June 6, 2011 | by Luke Brocki | News
This is a story about food, land and money and how a healthy dose of civil disobedience could help create a new green economy in Vancouver.
The city is no stranger to green ideas. The stage was set by local environmentalism in the late 1960s, which launched Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation, among others. The 1990s brought the ecological footprint, a brilliant bit of land use research supervised by UBC’s Bill Rees. Some eight years ago, a pair of Vancouver writers carried out a wildly popular lifestyle experiment known as the 100 Mile Diet, a book that added to modern literary conversations about food, in the vein of Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan.
Today, the City of Vancouver is chipping away at its ambitious Greenest City 2020 plan, which includes food security as one of the pillars to hold up a green economy and a sustainable future. Discussions of food politics are now commonplace, sparked by rising food and fuel prices and legion other threats to global food security. The goal is a food revolution. It’s still too early for sweeping policy changes, but a diverse group of urban farmers is already at work, experimenting with growing and selling food in the city while testing the elasticity of local bylaws.
Growing out of Poverty
“We’ve got lettuce, Tyee spinach, bunches of arugula, French Breakfast radish, rainbow chard. We’ve been selling for two months now, mostly greens. Our tomatoes and peppers just went in,” says Seann Dory, project manager at SOLEfood Farm, a social enterprise in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that employs neighborhood residents to build, plant, maintain and harvest what’s become a productive urban farm on a half-acre parking lot outside the Astoria Hotel at Hawks Avenue and Hastings Street.
The farm started under the umbrella of United We Can, another non-profit looking to build a path out of poverty through green-collar jobs and sustainable economic development. SOLEfood secured startup funding through grants from the City of Vancouver and private companies looking to fund community projects. It then struck a deal with the landowner to pay property taxes on the lot in exchange for being able to farm it.
Last year, the farm hired two full-time and five part-time workers. Their wages were paid with market sales of some 10,000 pounds of food they grew through the season. The project is still far from profitable, but saw $40,000 in revenue in 2010, mostly from produce sales at the city’s farmers markets.
“If it wasn’t for the farmers markets and people buying local, I don’t think this would be viable. They give the farmer a direct-to-consumer contact. Otherwise, you get middled. This way, small-scale agriculture works because we’re actually getting a retail price for our products.”
SOLEfood hired seasoned farmer and author Michael Ableman, who helped design an aggressive growth strategy for the farm.
“We’re projecting a fourfold increase this year. Because we didn’t get more space, we’ve decided we would interplant all our stuff. And we’re starting to take advantage of the vertical space. This year, our returns are going to be a lot better than last year,” says Dory. “We won’t see profit until after year three. We are on a growth path and will continue to take on capital expense until, and possibly past, year three. We hope to have six acres in production by year four and we think we can model the sites to attain similar returns.”
The plan is to employ 50 to 100 staff once the project is moving at full capacity. Dory says part of the illusion that urban farming isn’t profitable comes from the community garden movement.
“Production is not the number one goal for most urban agriculture projects. Ours is [about] employment creation, which makes high production our top priority.”
SOLEfood’s goal to improve life in the Downtown Eastside is in line with the poverty elimination focus of City Hall, so the farm gets support in the form of cash and land donations, but the long-term goal is profits without perennial inputs.
“If you put the means of production in the neighbourhood, it kind of turns the charitable food paradigm model on its head,” says Dory. “It’s going to be patient capital, it’s going to be long-term, but there is a business case for it for sure.”
All Together Now
Elsewhere in East Vancouver, agronomist Ward Teulon follows a different model of urban farming. As an entrepreneur with no ties to the non-profit sector and no sources of start-up funding, Teulon forged his business through community-supported agriculture (CSA). He approached home owners one by one and offered them a share of the vegetable haul he wanted to grow in their backyards. They became his first customers. He then found would-be buyers and charged them up front for weekly shares of whatever he would pull out of the ground.
It been working well for five years. One year, before he scaled back, he tended 15 backyards for a CSA of 40 members. Last year, he grew and sold about $28,000 in produce. This year, he has nine backyards within a five-kilometer radius, where he grows some 25 different crops using organic methods and charges $580 for a weekly share of the growing season’s harvest to be picked up every Thursday.
“I like digging out my own potatoes and the corn I try to harvest as close to the pot as possible and it’s super sweet. And you just can’t find that, even at the farmers market. I harvest everything Thursdays and they come pick up Thursdays. I don’t have refrigeration and minimal storage, so for the most part it comes out of the ground that day and they pick it up that day, so it’s really fresh.”
