We’ve known it all along, but at last we hear it out loud. Robin Silvester, the President and CEO of Port Metro Vancouver, has stated that: “Agriculture is emotionally important, but economically [of] relatively low importance to the Lower Mainland. And in terms of food security, [it] is almost meaningless for the Lower Mainland.” So there we have it...finally, honesty from someone in a position of power. Our Premiers and their governments have known it was too political to admit to -- that Delta’s agricultural land will be turned into an industrial park.

From The Economist - Dec 9, 2010

WHEN you run out of land in a crowded city, the solution is obvious: build upwards. This simple trick makes it possible to pack huge numbers of homes and offices into a limited space such as Hong Kong, Manhattan or the City of London. Mankind now faces a similar problem on a global scale. The world’s population is expected to increase to 9.1 billion by 2050, according to the UN. Feeding all those people will mean increasing food production by 70%, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, through a combination of higher crop yields and an expansion of the area under cultivation. But the additional land available for cultivation is unevenly distributed, and much of it is suitable for growing only a few crops. So why not create more agricultural land by building upwards?

Such is the thinking behind vertical farming. The idea is that skyscrapers filled with floor upon floor of orchards and fields, producing crops all year round, will sprout in cities across the world. As well as creating more farmable land out of thin air, this would slash the transport costs and carbon-dioxide emissions associated with moving food over long distances. It would also reduce the spoilage that inevitably occurs along the way, says Dickson Despommier, a professor of public and environmental health at Columbia University in New York who is widely regarded as the progenitor of vertical farming, and whose recently published book, “The Vertical Farm”, is a manifesto for the idea. According to the UN’s Population Division, by 2050 around 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. So it just makes sense, he says, to move farms closer to where everyone will be living.

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Hemmed in by Delta to the east, Point Roberts to the south and the Salish Sea to the west, Southlands is a 538-acre farm that has been in the middle of a tug-of-war between developers and farmland defenders for nearly four decades.

The president of the development company that owns Southlands has proposed a plan that he says could serve both interests equally. Proponents argue that it could serve as a model for a new form of planning -- agricultural urbanism -- where people and farms can co-exist. Opponents fear it will only drive up the prices of already expensive, and scarce, farmland in the region.

Read the full Tyee article here

"The agriculture that we should bring about substantially is local scale, human intensive, ecologically sound," says Dr. Kent Mullinix from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The director of Sustainable Agri-food Systems acknowledges that, "The fact of the matter is this post industrial agri-food system is going to require a lot of people, in particular a lot of farmers."

Mullinix references the work of Richard Heinburg from the Post Carbon Institute whose research suggests that the United States will need up to 50 million new farmers to work the land and feed the people in a post carbon world. That's roughly 17 per cent of the current population. Applying that number to British Columbia suggests that three quarters of a million of us will need to take up the hoe. At the moment, I'm feeling woefully unprepared.

Read full Tyee article here