Seeding North Vancouver's first urban farm

High above a ravine at the eastern edge of North Vancouver is a scrubby strip of land popular with dog walkers. Not much grows here. Even the grass struggles up in patches. The soil is largely compacted glacial till, land created out of fill from the Highway 1 cut that runs directly to the east. Ten metres below surface is an old dump, decommissioned in 1950s.

Welcome to Loutet Park, site of the city’s first urban farm.

Nearly two years in the making, the Loutet Park Urban Agriculture Project is the brainchild of greenskins lab’s Daniel Roehr and Isabel Kunigk, landscape architects who saw an opportunity in North Vancouver’s so-called “Green Necklace” to convert underused, taxpayer-owned green space–space that takes a lot of cash to keep green–into profitable, entrepreneurial, agriculture land.

Roehr envisioned a new interpretation of a social space–one related to the culture of eating and growing, and the cultivation of water and energy.

The challenge? How to convince policymakers to hand over public land.

In effort to do just that, Roehr and Kunigk drew up a plan, and in May 2009 pitched to the City of North Vancouver a pilot urban farm project to develop data on the benefits of urban agriculture. Their research would focus on issues of water and energy storage, and the success of intensive, sub-acre farming methods. They would also look at what would grow well–with as little energy input, and as much return to the community, as possible–on the chosen site.

Council voted almost unanimously in favour of the pilot, and offered greenskins the Loutet Park site, in part because of its location at the foot of an elementary school soccer pitch. In turn, the community expressed overwhelming support, with Brooksbank Elementary teachers particularly excited about the curriculum opportunities a neighbourhood farm could offer.

“We imagined that this park space would always be available to the public,” says Alex Kurnicki, the planner for City of North Vancouver who was tasked with overseeing the project. “But rather than having turf we’d have turnips, rather than lawn, lettuce. Trees would be fruit trees, and bushes would be berry bushes. It would be like a community garden, but not.”

Where it is most unlike a community garden is in its management structure: run by professional farmers, and administered by the Edible Garden Project, a not-for-profit organization that works in food security on the north shore.

“For us, this is a really about how to integrate agriculture into the community,” says Edible Garden manager Heather Johnstone. “It’s being creative about how to use these spaces that you wouldn’t normally notice, whether a right-of-way, an old parking lot, or a rooftop. Today, there is no food production on the north shore. So this is a great way to bring food–and keep food–here.”

The farmers have been hired, the kids have started composting, and while Edible Garden is still looking for one last bit of funding, Johnstone and Kurnicki say ground will broken in March.