About the UBC Farm
The UBC Farm is a 24 hectare learning and research farm located on the University of British Columbia's Campus in Vancouver, Canada. The farm is student-driven and integrated with the wider community. As the only working farmland within the city of Vancouver, the UBC Farm is an urban agrarian gem, featuring a landscape of unique beauty.
The Farm is a student-driven initiative where students, faculty, staff, and the local community have been working together to create a place where anyone can come to learn, live and value the connection between land, food and community. The ultimate goal of the farm is to retain and re-create existing farm and forest lands at the University of British Columbia into an internationally significant centre for sustainable agriculture, forestry and food systems.
The UBC Farm initiative began in 2000 when students in Agricultural Science (now the Faculty of Land and Food Systems) filled a community planning meeting to raise concern about the UBC Official Community Plan (OCP) which guides the course of development on Campus. The Farm site was part of an area labeled in the OCP as “future housing reserve,” (see section 4.1.20) and students did not want to lose these valuable outdoor educational facilities. Responding to student concerns and indicating the faculty’s interests in the potential for the project, the Faculty published a vision paper, entitled “Re-inventing the UBC Farm”. This document suggests that, if carefully planned, the University can meet its residential housing needs while protecting and integrating the UBC Farm in a manner that will both support its academic mission and protect and enhance the environment.
The UBC Farm site actually integrates several field research areas on South Campus designated to the departments of Botany, Forest Sciences, the Botanical Gardens, and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. The Farm site is not usually shown on official university maps because of these different designations. Twenty-two hectares of these lands are protected with future housing and academic reserve status until 2012. Any type of residential construction can not happen at the site until after this date and only after the OCP document is amended by the Board of Governors and Metro Vancouver (GVRD). The University has confirmed that the Farm lands will be held until it can be verified that the site is not required for academic use.
The last seven years have seen considerable progress towards the farm's vision. While the first stages of the South Campus Neigbourhood Plan have only peripherally addressed the UBC Farm, the creation of a South Campus Working Group did show a promising improvement in the public planning process compared to five years earlier.
The underlying intention of the Farm initiative is to help the University community realize the development of a healthy South Campus community - a community that considers and integrates aspects necessary for living, working, sustaining, recreating, and learning. The UBC South Campus Farm provides a unique opportunity to integrate a working research farm within a newly planned community development.
The task before us is to show the Farm can be transformed into a beneficial partner in the creation of an integrated sustainable development that supports the ecological, economic, social, and educational interests of the University. To this end the UBC Farm initiative will demonstrate how a permanent, mutually beneficial and economically-feasible sustainable community farm could be realized at the University of British Columbia.