Feature: Protecting the Agricultural Land Reserve, Part 2

In a recent proposal, BC Agriculture Minister Pat Pimm argued that the Agricultural Land Commission's (ALC) mandate should be expanded to include economic development priorities such as oil and gas industry and that decision making power over agricultural lands be transferred to the BC Oil and Gas Commission for most of the province.

Source: BC Food Systems Network

What is the Agricultural Land Reserve?

The Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), created in the 1970s, is a provincial zone in which agriculture is recognized as the priority use. Farming is encouraged and non-agricultural uses are controlled.

It covers approximately 4.7 million hectares, including private and public lands that may be farmed, forested or vacant land. Some ALR blocks cover thousands of hectares while others are small pockets of only a few hectares. The ALR comprises those lands within BC that have the potential for agricultural production.

What is the problem?

BC's farmland is scarce, making up less than 5% of the provincial land base. In order to preserve our ability to grow food locally as well as food security, it is essential to protect our farm base and support the farmers who grow our food.

Originally established as a way to defend valuable farmland from large-scale development projects, the ALR has recently been eyed for changes. Development pressures are mounting, especially with the high-profit potential of land development, and these pressures risk removing high-quality farmland from the existing land reserve.

So, what can you do?

Efforts to save the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) call on the provincial government to

• Retain the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) as one zone for the whole province
• Retain the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) as a province-wide, independent administrative body with judicial powers (as it has now)
• Conduct a public consultation process with the ALC and those affected by its decisions -- farmers, ranchers, and the citizens of BC -- provided changes beyond those from 2010 are to be considered

Things you can do to help ensure that the ALR remains intact include the following:

1. Circulate this information to your contacts.
2. Contact your local government representatives, MLA, the Premier, and Ministers Bennett and Pimm and ask them to leave the ALR and ALC alone.
3. Copy your MP on your letters and emails.
4. Like and post to the ALR Watch Facebook page.
5. Like and post to the Farmland Protection Coalition Facebook page.
6. Organize a town hall meeting to promote discussion and action about farmland protection: the BCFSN and organizations above can help!
7. Sign the online petition Premier Christy Clark: Hands off BC’s Agricultural Land Commission at change.org
8. Get signatures on petitions in your community (each petition can be brought up in the Legislature).

Missed Protecting the Agricultural Land Reserve, Part 2? Read it here.

Want to find out more? Visit one of these sites for more information.

BC Food Systems Network, Protecting the Agricultural Land Reserve

Provincial Agricultural Land Commission

The Province, "Shrinking farmland"
The Province, "Farmland advocates warn B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve is under threat from large-scale development"
BC Food Systems Network, "14 Reasons Why Food Security is Important"

Feature: Protecting the Agricultural Land Reserve, Part 1

In November 2013, news media reports outlined government threats to the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC).

Source: BC Food Systems Network

A recent proposal by BC Agriculture Minister Pat Pimm argued that the ALC's mandate should be expanded to include economic development priorities such as oil and gas industry and that decision making power over agricultural lands be transferred to the BC Oil and Gas Commission for most of the province.

The Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) is a provincial zone in which agriculture is recognized as the priority use. Farming is encouraged and non-agricultural uses are controlled. The ALR covers approximately 4.7 million hectares, encompassing private and public lands that may be farmed or forested or vacant land. Some ALR blocks cover thousands of hectares, while others are small pockets of only a few hectares.

Advocates for BC’s Agricultural Land Reserve will gather this weekend to discuss how to save the province’s shrinking farmland. With condos today more profitable than corn, pressure is mounting to pull agricultural land out of the ALR for lucrative development.

BC’s farmland is scarce, less than 5% of the provincial land base. In an age when we must grow as much food as we can locally, preservation of farmland is crucial. In an emergency that cut off our province's imported food supply, we could be in trouble very fast.

Visit again next week for more details on the Agricultural Land Reserve and the continuing efforts to protect existing farmlands.

