Media Clipping — Thursday July.31st, 2008, Metro

Farmland needs better protection, according to GPI Atlantic report

By Jennifer Taplin

Nova Scotia needs to protect its farmland, according to a new report.

GPI Atlantic, a Halifax-based research firm, says Nova Scotia can feed itself if precautions are taken. And in the face of high food and fuel prices, it’s now more important than ever to be able to cultivate home-grown food, wrote Jennifer Scott, the report’s author.

“These circumstances give new importance to the issue of land capacity … since an emerging question is whether Nova Scotia could feed itself in the event of an emergency.”

Farmers would need more than 490,000 more hec­tares to feed everyone in the province. She said we have double that in potential farmland available in Nova Scotia.

It puts the province in a unique position, since other provinces are experiencing agricultural land shortages, Scott said.

The problem is that some farmland, especially in the Annapolis Valley, is becoming so valuable it’s worth more for farmers to sell it to developers.

“The scarcity of farm land in Kings County, along with the high cost of land and competition with housing and commercial developments, generally means that farmers have to crop more intensively and make every acre pay,” she wrote.

This technique discourages soil-building farming techniques.

“There may be heavy prices to pay for the intensive use of land.”

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