P.E.I. farmland loss reaching crisis levels, warns federation of agriculture

Prince Edward Island is rapidly losing valuable agricultural land to residential development and the provincial government is failing to act, warns the P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture.

Executive director Donald Killorn said this has been a problem for years, and farmers are increasingly frustrated about the province's lack of action.

"It's becoming harder for them to grow their operations. It's becoming harder for them to empower the next generation of farmers with farmland, and they increasingly see good farmland lost," he said. "This is growing into a crisis."

Alarming rate of loss

The federation previously told CBC News in 2023 that the Island has been losing farmland at a dangerous rate. Between 2016 and 2021, P.E.I. lost 12.3 per cent of its farmland. At this pace, the Island could lose half of its farmland by 2050.

"There's nothing to suggest that there's been any change to the rate of loss. We're still seeing conversion of good agricultural land," Killorn said.

He said the federation has been urging the provincial government to impose a moratorium on residential development in areas without a land-use plan.

"It's clear that this government does not have the appetite for real land use planning. You know, we've had the same government for six years. We were not in a meaningful place around land use planning. The moratorium, it could happen today if they had an interest in actually doing it," he said.

In an email, P.E.I.'s Department of Housing, Land and Communities said it would not be able to respond to the federation's comments this week.

Impact on future generations

Killorn pointed to the "ribbon development" across rural areas — long stretches of houses built along roads, not within actual planned neighbourhoods — as a significant issue.

Farmland converted into residential lots not only means losing the ability to generate wealth from that land, but it also creates immense costs for the province to maintain road networks supporting these developments, he said.

"The long-term infrastructure commitments that have to be made in order to support this unchecked rural development is a bill that we're passing on to future generations," he said.

"What we're doing as Prince Edward Islanders is giving up a tremendous amount of long term economic growth and healthy, sustainable economic development in exchange for kind of cheap, fast economic calories by selling land, doing ribbon development."

Slow progress on land-use planning

The federation and farmers have long awaited a province-wide land-use plan, a goal that has been in development for several years.

In 2021, a provincial advisory committee released the Now Is The Time report, which outlined ways to modernize P.E.I.'s land-related policies and emphasized the urgency of an official land-use plan.

"This is moving at a glacial pace and an unchecked development and unsustainable residential development is not waiting around for the Prince Edward Island government to get to the bottom of this thing," Killorn said.

"There are measures that the government of Prince Edward Island can take today to stem the loss, and  each day, they choose not to implement those measures."