Want to find out more? Visit one of these sites for more information.

BC Food Systems Network, Protecting the Agricultural Land Reserve

Provincial Agricultural Land Commission

The Province, "Shrinking farmland"

Composting Series, Part 4: Worm Composting

Worm composting, or vermicomposting, is an easy, efficient way to recycle food waste and produce fine, high-quality compost for your houseplants or garden. Worm bins can be used in apartments, gardens, and even offices.

Compost bins can be easily purchased from your municipality. Once filled with kitchen waste and bedding material, red wiggler worms go to work and munch through your food scraps.

Why compost with worms?

Here's the dirt:

1) Reduce your garbage

Organic waste such as kitchen food scraps and garden clippings make up about a third of all household garbage going to the landfill today. Composting is one of the easiest ways to help reduce garbage volume.

2) It's easy

Once your worm bin is established, adding materials and bedding (brown material) become routine. Plus, the worms do most of the work for you!

3) Help the environment

Less waste means fewer trucks on the road moving garbage to landfills, not to mention less methane gas generated by landfills. Composting also helps to recycle nutrients back into the earth.

4) Improve your garden

Using compost in your garden will help the soil retain moisture after rain or watering.

5) Reduce use of chemical fertilizers

Help keep local waterways clean by avoiding chemical fertilizers -- composting provides a high-quality source of fertilizer, minus the chemical impact on the environment.

Source: Planet Natural

How do I get started?

The sample principles for backyard composting apply to worm composting. Layering dry, brown, carbon-rich materials in between your kitchen scraps and regularly aerating your compost will help improve your composting success. Similarly, fish, meat, and oil should never touch your composter.

1) Fill your empty worm bin with a variety of bedding material and two handfuls of sand or soil.

2) Add water to the bedding so its overall moisture level is like a wrung-out sponge. Ensure that the container is half-full of bedding.

3) Lift the bedding gently, using a tool, to create air spaces. This helps control odours and gives the worms freer movement.

4) Add the worms.

5) Add food scraps by pulling aside some of the bedding, dumping in the scraps, and covering the scraps with bedding.

6) Bury successive loads of food scraps in different locations of the bin.

7) Harvest your compost in one to three months. The contents of your bin will be brown and earthy-looking when ready.

For a handy guide on worm composting, and on composting successfully and common problems encountered, visit the Metro Vancouver website guide here.

Missed the earlier parts of the series? Check them out here.

Part 1: Food Scraps Recycling
Part 2: Backyard Composting
Part 3: Apartment Composting

Composting Series, Part 3: Apartment Composting

Want to divert your food waste to a compost bin but don't think you have the space? Believe it or not, if you have even a small balcony or unused corner in your apartment, there's a way to compost!

Here are a few ways for apartment dwellers who want to compost. Not sure if it's for you? Start small and see what works for you.

Indoor compost bin

Source: Apartment Therapy

One of the cheapest, easiest ways to compost indoors with minimal space is to use a metal garbage can modified for use as a compost bin.

All you need is a garbage bin in a size of your choosing (drilled with holes), newspaper, a rubber mat, potting mix, composted manure, old furniture legs or small wooden legs, and of course, food scraps. With this method, it will take approximately 3 months to generate usable compost.

Worried about the smell? When properly aerated and kept, with a balance between food scraps and dry material, kitchen bins will largely be odourless.

This is a simple, inexpensive way to compost and costs only as much as you're willing to put down for your garbage bin and other supplies.

You can find a step-by-step tutorial on making your own indoor compost bin here and here.

Fermentation

Fermentation... for compost? That's right, folks!

Source: Bokashi Composting

The Bokashi Composting System uses a microbial agent to ferment food scraps to produce ready-to-use compost in just two weeks. Unlike other composters, you can even compost meat, fish, and dairy, with no gross smells or bugs -- all you need to do is add your food scraps and the bran containing the necessary micro-organisms to anaerobically ferment your kitchen waste.

