LETTER—Tasteful solution
Email
Print
Letter to Editor
Share
You never know where you might find a tasteful solution to challenges like Southlands in Delta.
A 2002 article in the Gourmet magazine on the plight of farmers shows one way to save farm lands. It addresses the problem of farmers being land rich but cash poor.
A land trust gives the farmer a one-time payment to compensate for the difference between what their land is worth as a farm and what it would be worth on the open market to developers. The transaction in the U.S. is called a purchase of development rights (PDR) or a purchase of agricultural conservation easement (PACE) because it places a permanent limitation on the property, meaning the land can neither be divided nor be used for any purpose other than farming.
It requires a non-profit land trust organization to merely hold the easement and oversee it. Owners both present and future are limited in the number of houses built on the property, and their rights to subdivide or develop it is wiped out forever. The program could be funded from lotteries.
In the case of Southlands, it would mean giving a one time payment to a farmer who agrees to soil-based farming on the land in order they can purchase it from Century Group which has been holding the lands in a fallow state for many years.
Jim Ronback,
Tsawwassen
v2
