn’t designed for efficient farming with more sloughs and hedges than most farmers like, said Rick McKelvey, who administers the sanctuary. However, to encourage birds to land, water and shelter are necessary.
The sanctuary is about 700 acres of which 550 are in farm production, said McKelvey.
No money changes hands. The farmers take their crops off in exchange for keeping the land in good shape and keeping drainage ditches working.
Mostly cole crops (cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower) are grown in rotation with corn and potatoes, interspersed with rest crops. Haying and grazing is also allowed, and hunting is prohibited.
Integrated pest management is also used extensively to cut back on farm chemicals. Predator insects are released and fields are monitored for pests and disease before any spraying is done.
