Introduction
What is the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR)?
The Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) is a provincial land use zone established by the provincial government in 1973. The reserve is designed to protect the Province's agricultural land and ensure that it is available for agricultural use by restricting non-farm uses and subdivisions of the reserve. The ALR covers approximately 4.7 million hectares and includes private and public lands that may be farmed, forested or vacant land (Provincial Agricultural Land Commission, 2011). Some ALR blocks cover thousands of hectares while others are only small pockets.Why Develop in the Abbotsford ALR?
"The ALR is not all equally fertile, perhaps the less fertile land should be able to develop" (Woolley, 2010). While the ALR of British Columbia aids to sustain agricultural practices and attempts to promote local food security, it has been recently criticized for its lack of effectiveness. In many places, the ALR acts mainly as an urban growth boundary and, especially in Abbotsford, land parcels within the reserve can be small and relatively infertile. In reality, some of these plots that make up 75% of Abbotsford's region may actually be unsuitable for commercial agriculture (South Fraser Blog, 2012). Soil capabilities in Abbotsford in the upland area are generally lower than those in the rest of the municipality due to finer soil textures and denser sub-soils and due to the generally rolling terrain (BC Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries. 2011).Some ALR plots in Abbotsford are actually not being used for agricultural practices, and this has stimulated the idea of expanding urban activities into such spaces. The City of Abbotsford is a rapidly growing urban area of 135,000 people and by 2031, Abbotsford is projected to have about 200,000 residents (City of Abbotsford, 2008). Existing urban development in the city has "filled in" up to the boundary of the ALR in many areas, and urban growth into some of the less fertile ALR land may be a way to relieve further population congestion and crowding. It may also increase Abbotsford's housing stock to prevent its real estate market from rising like Vancouver's and may reduce deforestation of bush and forests up in the mountains where people of the Fraser Valley are currently urbanizing due to space limitations.
Criticism has also engulfed the initial idea of preserving agricultural land for the production of safer and healthier food that's better for the environment - evidence shows this is fanciful thinking and many BC consumers have shown an undeniable preference for a greater choice of products. Studies have found that the majority of BC consumers buy great quantities of imported food and base their purchasing decisions on a range of factors, including price, variety, and convenience, rather than simply product origin (Archer, 2009), weakening the initial intent of BC's ALR.
Our Project
The purpose of our GIS project is to identify areas of the Abbotsford ALR that have the most potential for urban development. These portions of the ALR that we are attempting to target are parcels within the reserve that are notably less capable, agriculturally, than their adjacent plots. Generally, these are ALR plots that are smaller and/or have less fertile soil. We also encourage development to be at the edge of the ALR along the rural-urban interface to promote greater accessibility Most of the land outside of Abbotsford's ALR has been exhausted and so we hope to identify these areas within the ALR to allow for urban growth outwards - a time will come when urbanizing upwards will no longer be sustainable and other strategies must be undertaken to accommodate for the city's increasing population.In our analysis, we will determine these ideal ALR parcels by firstly, isolating land suitable for building on within the ALR, and secondly, performing a multi-criteria analysis (MCE) on land characteristics that we believe are important in deciding the most potential plots. These characteristics included ALR parcel size, proximity to Abbotsford's urban center, agricultural capability per parcel, edge contrasts and ground slope.