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Rant · Brookswood

Keep the Heppell field a farm, whoever ends up owning it

Prime farmland next door to Brookswood has grown BC's first potatoes for 50 years on a lease renewed one year at a time. That's no way to look after land this good. Here is what would fix it.

Rows of leafy crops stretching across a Heppell farm field under a dark sky, with a line of trees beyond
Photo: Heppell's Potato Corp.

This is an opinion piece. The full, sourced history, with every side’s position, is on our Heppell farm lands page.

We’ll be upfront about where we stand. We think the field at 192 Street and 36 Avenue should stay a farm. Not for five years, not until the next plan review, but for good.

It sits on the Surrey side of the line, but ask anyone on the west side of Brookswood whose field it is and they’ll point over their back fence. It’s the view, the owls and deer at dusk, the tractors in February when everything else is still asleep. And in late May it’s the first new potatoes in Western Canada.

Land like this doesn’t come back

The Agricultural Land Commission rates about 91 per cent of the land Class 2, which is prime. It’s sandy, drains fast and warms early, and that’s why the season starts here weeks before anywhere else in BC. The farm and the City of Surrey put the output at around 50 million servings of vegetables a year. In the early-summer window, the farm estimates this one field supplies a quarter to a half of BC’s local potatoes, carrots and cabbage.

You can pave a field in a season, but you can’t unpave one. Once the soil is under a slab, it’s gone for every generation after us. The Lower Mainland doesn’t have a spare 220 acres of early-season Class 2 ground somewhere else.

The problem is the system, not any one person

Nobody here is the villain. The real trouble is a process that has left some of the best farmland in the province in limbo for nearly a decade:

  • It was never put in the ALR, because it was federal land in 1973, so the protection every farm around it has never applied.
  • Every plan on paper says it’s for something else. Surrey’s community plan and the regional plan mark it “Mixed Employment”, and the old Campbell Heights plan calls it a business park.
  • Ottawa declared it surplus in 2017 and has renewed the farm’s lease one year at a time ever since. You can’t drain, irrigate, rotate or invest properly on a lease that might end next fall.
  • The ALC agreed the soil is prime, then stepped back in 2024, because Canada and the Nations both said it had no say over federal land.

Meanwhile 363 of the 365 people who wrote to the ALC in 2023 asked for it to be protected. Two Surrey councils under two different mayors voted to support farming it. More than 90,000 people have signed the petition. The support is there. The mechanism isn’t.

Reconciliation and farmland don’t have to be opposites

The Katzie, Kwantlen and Semiahmoo First Nations have asked Canada to return this land. Their claim deserves a real answer, and it’s not ours to decide. They’ve said its future use isn’t settled.

What we’d ask, whoever ends up holding title, is that the farm part stays a farm. Land can change hands and still carry a covenant that keeps it in agriculture. A First Nation can own farmland and lease it to farmers, just as Ottawa does today, on better terms than one year at a time. The way we see it, keeping this soil growing food fits with returning land, and doesn’t have to come at its expense.

What would fix it

  1. A farm covenant registered on the farmed 220 acres now, binding on any future owner, so the soil is protected whatever the ownership talks decide.
  2. A real lease in the meantime. The farm has asked for five years. That’s the least it would take to plan and invest properly.
  3. Surrey changes its plan from “Mixed Employment” to Agricultural for the farmed land, as its own council voted to support in 2022 and 2023.
  4. ALR inclusion once ownership is settled, which the ALC said it could revisit.
  5. The Township speaks up. The field borders Brookswood, and Langley Township council has never taken a position. It should.

Where to act