Planned towers threaten experimental farm research, scientists say
Agriculture Canada says shadows from towers on Carling would make research fields 'unusable'
UPDATE: City councillors voted to approve the proposed highrise towers at 1081 Carling Ave. on Sept. 27, 2023 in a vote of 18 to 7.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) is warning that two towers planned for the edge of the Central Experimental Farm would block out light for vital crops and make a wide swath of its fields "unusable" for most experiments.
Local developer Taggart Realty Management is applying to sharply increase height limits at 1081 Carling Ave. to allow it to build 16- and 27-storey towers just west of The Ottawa Hospital's Civic campus. The company says the towers would provide more than 350 rental apartments, potentially including affordable units, as the city grapples with a housing crisis.
But two senior AAFC officials penned a letter to the city this April urging it to consider the costs to essential research that help breed crops better able to endure a changing climate.
The problem is the shadows the towers would cast deep into the farm toward sunset, interfering with flowering and photosynthesis — and with the data researchers rely on to produce the food of the future.
Pascal Michel, AAFC's director general of science and technology in the Ontario-Quebec region and one of the signatories of the letter, said the research relies on a delicate balance that would be upended by the towers. The shadows would be a complicating factor — a new variable — that would make results tough to interpret.
"At this point we believe that it would be very severely affecting the capacity to do any research on those sites," he said in an interview.
"You're introducing noise into the experiment that cannot be controlled, and so the whole research integrity of those data can be questioned … all of that variation is quite a bit of a headache for researchers."
The letter came with a detailed shadow study that found lands just southeast of the proposed towers would lose the equivalent of about 70 days of sunlight per year.
The effects fall off with distance, but the shadows would still compromise work at important sandy loam research fields that would lose about seven days of annual radiation.
Those fields are ideal for studying the effects of drought on crops. Scientists grow special varieties of wheat, soybeans, barley, corn and oats there that might be better able to weather the effects of climate change.
Wheat breeder Gavin Humphreys said the shadows would interfere with his research, which focuses on everything from disease resistance to winter survival.
"We would have issues with the development of the crop, and it won't be representative of what we would have if we were in a farmer's field where there would be no shadows," he said.
The work can't simply move, at least not easily. Michel said the farm has varying soil compositions ideal for research. Humphreys said its central location in a city with three universities and an educated workforce is a huge advantage for research.
Taggart Realty Management did not directly respond to questions about Michel's concerns. But its president, Jeff Parkes, told CBC in an email that the project complies with the city's planning policies on shadow impacts.
He added that it went through extensive public consultation that shaped the design, which was resubmitted to the city twice.
The towers are now smaller than an initial pitch for 28- and 22-storey highrises. They step back toward the low-rise community to the north. Taggart's architecture firm said the new design creates a "less daunting relationship" and touted a stouter podium that replicates "the scale, texture and rhythm of the adjacent neighbourhood."
But even the reduced towers greatly exceed the roughly nine-storey height limit on the south side of the site, which now hosts an eight-storey medical office building. Taggart wants to demolish that building and a neighbouring parking garage, where the height limits are even lower.
Karen Wright, president of the Civic Hospital Neighbourhood Association, called the proposed towers "monolithic." In her view, even the new design does little to ease the abrupt transition with neighbouring homes.
Michel's letter also makes her fear for the farm. It's a unique asset for her community. She was a farmer's daughter, and delights in having a working farm steps from her door.
"It's not just green space," she said. "This is agricultural research which helps us feed ourselves."
The entire farm is a national historic site. But it's bounded on two sides by Baseline Road and Carling Avenue, both now deemed transit-oriented corridors where the city wants to concentrate development.
That could make 1081 Carling Ave. a test case. Wright worries that more tall towers could follow to cover the farm in a still wider blanket of shadow.
"I think there are pockets that have to be watched and possibly limited if we wish to protect the farm," she said.
"It's a big city. Intensification is going to happen everywhere. So this is one very special piece of land, and I think it may be appropriate to look at some sort of restrictions."
Taggart's zoning application is scheduled to come before council's planning and housing committee on Aug. 16.
Michel said the higher the building , the more impact it will cause to the farm. He said AAFC is open to talking to the city to find a solution that would limit the damage.
"Of course we are not in the business of telling the City of Ottawa how high the building will be," he said. "But certainly we are very much committed to work with everyone else to preserve those functions — the historical, cultural and scientific functions of the [Central Experimental Farm]."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
