Multifunctionality of farmland and farm activities & multi-actor involvement in agricultural development planning

Abstract

This article deals with the conservation of farmland and its farm activities, and the role of their multi-functionality in increasing the potential for conserving good quality farmland and its farm activities. This is especially important given the fact that traditional land use planning has frequently not been able to conserve good quality farmland and large areas of such farmland have often been removed by governments and their planners to support the development of subdivisions and industrial parks. There have however been some substantial improvements in some jurisdictions such as in two of the provinces of Canada, viz. British Columbia and Québec. But even with special legislation to conserve good quality farmland, some land was still removed. Hence, as a very novel move at the end of the 1990s, the province of Québec suggested to its Regional Municipal Counties to support the development of a strategic development plan for agriculture for their agricultural reserves and to involve different actors who supported the conservation of good quality farmland and its farm activities because of one or more of the multiple functions that farmland can support. Successful efforts led to the involvement of multiple actors who supported the conservation of good quality agricultural land because such land also frequently supported multiple other functions of value to society. As an example, the municipality of Senneville at the western end of the Island of Montréal demonstrates this multi-functionality and the involvement of several of its farmers in undertaking actions, including in an Action Research process, to support the multiple other functions of their farmland and its activities which they communicated to their municipality and to other organizations which were also interested in conserving good quality farmland and its farm activities.