[getsmart-l] Farmers losing fight against urban sprawl

[John O'Gorman]

http://www.hcfa.on.ca/cached.asp?id=1122
Farmers losing fight against urban sprawl
        
      Charles Mandel 
      CanWest News Service 


Sunday, October 07, 2007

  
>From the deck of Foxhill Farm, Richard Rand can look out over Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley and see the green fields rolling off like a crumbled blanket toward Cape Blomidon. 
It's an inspiring, beautiful sight and one that's very much in demand these days - from the Annapolis Valley to Ontario's Niagara Peninsula and British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

Much of Canada's rich farm land is more valuable for housing developments these days than it is for supporting crops.

Whereas land for growing vegetables or raising cattle might fetch $2,000 an acre, developers are ready to offer farmers $40,000 an acre, knowing they can flip it for twice that when the property becomes part of a new subdivision.

It's that loss of land that's concerning advocates about the long-term viability and supply of locally grown food.

"I always considered myself a steward of the land," said Rand, whose family has farmed in the Annapolis Valley for six generations. But that's not necessarily the case with a couple of his neighbours, who are currently considering selling their farms to make room for new developments that could hold anywhere from 300 to 500 new homes.

Rand said he's not anti-development, but the idea of prime agricultural land being turned into subdivisions disturbs him.

A couple of weeks ago Rand held a meeting to debate the idea. "If I don't say something, I'm guilty for just standing and watching it go by," he said.

It's not only the aesthetic beauty that attract development. Farm land is relatively easy and inexpensive to develop. The already cleared land makes it easy to dig foundations and good drainage is available.

Another part of the problem is that for many farmers, agriculture isn't very feasible any more. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of farms dropped 7.1 per cent to 229,373 farms across Canada -- a loss of 17,500 farms -- according to the 2006 Statistics Canada census.

The census reports that farmers are getting older overall, while fewer, younger individuals are continuing to work in the field. Lacking younger family members willing to take on the burden of managing the operation, many of the retiring farmers -- like Rand's neighbours -- are hoping to cash out.

The pattern has become so well-established that Witold Rybczynski -- a well-known author on urban planning -- used the term developers apply to farmers who sell their land as the title to his most recent book on land development: The Last Harvest.

The connotations of that phrase cause worries advocates that down the road that will mean an increasing reliance on imported food.

Jill Grant, director of the school of planning at Halifax's Dalhousie University, said for now it's fine to buy inexpensive food from other countries, but she worries that as energy costs escalate, local food sources will be increasingly important.

"In looking at agricultural land, you can't just think about the immediate need for housing," Grant said. "You have to think about future generations and what they may need to sustain themselves. Food is such a basic element that we can't rob future generations of the opportunity to grow it."

Yet that's exactly what's been going on across the country, according to Melissa Watkins, executive director of the Ontario Farmland Trust. "The big failing that's happening here in Ontario, and I imagine elsewhere in Canada, is our land uses a planning system that is supposed to protect the land for agriculture."

Some of the initiatives that have been done to protect farmland include British Columbia's agricultural land reserve, established in the 1970s to stop the annual loss of 6,000 hectares of farm land; and the City of Toronto's land-use boundary, meant to prevent urban sprawl. The former is a land reserve of about 4.7 million hectares.

But critics say neither work.

Areas such as B.C.'s fertile Okanagan Valley continues to face development pressures, while sprawl has just skipped the Toronto land-use boundary to continue further out. The latter boundary also leads to inequities, with farmers within the boundary unable to get the sky-high prices for land farmers outside the boundary can command.

Watkins believes the federal government should take some interest in the problem and put legislation in place to stop valuable farm land from vanishing. "It is a national resource. If we want to have the capacity to feed ourselves, we should be concerned about our capacity to produce our food."

Back in the valley, Rand proposes a program that might buy farmers out, paying them less than what a developer would, but at a fair enough price that the land would become available for another farmer to purchase it.

"I think society should look at paying that. If not, we're going to lose a lot of good farm land here because it's a beautiful place to live. Once it's gone, it's gone."

© CanWest News Service 2007
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