Once the fermentation is completed, the compost scraps (or pre-compost) can be added to a worm bin or buried directly into soil. They'll take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks to integrate into the soil, depending upon local soil biological activity and local climate. You can also convert the pre-compost into usable potting soil.

Starter kits, complete with bin and bran, start at $50.

You can find out more about fermenting compost at the Bokashi website here.

Electric composters

Source: NatureMill

If you're short on square footage, a mechanized composter is a garbage can-sized unit that can easily be stowed in a standard cabinet.

Electric composters mix, heat, and aerate food scraps before transferring the material to a lower chamber, which produces fresh, garden-ready compost -- every two weeks!

Though odour-free and small, the composters can get pricey, so be prepared to pay upwards of $100 for a unit.

Vermicomposting

Vermi-what? Vermicomposting refers to composting using worms and taps into the digestive talents of wriggly earthworms to break down organic matter into compost. It's good for small spaces but can also be used as a substitute or supplement to backyard composting.

Want to learn more? Visit us next week for the last part of our Composting Series on worm composting!

Missed the first two parts of the Series?

Part 1: Food Scraps Recycling
Part 2: Backyard Composting

Composting Series, Part 2: Backyard Composting

So, what if your municipality doesn't have a food waste recycling program (Composting Series, Part 1)? Whether you're an avid home gardener (cheap fertilizer!) or just looking for a way to use those food scraps, if you have some yard space to spare, keeping a backyard compost bin can be a good way to reduce garbage going to our landfills while also producing a valuable resource.

Backyard composting is an effective and environmentally-friendly way to manage the organic waste that households produce. It helps to reduce pollution, our carbon footprint, and disposal costs, while also improving the environment and keeping organic matter in the ecological cycle.

And did we mention that it'll reduce the need to store (increasingly) smelly garbage indoors until garbage collection day?

Source: Enviro World

That's all fine and great, but how does composting work?

Your compost bin works through the power of bacteria -- all you need to do is create the right conditions for the bacteria in the bin to thrive, and they will produce rich, earthy-smelling compost using just food scraps.

Bacteria need three things:

1) An equal mix of carbon-rich ("brown") and nitrogen-rich ("green") material.

Nitrogen provides the protein for bacteria to grow and multiply, while carbon provides the energy that bacteria need to do the work of composting.

For every bucket of kitchen scraps or lawn clippings you put in, add an equal volume of fallen leaves or paper products. Always cover "green" material with a 3- to 4-inch layer of "brown" material.

Click here for a list of "green" and "brown" material, as well as other compostable materials.

2) Oxygen

Oxygen-loving (or aerobic) bacteria transform organic material into compost without producing bad odours. Add oxygen at least once a week to your compost using a pitchfork or strong stick or a special aerating tool. The more you aerate, the faster you will have finished compost. If the contents of your compost bin get too compacted, anaerobic bacteria will ferment your food scraps, creating ammonia, or rotten egg, odours.

For more on aerating your compost bin, click here.

3) Moisture

Without water, living organisms die. The contents of your compost bin should be moist like a damp, wrung-out sponge. The fresh "green" material you add to your bin will usually provide enough moisture; however, if your bin is in the sun, you are using a lot of dry "brown" material, or if it is a particularly hot outside, you may need to water the contents of the bin to keep the bacteria and other decomposers alive.

Source: Home Composting Made Easy

What do I need to compost?

These 10 easy steps will get you composting in no time!

1) Choose a flat, partly-sunny area with good drainage.

2) Purchase a compost bin -- you can get one from your municipality or from a store -- or build your own rodent-proof compost bin. Keeping a lid on your bin will help keep out rain and wildlife. The ideal size for a bin is one cubic metre; this will help the bin retain the heat it generates.

3) Create a 6 to 10 cm base layer using straw, leaves, or woody brushy material to promote air circulation.

