The restrictive rules that protect farmland across the province have transformed dozens of farm-based businesses into illegal enterprises.
According to Citizens for Agricultural Land Reform, a group of landowners in northeast B.C., most farms in that part of the province don’t generate enough revenue to stay afloat on their own.
Forcing many farmers to open second and home-based businesses that serve the booming oil and gas industry.
But the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), which governs B.C.’s pool of Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), refuses to allow many of those businesses to legally operate on protected farmland.
The ALC is tasked with protecting the province’s prime food-producing land, but farmers say they can’t keep their agricultural businesses afloat without a secondary income.
That’s why many of them have chosen to ignore the ALC’s rules and operate secondary businesses anyway.
“I’m willing to guess there’s at least 200 or more businesses in the northeast that are working from farmland that are illegal,” said Paul Gevatkoff, a spokesman for Citizens for Agricultural Land Reform.
B.C. Liberal leadership candidate Mike de Jong recently toured the northeast and heard about the problem first hand.
“The concern that has arisen in the northeast, with some legitimacy, is that the kind of pressure that exists on prime farmland in the Lower Mainland or the Okanagan is entirely different than what exists in the northeast,” de Jong recently told Business in Vancouver. “The starkest example of this is some of the rulings and constraints that have been placed around attempts to develop economic opportunity in Fort Nelson.”
He believes the ALC shouldn’t be blamed for the situation, given that its primary mandate is to protect farmland across the province, but a solution to the problem is needed.
“I’m not going to pretend I’ve worked out the perfect wording, but it would be a significant step to having a differentiated mandate in that region of the province.”
Check out this week’s edition of BIV for more about farmers who say they’re struggling amid stringent ALR rules.