Question 7 of 10: The Loss of Prime Agricultural Land Around Canadian Communities

Question 7: The Loss of Prime Agricultural Land Around Canadian Communities (10 marks)

Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.

Why it is happening. The conversion is not an accident and it is not caused mainly by farmers selling out. It is the predictable result of four forces acting on the same land at once. The first is geography: Canadian settlements were founded where the agriculture was, because the best soils, the flattest ground and the navigable water were the same places. Prime land under the Canada Land Inventory — Classes 1 to 3, the dependable agricultural land — makes up only a small fraction of the national land area, on the order of five per cent, and a disproportionate share of it lies in exactly the corridors where the population lives. Every Canadian city therefore expands onto its own best soil. The second force is economics: at the urban fringe, land priced for its development potential is worth a large multiple of its value in agricultural production, so the arithmetic of holding a farm against an offer is one-sided, and the option value alone begins to distort farming decisions long before a sale. The third force is the development pattern itself. Low-density, land-extensive suburban and estate-lot development consumes land out of all proportion to the households it houses: a thousand dwellings on 0.8 ha estate lots take about 800 ha, while the same thousand dwellings at 40 units per gross hectare take about 25 ha — a factor of 32. The fourth is institutional: fringe land is often in a different jurisdiction than the city that generates the demand, so a small rural municipality with a thin assessment base faces a strong fiscal incentive to approve residential development that its neighbour’s growth created, and there may be no regional body with the authority to say no.

The mechanism is also gradual, which is what makes it hard to stop. Farmland near an expanding edge suffers impermanence syndrome: with development expected, the operator stops investing in drainage, buildings and perennial crops, and the land becomes progressively less productive well before it is built on. Conflicts with new non-farm neighbours over dust, odour, noise and slow-moving equipment add pressure; fragmentation by scattered severances and estate lots leaves parcels too small and too interrupted to farm economically; and infrastructure built to serve the new residents — a widened road, a water main, a sewer extension — makes the next parcel out developable in turn.

The role planners play. Planners are on both sides of this, and the honest answer says so. They process and recommend on the applications that convert the land; they prepare the growth forecasts and land-needs studies that justify boundary expansions, and an inflated forecast or an unrealistically low assumed density produces a defensible-looking case for taking farmland that is not actually needed. They also draft the policies that protect it, run the regional and provincial planning processes where the boundary is fixed, and provide council with the analysis of alternatives — how much of the demand can be met through intensification, what the servicing cost of each option is, what the land actually is under the soil classification. The professional obligation, under the Canadian Institute of Planners code of conduct, is to advise on the long-term public interest, which means putting the true land-needs arithmetic in front of council even when the applicant, the landowner and sometimes the council itself would prefer a different number.

Why the loss is an issue. Prime agricultural land is not renewable on any human timescale — soil formation is measured in centuries and pavement is permanent — and the supply is small, so the loss is cumulative and irreversible. Food security and food-system resilience depend on domestic production capacity, and the near-urban land is disproportionately the land that grows perishable, high-value crops close to the market that consumes them; losing it lengthens supply chains and raises the transportation energy embedded in food. There is a rural-economy dimension: farms support processing, storage, equipment and transport businesses, and once the critical mass of production in a district falls the supporting industry leaves and the remaining farms lose their local services. There is an environmental dimension, since farmland provides drainage, groundwater recharge, carbon storage and habitat that pavement does not, and the low-density pattern that consumes it also generates the longest vehicle trips per household. And there is a fiscal dimension that councils consistently underestimate: dispersed development is expensive to service and to maintain in perpetuity, and the studies that compare municipal cost per dwelling by density consistently find the scattered fringe pattern to be the costliest form the municipality can accept.

What might be done. The measures that work in Canada are layered, and no single one is sufficient. At the provincial and regional level, the strongest instruments are a designated agricultural reserve with a provincial body controlling exclusion — British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve and the Agricultural Land Commission are the model — and provincial policy that requires municipalities to protect prime agricultural areas and permit only agriculture-related uses in them, coupled with a firm regional urban containment boundary of the kind used in Ontario’s Greenbelt and Growth Plan and in Metro Vancouver’s regional growth strategy. Removing the decision from the municipality that benefits fiscally from conversion is the single most effective structural change. At the municipal level: a community plan that sets a genuine intensification target and a minimum greenfield density so that the land-needs calculation cannot be gamed; large minimum parcel sizes and strict severance policy in agricultural areas to prevent fragmentation; agricultural-area zoning that permits farming and farm-related uses and excludes residential subdivision; hard urban-edge policies with mutual buffering so that new development, not the farm, absorbs the interface; and refusal to extend water and sewer into agricultural areas, which is often the most decisive control of all. At the property level: agricultural easements and covenants purchased or donated to a land trust, and transfer of development rights in the jurisdictions that permit it, which compensates the owner for the value forgone rather than simply forbidding the sale. And in support of farming itself: differential farm property tax assessment, right-to-farm legislation that protects normal farm practices from nuisance complaints, farm succession programs and support for new entrants, and local food procurement and marketing that improves the return from farming so that the land is worth more in use.

The measure that underlies all of them is honest land-needs accounting. Most farmland lost in Canada is not lost because protection was overridden; it is lost because a forecast, a household-size assumption and a density assumption were each set slightly conservatively, and the product of the three justified a boundary expansion that the community did not need.