High-value farming | Rural and urban communities will have to interact, says food security researcher
HARRISON HOT SPRINGS, B.C. — The notion that farming happens “out there” beyond the city walls changes as cities grow and sprawl over more farmland.
Lenore Newman, Canadian research chair in food security and the environment at the University of the Fraser Valley, has a word for the space where food production and residential development co-exist: agriburbia.
“One of the strong future branches of agriculture is going to be suburban,” she told the Canadian Farm Writers Federation annual conference recently in Harrison Hot Springs.
Canada is a suburban nation, not an urban one, she said.
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While urban agriculture draws headlines and cities approve backyard chickens and rooftop gardens, that type of agriculture won’t be enough to feed the growing world.
British Columbia’s Fraser Valley is a good example of the interaction between cities and agriculture, Newman said. The cities of Abbotsford and Chilliwack compete for space with poultry and dairy farms, berry operations and farm markets.
Newman said three types of agriculture occur in agriburbia, according to Newman.
One is a high intensity type of farming that uses high technology and as little land as possible. This includes peppers, eggs and crops specific to an ethnic market in nearby Vancouver.
Another type is small land-use and high-value farming that incorporates agri-tourism, such as berry farms and markets, vineyards and wineries, cut flowers and fresh herbs.
Newman said the addition of agri-tourism can lead to conflict, often because of urban residents’ perceptions of rural Canada.
“City people kind of expect to see square hay bales and a guy in overalls with a fiddle,” she said.
“They don’t expect to see aerial spraying or a giant building full of peppers.”
The third type of farming features farmers with small plots, likely organic and producing crops such as heirloom tomatoes for farmers markets.
Newman said these farmers are often young people with other jobs who are making a go of it on an acreage. They are also great ambassadors for agriculture because they are willing to talk about what they do.
The Fraser Valley area contains 0.2 percent of Canada’s arable land but produces 4.5 percent of the country’s farmgate receipts, said Kim Sutherland, regional agrologist with the B.C. agriculture ministry.
Farmgate receipts in the region are $7,300 per acre, she said, compared to the Niagara peninsula region at $3,200 per acre.
“The only basin that produces food more efficiently is the Nile,” said Newman.
Yet Vancouver and other cities in the region want to grow further into the valley.
Newman said the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), which was implemented in 1974, has kept the region from turning into Los Angeles.
“That L.A. basin was one of the greatest farming regions in North America before we built 17 million people worth of city on it,” said Newman.
“It was a citrus area.”
The region was marketed in the eastern states as a place to move and grow 10 or 20 acres of fruit.
Los Angeles was close to amenities, but with no laws in place to protect farmland, the suburbs washed over the region and wiped out the farms.
Not all cities sprawl like this, but Vancouver is the same model, Newman said.
“Four of the five biggest cities in British Columbia are in the Fraser River delta and it’s all one big city,” she said.
The only place it can sprawl is further into the Fraser River Valley, where the ALR is in effect.
She said only three percent of farmland has been lost since the ALR was implemented. Prior to that, the region was losing 15,000 acres a year.
There are challenges, however.
Some of the farmland is in tiny pieces and is becoming too small to farm effectively.
As well, some of it is in such close proximity to urban development that complaints about smell and noise are common.
“You get a lot of tension because the way the land reserve works, it has a lot of fragmented boundaries,” Newman said.
“It has a lot of places where housing pushes into farmland and every time that happens, people move into those places thinking that it’s going to be Old MacDonald growing wine and perhaps leaving a bottle at their doorstep every now and then.”
Sutherland said the ALR and land use planning principles are critical for the future.
“If you use conflict resolution mechanisms like minimum distance separation, you scatter the agriculture,” she said.
“If you use planning mechanisms, you can tighten it and the land can be used very, very efficiently.”
