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Abstract
Agricultural land protection near the urban-rural fringe is a goal of many
jurisdictions, including British Columbia, Canada, which uses a provincial-wide
zoning scheme to prevent subdivisions and non-agricultural uses of the land.
Preferential taxes are also used to encourage agricultural use of the land. Small scale
hobby farmers are present at the urban fringe near Victoria (the capital), both inside
and outside of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). The goal of this paper is to
investigate whether hobby farms create problems for agricultural land preservation.
We make use of a GIS (geographic information system) model to construct detailed
spatial variables and analyse our parcel-level data set using an hedonic pricing model
and a limited dependent variable model. The results show that hobby farmers tend to
select small parcels that are near open space and relatively close to the city and they
tend to support horses and other livestock. In terms of price, farmland is worth more
per ha the smaller the parcel is and the closer it is to the city. In general farmland is
worth more when it is less fragmented but this appears to be reversed for hobby farms
– indicating that hobby farmers may be better adapted to surviving in the urban fringe
than conventional farmers. The conclusions drawn from the results in this paper
would likely apply to other jurisdictions which seek to protect agricultural land in the
urban fringe.