By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 15, 2014
Fraser Valley farmland is at risk, but a new study from Dr. Lenore Newman might fix that.
Newman has been exploring the history of valley farmland for the past year, and recently received $32,000 from the City of Abbotsford to continue.
Most farmland in the valley is protected as part of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), which prevents the land from being converted for other use — industrial or residential — without municipalities signing off on it. This preserves the largely agricultural nature of the valley, which is important to feeding both the local population and the rest of the province.
But with the constant expansion of valley cities, developers are starting to eye up land currently protected by the ALR.
This, Newman says, has the potential to be a huge problem.
“All around the world, urban hinterlands are losing their farmland at this incredibly rapid rate,” she says.
Newman hopes her research will drive home the importance of agricultural land to the public, keeping the majority of protected land in the ALR for as long as possible.
“This system, the ALR, is one of the strongest in the world — and it’s one of the older ones,” she says. “Getting that information out there — how it’s working, how it’s not working, what we need to change to make it stronger — is really important, so that other cities around the world can mimic it.”
Aside from the risk of development, the ALR is faced with another risk: people who buy farmland with no intent to farm it.
This land usually falls into one of two categories: people who buy land on speculation, with the hope to reap a healthy profit from it later, and people who buy land to live on when they reach a certain income bracket.
“They’re rich, they buy five acres, they put a horse on it — that’s allowed,” Newman explains.
Currently there is nothing in the ALR guidelines to prevent this, and Newman suggests restricting who can buy ALR land, limiting it to farmers or those with an agricultural background who intend to farm.
“We need incentives to … have those owners rent out their land to young farmers,” she notes, “because we have a whole lot of young farmers who can’t find land.”
Newman and her post-doc research assistant Denver Nixon have been constructing a map of the ALR from Agassiz to Vancouver for the last year, tracking land that’s been added or removed since 1974. Newman pinned the resulting poster — a swath of ALR green over the geometric web of property lines and municipal divisions — across three of her office’s walls just this week.
Recent City of Abbotsford funding will propel this research forward for another eight months, and help bring that research into the public eye. Newman says they’ll hire a few more students to help with the legwork, and eventually set up exhibits about the ALR in the gallery at UFV and at the Reach.
“We’re always pushing to remind people, hey, this is not a poor use of land,” Newman says. “This is the most fertile delta in the world next to the Nile, and we’re not really aware of it … We have to start thinking of this region as a great river delta, and as long as we don’t we’re going to be pretty tempted to say, ‘Oh, it’s flat land. I’ll put some condos on it.’”
