Victory Gardens Blog

The City of Vancouver is pursuing changes to bylaws and regulations that will rescue commercial urban agriculture from its legal limbo.

A team of city staff members has convened with the goal of removing the legal impediments to farming on both public and private land, according to Coun. Andrea Reimer.

“We have a strong commitment under the Greenest City Action Plan to encourage local food production,” said Reimer.

Two of the 10 goals of the Greenest City plan are to promote a green economy and enhance access to local food. Urban farming does both.

The city has done everything possible to promote commercial urban agriculture — despite its murky legal status —as an unofficial pilot project that will guide substantial changes to the rules, Reimer said.

Prohibitions against businesses operating on land zoned for residential uses and a tangle of bylaws passed to discourage illegal marijuana-growing operations will have to be overhauled, she said.

“Those same laws would prohibit growing lettuce indoors on commercially zoned land, but that’s being done now all over the world,” Reimer said.

In addition, the city’s business licensing system does not recognize commercial urban agriculture as a business.

“We know there are successful commercial enterprises in the city of Vancouver that are using front and back yards for urban agriculture and to the best of my knowledge we haven’t had any complaints,” said Reimer. “The neighbours aren’t distinguishing that activity from you or I gardening in our yards, which is really encouraging.”

Despite the city’s tacit support for their work, urban farmers are nervous about operating outside the law.

Urban farmer Emi Do of Yummy Yards cultivates vegetables on both residential land and agricultural land in Vancouver and Burnaby, but takes pains to characterize her work on residential lots as “edible landscaping.”

Do uses the vegetables she harvests from her clients on urban residential lots to reward interns, employees and the homeowners who make their yards available, rather than sell them and risk legal sanction.

She grows crops that she sells on agricultural land in Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond.

“In residential-zoned yards in Vancouver I can’t produce food for sale,” she said. “I’m providing a landscaping service.”

About half a dozen farmers are commercially cultivating crops on residential lots in Vancouver for sale at farmers’ markets and through small organic produce cooperatives, all without city business licences.

Lawmakers all over North America are scrambling to keep up with the urban agriculture movement, according to Michael Levenston of the local website City Farmer (cityfarmer.info).

“We are in a new time,” he said. “With young people growing food commercially in the city it has put a whole new focus on what can be done with an urban landscape and they are certainly pushing the legal limits.”

Political leaders are beginning to make the connection between access to fresh foods and the fight against obesity, he said.

A recent city-sponsored forum of city councillors, staff, urban farmers and academics helped create a roadmap to change for city staff.

“The number of urban farms in Vancouver is increasing and these green businesses are leading the way in developing economically viable food production models for the urban environment,” according to the report on the Vancouver Urban Farming Forum held late last year.

Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Milwaukee all regulate urban farming and have had to create a new legal environment to accommodate the new industry, the report notes.

In addition to bylaw and licensing changes, the city’s goals include the creation of a land inventory to expand the footprint of urban agriculture and a 400-per-cent increase in the number of urban farms by 2020.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/City+Vancouver+weed+laws+impeding+agriculture/6500597/story.html#ixzz1tLdv2Tks