Beyond Protection: Delineating the Economic and Food Production Potential of Underutilized, Small-parcel Farmland in Metropolitan Surrey, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surrey, British Columbia, is Canada's twelfth largest and fastest-growing city. Within its boundary, 8,692 hectares (21,478 acres) (25 percent of the municipality's land base) are protected by the province's Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). Local government intuits the long-term importance of ALR lands. In this region speculative land development for urbanization is routinely considered the greatest threat to agriculture land loss. However, our analyses reveal that use of ALR land in Surrey for non-agricultural purposes was the greatest contributor to "effective agricultural land loss" and thus poses a formidable threat to ALR diminution. Given that most of these underutilized parcels are less than 5 hectares (12.4 acres) in size, the Surrey government is interested in the potential of small-lot, community-focused agriculture to curtail their loss from agriculture while simultaneously contributing to community economic vitality. We conducted an inventory of 669 properties, covering 3,035 hectares (7,500 acres) or approximately 33 percent of the total Surrey ALR, which had been identified as underutilized for agriculture by the Ministry of Agriculture in its 2004 City of Surrey Agricultural Land Use Inventory. Our work revealed that at least 556 parcels amounting to 2,446 hectares (6,044 acres) (27 percent of Surrey's ALR) remained underutilized, and that within these parcels 1,351 hectares (3,338 acres) (15 percent) could still conceivably be farmed. We calculated that if brought into small-scale, human-intensive, direct-market production, these lands could satisfy 100 percent of Surrey's seasonal consumption of 29 regionally appropriate crop and animal products, create over 1,500 jobs, and have the potential to nearly double the current economic magnitude of Surrey's agriculture sector.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".