Teulon’s business is aptly named City Farm Boy, in homage to his family’s long farming history. He grew up on a 6,000-acre farm in southern Saskatchewan, where his father, grandfather and great grandfather farmed golden fields of wheat and canola and where food gardens were as sure a part of life as long snowy winters. Today he’s working with a much smaller land base, roughly ¼ of an acre in total, but the CSA model delivers customers willing to pay more for freshness.
“I can [earn] about $3 per square foot, comfortably. I can do much more if I’m lucky, or if I’m growing high-value crops. Like garlic, I may be able to gross $15 per square foot.”
Despite the innovative approach, Teulon fits the mold of today’s average farmer, reliant on off-farm income. He pays the rest of the bills through garden design, writing and consulting work and educational workshops about growing food, a skill he deems essential for a sustainable future.
“The [United Nations] says by 2050 we will have to double our food production in the world. We’re losing land mass every year to development and erosion. We’re soon going to have to grow food wherever we can grow food.
There’s already a billion people starving on the planet. There’s a million new mouths to feed every week. With the price of fuel going up, we may not be able to get those peppers from South America.”
“[Urban farming] seems a no brainer for me. All my neighbours come and hang out and meet each other. Most of my gardens are places that were a liability. They were just a big weedy area or just a vast area of grass that was being mowed and costing the landowners money. Now they’ve got a garden, they’ve got some vegetables coming in. In some cases, they’re retired and live alone and now they’ve got some company that comes in every week. And they’re always welcome to take whatever they want out of the garden for their kitchen.”
On Sprouts, Bicycles and Mayonnaise Factories
While Teulon grows a large variety of vegetables for a small community of members, another Vancouver entrepreneur is focusing on just two crops for sale at farmers markets. Chris Thoreau used to run a small organic farm on Vancouver Island, but dismal profits fueled a move to the city, where he took a degree in agroecology and started an urban farming business, My Urban Farm, focused on pea shoots and sunflower sprouts. Thoreau got lucky on the land front, when the owner of a small mayonnaise factory in Strathcona liked his idea and let him set up growing trays behind the building free of charge. Thoreau keeps operational costs down by doing all his transport and deliveries by bike.
“Last year I did $21,000 in sales. My goal this year is about $28,000. My expenses were about $11,000 last year, so I did about $10,500 in profit, which was about $13 per hour. I’ve got two employees, both part-time and I’m able to pay them at $12 per hour, so a decent wage.”
Thoreau says the whole project is an exploration of the economic viability of farming in small spaces.
“I love it,” he tells The Dependent in an interview one rainy Saturday morning in late May at the Trout Lake Farmers Market. “This is my job. We talk about food. I give you sprouts and you give me money. I’ve got a limited season, so I need to have off-season work, which is a drawback. But it’s really easy work and it’s really enjoyable.”
Thoreau’s farm occupies 1,800 square feet. Following the same math Teulon did above, Thoreau makes roughly $12 per square foot of production space and is curious what would happen if he scaled up.
But there’s a bit of a problem with that.
“Essentially urban farming right
now is illegal,” he says. “There’s no business license designation for it in the city and you can’t sell anything or deliver a service without having a business license. There’s no zoning, except for Southlands, for agricultural use. The farmers market is an exception because as a vendor I’m covered by their business license. But because I sell to restaurants and grocers as well, technically that’s illegal.
“It’s not meant to be super disobedient because the city knows what we’re doing. We’ve talked with city planners quite a bit, we’ve presented to the mayor directly. It’s on their radar, but change takes time at the municipal level.”
The Land Puzzle
Change really does take time. Take farmers markets for example. Now a local food empire with five locations, including a new weeknight addition on Oak Street, they were illegal for 15 years before bylaw changes legitimized their operations.
But today’s farmers and their allies don’t want to wait that long and are pushing for more leadership from City Hall. Among them is Arzeena Hamir, agronomist, co-ordinator of the Richmond Food Security Society and long a thorn in the side of local government officials and land use authorities.
“It is still not legal for you to grow and sell your products within Vancouver city limits. A backyard farm, or an empty lot farm, is not zoned for that in Vancouver. You can grow food for yourself, but as soon as you start bringing in an economic component into it, you’re in that grey area. The climate at city hall is such right now that I think staff has been told to look the other way, which is great, because you won’t see anyone being prosecuted for farming. Unless someone complains.”
Some people do complain, but would-be urban farmers have bigger problems. Especially troubling is their limited access to land and to lending.
“Land prices are so inflated in Vancouver. You cannot commercially farm using our land prices. Even Richmond is about half a million an acre and that’s for farmland. You cannot go to a bank to ask for a loan to start a vegetable farm at half a million an acre. We need to look at food growing in the city as not just a cool thing, but as a public amenity, something beneficial that we want to see. In order to have that happen with the land prices the way that they are, and the pressure on land use, there needs to be some sort of help. Quite honestly, the big farmers in Canada get subsidies from the government to farm. There’s all kinds of subsidies going toward biofuel production and the GMO crowd. So I don’t see that there’s any contradiction in having some kind of support for urban farmers.”
