Doug McCallum said the Campbell Heights property, located at 192nd Street and 36th Avenue, is a “vital piece of farm land that should remain untouched.”
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The City of Surrey would be interested in buying a federally owned parcel of farmland to ensure it doesn’t get turned into industrial land, said the mayor.
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Doug McCallum said the Campbell Heights property, at 192nd Street and 36th Avenue, is a “vital piece of farm land that should remain untouched.”
“If the federal government were to make this property available to the City of Surrey, I would ensure an offer would be made,” McCallum said in a statement on Tuesday. “If successful, I would pledge that the property would remain as farmland so it can produce harvest after harvest for generations to come.”
A group of farmers has launched a request to save the parcel of land which is 300 acres or about 1.2 square kilometers in size. Currently, it said is slated to be sold by Ottawa and turned into industrial warehouses.
About two-thirds of the parcel is a that produces between 30 million and 50 million servings of vegetables annually. Because of superior drainage, it is often the only source of locally grown field vegetables in early spring and fall and is essential to the province’s food security, said advocates.
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“It’s some of the most productive and reliable land in BC, and some of the most important,” farmer Tyler Heppell told Postmedia.
The Heppell family has leased the land for the past 50 years.
The land does not fall within the province’s protected Agricultural Land Reserve, and the city’s own local area plan has identified the property, which is already surrounded by warehouses, as a potential business park.
The farmers’ petition calls on the federal government to grant a long-term lease to a farmer and apply to include the land in the Agricultural Land Reserve. It also calls on the city to amend its official community plan to prevent the land from being turned to any other use aside from agricultural.
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