Purpose of Planning for Agriculture

Historically, planning and agriculture have not been strong examples of cross-over disciplines. Few planners feel completely at home dealing with agricultural issues and few agricultural specialists are fully comfortable within the realm of community plans and bylaws. Planning for Agriculture is a resource document intended to act as a bridge between the world of land use planning and agriculture.

Planning for the health of our agricultural sector can happen in many ways. The day-to-day, season-by-season management decisions of BC’s farmers are clearly one form - indeed a very direct form - of planning for agriculture. The federal and provincial agricultural initiatives and programmes constitute another form of planning for agriculture.

This document, however, focuses most directly on the contribution at the local level that is being made, and can be made, to ensure agriculture’s sustainable future. Local governments and other groups have an important role to play in ensuring agriculture’s place in their communities.

The Agricultural Land Commission has reviewed several hundred local government official plans and regulatory bylaws. In some cases official community and regional plans, like the now defunct 1980 Plan for the Lower Mainland, are committed to farming and the preservation of agricultural land. On the other hand there are examples of local land use policy that are clearly directed at agriculture’s demise in favour of alternative land uses. However, more often than not local policy has tended to reflect an indifference to agriculture. There are several reasons for this historic policy lethargy or disinterest.

As a society, generation by generation, most of us are gradually becoming removed from any direct link to primary agricultural production. Thus, a lack of awareness of the complexities of the agri-food sector - from farm field to table - is to be expected.

For a variety of reasons, planning for agriculture has not been high on public agendas.

The population of BC has grown rapidly. Most of this growth has been directed to urban areas. Consequently the pressures of urbanization - the many important settlement questions and challenges - have tended to capture the public agenda. As a result agriculture has too often been placed in a sort of policy vacuum - this despite food being a basic need for human existence.

In Canada, the trend towards increasing urbanization has been ongoing for most of this century. However, following World War II, as the single family home and its ally the private automobile joined forces, urbanization was transformed into the far more land consumptive suburbanization. The land in question was most often farmland. Over time it became viewed as an inevitable or normal process to compromise agricultural land for urban purposes.

Land stewardship has also been affected in Canada and BC by a false sense of land abundance. In British Columbia, in reality, our farmland resource is a study of scarcity. All prime agricultural land within the ALR (our best crop land) accounts for only about 1% of the BC land base.

Also, the abundance of food, (for most, but not all) and the ability to readily import from abroad, have also affected our sense of food security. Historically Canadians have never experienced serious food shortages or have had to suffer through a blockade of goods as has been or is the case in other countries.

Finally, farmland, as a commodity, remains largely unshielded from the vagaries of the market place and is susceptible to speculative forces, forces that in turn exert pressure on public policy.

Singularly, or in combination, these are some of the reasons why farmland is often under threat, or the needs of agriculture have not been understood or high on policy agendas. One of the key purposes of Planning for Agriculture is to create a reversal in which the farmland base and the business of farming gain a prominent and positive place within local planning processes and policy formulation.

Planning for Agriculture also considers linkages between local and provincial programmes that are required to ensure local actions are not frustrated. Considered also are a wide variety of values placed, and at times misplaced, upon our foodlands along with the key actors who are involved in and shape agricultural policy.

Key Elements -- Planning for Agriculture:

policy integration	encourage policy integration between levels of government;
building stronger relationships	build stronger partnerships with and between locally-based groups that affect and support agriculture;
enhance awareness of agriculture	foster an enhanced awareness of agriculture’s importance and contribution to the overall well-being of communities and the province;
improved inventory work & ongoing monitoring	enhance land use inventory work to ensure a better understanding of land use relationships, how agriculture functions and the issues important to the farm community; undertake ongoing monitoring to ensure the effectiveness of plans and bylaws;
agricultural area plans	develop within several key farming areas, focused agricultural area plans at the local level;
cross jurisdictional planning	encourage, where appropriate, cross jurisdictional planning efforts that encompass single identifiable agricultural communities;
edge planning	develop policies aimed at greater land use compatibility along agriculture’s interface through detailed edge planning;
inclusive planning processes	ensure inclusive planning processes that involve members of the agricultural community.

How can agriculture best fit into local plan and bylaw delivery systems? What new opportunities are provided by legislative initiatives such as the Farm Practices Protection (Right-to-Farm) Act and the Growth Strategies Act ? Each of these, and many other questions are explored. As well, several key issues facing agriculture are considered along with opportunities and recommended solutions that may be achieved through both local and provincial initiatives.

With very few exceptions, the recommendations and suggested approaches within "Planning for Agriculture" can be achieved within the context of current legislation

Given agriculture’s diversity, recommended approaches and solutions will not be equally applicable in all parts of the Province. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are required to complete the puzzle, only those pieces needed to enhance agriculture’s working environment in a given area will be appropriate. Planning for Agriculture, as a resource document, will demand periodic review and update to ensure an appropriate fit with other emerging rural resource objectives, growth strategies and new concepts required to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

British Columbians have been facing - and meeting - the serious challenge of agricultural land preservation for nearly a quarter century. While this effort must continue, it is time to get inside the Agricultural Land Reserve and pay far greater attention to planning for the long term agricultural use of agricultural land. Planning for Agriculture is aimed at fostering enduring partnerships that will help improve the security of BC’s foodlands in a way that preserves not only our working land base, but also the farmers on the land.

An objective: ...providing the largest possible number of agricultural opportunities over the broadest possible extent of our agricultural land base.

It is important that farm issues are considered in a way that clearly recognizes agriculture as the highest and best use of our farmland resource. This means ensuring that our regulatory imprint on the landscape does not disadvantage, but rather, actively supports agricultural enterprise. We need to provide for a working land base conducive to agricultural production - one that allows for the largest possible number of agricultural opportunities over the broadest possible extent of our agricultural land base. And finally we must work collectively to achieve sustainable agriculture - to reconcile environmental imperatives with economic viability.

^*  Within Planning for Agriculture the words farmer and farming will generally be used as all encompassing references to all forms of primary agricultural producers and production including orchardists, ranchers, growers and horticulturists, etc.