No Farm Is An Island
While Agriculture advocates lament a lack of agricultural zoning within city limits, Vancouver is also desperate for new commercial, industrial and social and market housing. It’s a tough puzzle to solve and worth a quick look at other jurisdictions for potential lessons, as Vancouver is not the only place facing tough decisions on urban farming and land use. In British Columbia, it’s currently a bit of a hot potato, in limbo between local jurisdictions, the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Agriculture Canada. On the rest of the continent, stories differ from place to place:
Metro Vancouver is keen to build a database of farmland in the region to get a clear picture of how it’s used and how it could be used for agriculture
Nanaimo is abuzz over bylaw changes proposing legal grounds for urban food gardens on city lots. These would allow farmers to sell their produce on-site, as well as at farmers markets. Urban agriculture captured Vancouver Island headlines before, when a farmer in Lantzville, a coastal community in the Nanaimo Regional District, was told to shut down his 2.5-acre farm because it didn’t fit with the local bylaws.
Farming is already a legitimate home business in Victoria, after councilors in that city approved zoning changes to allow city dwellers to grow fruit and vegetables on their properties.
Edmontonians are pushing staff and council in that city for a strategy on urban agriculture, buoyed by the recent triumphs of Vancouver gardeners and bee and chicken keepers, but also calling for policy on commercial urban food-growing operations.
All across Canada and the US, backyard sharing portals are looking to skip government intervention altogether and simply connect landowners with landless would-be farmers.
South of the border, Detroit is the poster child of the new homesteading movement, where depressed land prices
and a shattered economy have ushered in a new era of urban farming. Long peppered with startup food-growing operations, the city could soon be home to the world’s largest urban farm, which promises to use green-collar jobs to rebuild a booming local economy.
Greenest City 2020
Andrea Reimer is a longtime food security advocate and now city councilor on an administration hoping to transform Vancouver into the world’s greenest city by 2020, a mission that includes increasing the city’s food assets by 50 percent over the next nine years.
“Our efforts have been around community gardens, community kitchens, things in the public sphere, farmers markets being another one. We have another grant that we approved to do a food incubator in the Downtown Eastside, but that isn’t so much about growing food as it is about processing food.”
Farmers understand the city is not in the business of supporting private for-profit food producers, but advocates argue those farmers are providing an essential service and should at least be able to do it in a supportive environment. Reimer doesn’t argue with that, but says it’s too early for policy changes.
She says the city, under the Vancouver Charter, doesn’t have the authority to give tax incentives to residential property owners who choose to donate their land to urban farming, an idea advocates would like to see officials entertain. The calls for appropriate zoning might have more success, but not before holding community consultations and finding solutions to worries about urban marijuana grow operations piggybacking on bylaws meant to make help food producers.
“Help us learn what sort of bylaw changes we’d have to make to be able to prototype what successful agriculture looks like,” she says. “Having a tolerance for pilots and tests to find out where the barriers are would be the phase we’re in. It’s a 10-year action plan we’re on, not a 12-month action plan.”
The Future of Food
At best, the time will be used to experiment, observe, report and think about commercial farm operations in the city. But 2020 is still a number of growing seasons and civic elections away. In the name of posterity, urban farming advocates around the world are organizing into food policy councils, which aim to be forums for policy development for sustainable and economically viable food systems.
Author and agronomist David Tracey is a member of the Vancouver Food Policy Council. He is calling for greater collaboration between different levels of government to build a peri-urban food system serving larger regions, modeled on the province’s embattled Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR).
“We didn’t have that sprawl that every other North American city had because we had this thing that said, no, farmland is important and we have to save it. What I’d like to see is the equivalent of the ALR in the city. So the city would say, growing food is important, we have to have a public that is involved in this thing, for food reasons, also for health and fitness and the environment and education. We could actually create zoning for food protected areas. We do it for parks; we do it for playgrounds in parks. Well, we also have to have room for food.”
In the interim, Tracey is an advocate for participation in food production, from balcony growing and community gardens to guerrilla vegetable plots on abandoned lots, laneways and rooftops.
“Even though urban farming has this cache of being the cool thing on the block right now, it’s actually an old thing we’re doing. So it is bringing new people into the game, new technologies, new attitudes, and new aesthetics. What it’s going to be like in 5-10 years, nobody knows, because we haven’t done it this way before. That’s why it’s exciting to see the entrepreneurs get into it. It’s such an interesting blend of people.”
