Why This Matters:
Food security at a systems level is defined as a situation in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice. Household food insecurity is one component of Food Security. Another component is community food access which includes food charity initiatives and community food programs such as farmers markets, community gardens, roof top gardens, etc.
Did You Know…?
- Ontario is losing 319 acres of farmland every day. Source: Statistics Canada 2021 Census
- In the last 35 years, Ontario has lost 2.8 million acres of farmland to non-farm uses like urbanization and aggregate mining
- There are over 2000 operating farms across the County of Simcoe. The agricultural sector plays an important part in our local economies.
What You Can Do As A Municipal Leader:
To increase community food security:
To support local agriculture:
- Support and increase funding for Farmers Markets
- Create and invest in community food programs such as community gardens, roof- top gardens, edible landscapes, incubator kitchens and farms
- Protect existing farmland from urbanization
- Provide a letter of support for the creation of the Recreation, Research, and Education Farm at Lakehead University Orillia
- Create an Urban Agriculture Strategy within the municipality to preserve existing public land and enhance the community’s urban-scale food production.
- Strengthen municipal community food security by ensuring agriculture and food are part of Official Plans and Community Improvement Plans.
- Support local school food literacy programs through financial donations and shared infrastructure and resources.
- Provide food literacy programming through municipal facilities and integrate food programming into recreation departments.
- Support libraries to be leaders in food literacy initiatives in your municipality in partnership with community food champions.
To support local agriculture:
- Ease municipal building codes that limit on-farm housing to allow more housing options for farm workers which could include micro-units and tiny homes
- Pass a by-law to classify farm gate sales locations or buildings as agricultural, not commercial, for the purposes of property taxation
- Create a Municipal Food and Agriculture Committee to use a “systems thinking” approach, and apply a food lens to municipal work to address the complexity of food access and urban agriculture through leveraging community food assets.
- Ensure agriculture representation exists in municipal governance to provide input and feedback in decision making.
- Increase your municipality’s intensification target to ensure less farmland is lost to sprawl
- Review policies that create unintended barriers for local food initiatives like community gardens and farmers’ markets.
- Remove barriers and streamline navigation through the agricultural development process and land improvement (i.e., tile draining, farm buildings)
- Strengthen agritourism by promoting on-farm value-added initiatives and showcasing local food.
- Resources: Tourism Simcoe County and Always in Season