Giving farmers the tools and infrastructure to support local and sustainable food production is the goal of the future Salt Spring Island Farm Centre for Food Security, a project funded by the Victoria Foundation and Van City Credit Union.
At one time, local farmers produced most of the food on Salt Spring Island. Now, it’s less than six per cent.
The Salt Spring Island Farmland Trust Society, which oversees the development of the project, hopes to reverse the trend, with a goal of revitalizing agriculture on the island.
The organization is driven by concerns about the health hazards of industrial agriculture and a desire among residents to reverse the trend of reliance on imports with a return to fresh, local and sustainable food.
Part of the multi-faceted approach to improve long-term food security is creating the necessary infrastructure for the farm centre to serve as a local food-security hub.
The new facility will sit on a 0.6-hectare parcel that was formerly used as a sawmill. Plans call for a 279-square-metre building that can store locally harvested food, house value-added processing facilities and eventually encompass a greenhouse and a honey-extraction house.
“The centre is an important piece of the plans to build infrastructure,” said Patricia Reichert, a board member of the non-profit organization.
“We had to start from square one to ensure we laid a good foundation for the multi-year initiative.”
The facility will also serve as a staging site for workshops and regional demonstrations on the subject of food literacy. The goal is for inclusion of all demographic groups on the island, by providing vocational rehabilitation for vulnerable individuals.
The centre is designed to be able to accommodate local food production as it grows, with a target of a 25 per cent increase in its first five years.
Plans also call for a permaculture demonstration, set up to address past environmental degradation of the land when it was used as a sawmill.
The society has already completed rehabilitation of an existing barn on the property for storage.
“It’s pretty simple — we can’t increase food production without increasing storage, processing and distribution,” said Reichert. “Funding by the Victoria Foundation has been instrumental — a game changer — to the success of this project.”
Land, cash and in-kind contributions have accounted for 40 per cent of the cost of the project. The remaining 60 per cent amounts to about $800,000.
For more information, go to ssifarmlandtrust.org.
