Canada — Reading the City's Farms from the Ground Up

When you talk about urban farming in Canada, what first comes into view is not a tidy national strategy but the concrete sites that sprouted separately in each city. Though it is a vast agricultural nation, much of the population is concentrated in a handful of large cities, and the winters are long and harsh. Within those constraints, citizens, non-profits, universities, businesses and municipalities have each, for their own reasons, found space, broken ground, kept bees and shared food. There is no centralised 'urban agriculture act'; the initiative of practitioners comes first. For that very reason, this country's urban farming becomes clearest not through an account of its institutions but through observation of its sites.

This report takes that site-first viewpoint. It names actual projects running in cities such as Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax, and follows carefully who is cultivating what land, and to what end. Rather than survey statistics from above, we would rather peer into a single rooftop, a single vacant lot, a single kitchen. What comes into view there is not the single purpose of food production but the way many values — employment, education, welfare, community and climate adaptation — fold together onto one plot of ground.

Our database currently holds about nine Canadian cases. Geographically they are spread reasonably across the major cities of east and west: Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. The forms are varied too — rooftop beekeeping, portable container farms, a community farm, a university rooftop farm, a meal-delivery service with its own rooftop garden, a community-garden programme, a food centre, and a garden on former hospital land. Few in number, the cases nonetheless let you survey the full breadth of Canadian urban farming at a glance.

What is striking in the numbers is not scale but longevity. Montreal's community-garden programme dates to 1975, Santropol Roulant to 1995, The Stop to 1982 — each has run for decades. Meanwhile Sole Food, Black Creek and Common Roots are a comparatively new generation begun between 2009 and 2013, deeply marked by the contemporary concerns of social enterprise and food justice. The coexistence of an older generation and a newer one is, you might say, where this country stands now.