4) Alternate layers of "green" and "brown" materials.

5) Whenever you add a layer of food scraps, top it off with a layer of "brown" material, about 5o to 8 cm high. If you use only "green" material (e.g. kitchen scraps), your compost will likely be wet and will break down more slowly.

Tip: To ensure you have plenty of "brown" material throughout the year, collect dry leaves in the fall in an old garbage container and use them as needed.

6) Mix the contents of your compost bin every week or two. This allows air into the bin and helps the bin to heat up again so that the contents decompose faster.

7) The moisture content of your compost should be damp like a wrung-out sponge or dishcloth. Only add water if the contents of the bin are very dry after mixing.

8) As your pile of compost shrinks, continue to add layers of "green" and "brown" materials until the bin is almost full.

9) Your compost will typically be ready after 2 to 3 months, though ageing the compost for an additional 1 to 2 months is recommended.

10) Harvest your compost when the compost at the bottom and centre is decomposed, full of healthy worms, and moist. Dig out the compost with a shovel. In a commercial bin, use the door at the bottom of the bin. If you built your own bin, move the top layers aside and dig the compost out from the centre layers.

And that's that -- not that difficult at all, eh?

But what if I don't have room for a traditional compost bin? What if I live in an apartment?

Visit back next week for Part 3 of our Composting Series on apartment composting.

Resources

North Shore Recycling Program
Metro Vancouver

Composting Series, Part 1: Food Scraps Recycling in Metro Vancouver

Have you ever wondered about to do with the food scraps you accumulate each week? Today marks the first of a four-part, month-long series on composting. Whether you're curious about starting your own composter or want to reduce your amount of household garbage each week, there's sure to be something of interest!

About one-third to a half of the average household's garbage is food scraps. But did you know that there's a good chance that you can now recycle them? Most municipalities in Metro Vancouver now collect food waste!

Cities offering food waste collection:

Bowen Island Burnaby Coquitlam Delta Langley (Township) New Westminster North Vancouver (City and District) Pitt Meadows

Port Coquitlam Port Moody Richmond Surrey Vancouver West Vancouver White Rock

Source: Metro Vancouver

Composting food scraps and food-soiled paper products provides a valuable resource, diverts waste, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and in the process, helps to create a more sustainable city.

So, what can you put in? Where do you put the food waste?

If your neighbourhood has curb-side food scraps collection, you can put your leftovers or spoiled food into your yard trimmings waste bin. Just be sure not to use plastic or biodegradable bags! These contaminate the compost and also interrupt the composting process.

While there might be slight variations depending on the municipality you live in, food scraps recycling is as easy as this -- simple and no fuss. You can even put in meat, cheese, dairy, and bones!

The City of Burnaby, for example, operates a curb-side food scraps recycling program for single-family households and some multi-family complexes also participate and receive food waste recycling (Green Bin) services. 

For a handy guide on what you can and cannot include, as well as how to make a kitchen compost pail liner with newspaper, check out their Food Scraps Brochure.

To find out about other cities in Metro Vancouver, visit your respective municipalities' website (see "Cities offering food waste collection" above).

How do I get started?

1. Get a lidded container to collect food scraps and food-soiled paper products for your kitchen. An old 4 litre ice cream bucket or large plastic container are both good examples.

2. Grab a few sheets of old newspaper to make a liner for the bucket.

3. Collect accepted food scraps and food-soiled paper products in your container.

4. Empty your food scraps, along with the paper liners, into your yard trimmings container.

5. Set out your yard trimmings container on your regular scheduled collection day. The container does not have to be full for it to be collected.

6. Rinse and lightly wash your kitchen bucket and yard trimmings container in between uses.

And that's all, folks!

What if your municipality isn't on the list that receives food scraps collection? Or maybe you're interested in starting your own compost bin.

Stay tuned and join us next week for Part 2 of our Composting Series, on backyard composting.