Adaptation

Planner/educator/farmer urges innovative thinking about land and food

What we eat and how we produce our food is changing. While this has likely always been true, current trends toward larger, more industrialized farms and increasing demand for greater choices of food for an ever-more diverse palate can’t help but have a profound impact the land and how we use it.

Nina-Marie Lister believes rural communities like Prince Edward County need to have a conversation about the rules that govern land use planning— to consider greater agriculture flexibility and pursue market opportunities evolving around us.

Lister is a planner, researcher and professor of urban and regional planning at Ryerson University and a visiting professor at Harvard University. She is also a farmer in Prince Edward County.

Lister spoke to the annual meeting of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture on Thursday in Picton. She argues for more creativity, innovation and flexibility in how communities like the County interpret planning rules to best adapt to the changing needs of consumers and the forces shaping agriculture.

She observes how Toronto has evolved over the past five decades—the city is now composed of more Muslims than Presbyterians. Forty-seven per cent of Toronto residents were born in another country. As the city has changed, so to has its diet, and the contents of its kitchen cupboards. Yet more and more our food is produced elsewhere.

In 1960 most of Toronto’s food came from within 350 kilometres of the city. Today at least 60 per cent of the fresh produce consumed in Toronto is imported—a third of it arriving during Ontario’s own growing season.

In the meantime farmers have gotten better at producing higher yields from an acre of land— through mechanization, fertilizer use and consolidation. These trends suggest that as farmers become more productive, they become less relevant to the local markets they once served. Their outlook is becoming more regional and global.

Lister suggests there are many reasons we need to bring the producers and the local consumer closer together. Innovative planning can play a role.

She says planning policies have tended to follow the trend toward larger farms and concentrated farming practices. She suggests this view of agriculture needs to be expanded and perhaps re-imagined.

For example, Lister suggests small-scale agriculture and back yard farming ought to be embraced and encouraged.

“Under current planning legislation, if land is traded into rural residential the rules say it can no longer be farmed,” said Lister. “Well sure it can. There is no reason we can’t start looking at ways to introduce small-scale farming on smaller properties whether it is for hobby purposes or viable economic owners—that is up to the landowner.

“We shouldn’t have conversations about noxious use when somebody wants to have three back yard chickens or two rabbits and a pony on land under five acres. That should be a reasonable use.”

In this regard, Lister says Toronto is actually more advanced in its thinking than Picton.

“Residents there are testing the bylaw to keep chickens,” said Lister, “yet in a rural residential property under five acres you can’t have chickens in this community—its ridiculous.”

Innovation is a theme Lister comes back to regularly both as a way to think about food production and specifically when we think about how we use the land—but, she emphasizes, not at the expense of key principles.

“We understand the need to protect [prime agricultural land] as the basis of the land’s ability to produce food for people. If you impair that over time—we can’t feed ourselves.

“But how we interpret that may be contextual. Some communities will have many defined agricultural uses—others just use a very broad definition conceived by the province. It may need some fleshing out in the local areas—particularly in areas that are highly productive or where farmers need the opportunity to innovate.”

“Innovation doesn’t mean building a hotel on prime agriculture. It means: how can they add value to the product the land is able to produce?”

This is a dialogue, Lister says, that must be informed by good data—not on fabrications or wish lists.

“It is based upon what the evidence suggests,” said Lister.

She is working with the County’s Planning Department to put this evidence and information into the hands of decision makers and landowners alike.

“A lot of human capital goes into this,” said Lister. “We will make available the work that a lot of my graduate and undergraduate students are doing. They have produced a lot of excellent work in conjunction with the research that is on my team. We try to make that information as available as possible.”

Lister had the ear of many local decision makers on Thursday as nine members of council were in attendance at the gathering.

A report prepared in 2009 by Lister’s students entitled “Cultivating Rural Creativity in Prince Edward County” is currently available on the County’s website, pecounty.on.ca.