A large protected property in central Richmond will be more valuable in the long run if it remains part of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and is not released for development, say local residents.

An emergency town hall meeting was held on May 23rd to discuss a vision that would keep Richmond’s 135 acre Garden City lands in the ALR while providing an innovative and much-needed community farm environment.

“There is an urban-agriculture disconnect when we’re living in the urban environment. We know what we need or we think we know what we need… But we don’t know what agriculture needs so it’s easy to lose key commodities like the farms. It’s very hard to get them but easy to lose them,” says Kim Sutherland, agrologist with the BC Ministry of Agriculture, who spoke at the meeting.

The vision, put forth by the Food Security Task Force of the Richmond Poverty Response Committee, includes teaching farms, leased acreage, walking trails, farmers’ markets and a food bank. Richmond currently has no farmers’ markets, and of the four community gardens, only one is accessible by public transit. The Garden City lands could fill this void.

“It is excellent land. It has very high production capacity for a very wide variety of food products, there is no question about that,” says Sutherland. “These lands are the best of the best… Most farmers would just drool to get onto them”

Not surprisingly, it isn’t just farmers who are drooling over the Garden City lands. The city of Richmond, Crown corporations and the Musqueam First Nation have already jointly applied to remove the lands from the ALR for the development of recreational, residential and exhibition facilities.

The Agricultural Land Commission has so far rejected their last proposal in late 2006, but the Food Security Task Force of the Richmond Poverty Response Committee, who organized the recent meeting, fear that the unique agricultural value of the property is still at risk of being forgotten.

“We need to educate people in urban settings about the value of agriculture, teach children about where their food comes from… There are a couple generations that have taken for granted the food that we have – imported food – but it’s not sustainable,” says Jason O’Brian, Food Security Task Force Coordinator.

He explains that, while it may be cheaper to import food, or even sometimes to produce it locally, and then export it for processing and import it back again, this cost analysis does not consider the environmental consequences.

Sutherland estimates that for every calorie of food on a North American plate it takes approximately 10 calories of oil used at various stages in food production. If we neglect local food production and continue to rely on fossil fuels for our food, it will become increasingly expensive.

BC farmers currently supply about 48 per cent of the food consumed in this province, and with an increasing population and urban sprawl this number is expected to continue falling.

“Richmond has a really aging farming population right now. There are a lot of people in the last stage of their careers as farmers and there aren’t a lot of people banging on their doors saying “Hey, I want to follow in your footsteps!” says O’Brian. “What we’re trying to do is redefine the farmer. How do you make gardening cool, how do you make farming cool?”

The Task Force believes that a central green space offering more than just gardens could attract new interest in community food production, and offer a place to start for small-scale farmers.

“The value of this is that it’s the last piece of land in an urban setting,” says O’Brian, “You can have little café-couture property and get a dozen people together and create that pocket community, or you could have a Mecca community-building exercise that would set an example for the rest of Canada, and that people could come to from all over the world to see because it’s that big of a progressive step towards local food production.”

Sutherland says that the water, climate and soil in the Fraser Valley is unparalleled and allows for very intensive food production. She believes the Garden City lands are protected as agricultural land for a reason.

“Very rarely in the world will you see this kind of efficiency in land use,” she says, “You’ve got every square inch used for something. I think when we’re looking at urban development we have to consider: is it used as efficiently as agriculture [would use it]? This is really a Manhattan style of agriculture development.”

The Food Security Task Force is currently petitioning in support of their vision of an urban farm space and to keep the Garden City lands part of the ALR.