By Spencer Sterritt

$1 mil needed for urban community farm in south Nanaimo

Jan 31, 2017 | 11:37 AM

NANAIMO — There’s hope an urban farm in Nanaimo can be bought and sustained by the community.

Foodshare Nanaimo is looking to buy the lot of their current Five Acres Farm, located near Park Ave. and Eighth St. The owners of the lot will be selling it and Foodshare Nanaimo has been told they can buy the land for $1 million.

An info and planning session was held Monday night to brainstorm how to fund raise and secure the land, as well as engage the community and gather volunteers for the project. More than 40 people attended to share their thoughts, many more than staff member Marjorie Stewart had anticipated.

“We suspected there was strong community support, but we weren’t entirely sure until we saw how many people arrived,” she said of how they needed to bring in extra chairs for the meeting.

The hope is Five Acres Farm will provide local food for Nanaimo, teach residents about urban farming, raise the number of green thumbs in the city and protect the land. It’s already been used for many years by Foodshare to teach youth and students about farming and agriculture.

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Guest speaker Heather Pritchard from Farm Folk City Folk, who assists the development of city farms, said developing urban farming is a great way to bring a city together and sustain the community.

“To me it helps knit the community together. It attracts a diverse group of people (and) it’s incredibly important for our young people in the middle of cities to have places to go that are green spaces,” she said.

Pritchard said farm land is often treated as either something to protect and not develop or used to farm without environmental considerations.

“What we’re trying to do is bring those two circles together. This land will provide us with food but in return we have to take care of it.”

Buying the farm outright has been a Nanaimo Foodshare project for six to eight months, according to executive director Jennifer Cody.

At the brainstorming session, options of how to place the land in a trust for Foodshare Nanaimo, how to engage the community and how to fund raise for the land were discussed. Solidifying a position, vision and path forward will be discussed at a future meeting,

Spencer.sterritt@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @spencer_sterrit