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.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Victoria, Department of Economics, Resource Economics and Policy Analysis Research Group in its series Working Papers with number
2008-01A.
Find related papers by JEL classification: R11 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Analysis of Growth, Development, and Changes R15 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Econometric and Input-Output Models; Other Methods C50 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - General R14 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: