The final airport farming frontier: Hope

In a valley where rental deals of any sort are hard to come by, $425 won’t go very far.

But in the Hope area, that monthly rent will get one farmer 17 acres of farmland over the next five years at a particularly interesting site: the local airport. But the arrangement isn’t actually all that unusual; the deal will mean every airport in the region is used to grow crops.

Laidlaw-area dairy farm Lorenzetti Acres has sealed a deal with the Fraser Valley Regional District to farm the land around the runway and hangar areas at the Hope Airpark. Each year, Lorenzetti will pay the FVRD about $5,100 to harvest the land.

In a region where farmland often sells for $100,000 an acre, the deal—$300 per acre per year—might sound like a bargain, but FVRD staff say it’s in keeping with market rates. Normally land that has no water access and requires improvements to produce crops is rented for only about $275 to $350 per acre, staff said.

The figures illustrate how the value of agricultural land varies significantly in the Fraser Valley depending on its use, soil quality, amenities, and, often, its potential for development.

The airport deal 

The Fraser Valley Regional District advertised last fall that the land was available for rent. Only one proposal was submitted. It came from local dairy farm Lorenzetti Acres. They will rent 17 of 35 possible acres, farming hay or silage that would be harvested and fed to cattle on another property.

The farm has an option to renew the deal for another five years. The $5,100 in annual rent is “much-needed,” the FVRD says, and will be used to help fund the airpark’s operations.

Airport farming isn’t actually all that rare in the Fraser Valley. Each year, raspberries are harvested on significant tracts of Abbotsford International Airport. At one point, before the airport became heavily used by commercial airlines, land rentals to farmers comprised the facility’s largest revenue source. *

Nearly every inch of harvestable land at the Chilliwack Airport is planted and used for growing. That even includes relatively small squares in between runways and taxiways.

And Langley Regional Airport is also farmed between its runways and taxiways.

Of the four local airports, only Abbotsford International Airport isn’t located partly or wholly in the Agricultural Land Reserve. That’s partly a function of its previous ownership by the federal government, which sold YXX to the city in 1997 for $10.

*This story has been corrected; it originally said the land was used to grow blueberries, not raspberries. A reader writes that there is a good reason for that: raspberries attract fewer birds than blueberries.