Credits provide incentive to protect agricultural land

By Tamara Neely
Staff Reporter

As the population swells, retiring farmers and ranchers are finding themselves tempted to sell their land for the high price a developer can offer, even though it will mean converting their beloved, wide-open space into a patchwork of houses.
Facing urban sprawl, conservation-minded people have been looking for ways to put reins on development, protect land important to wildlife and preserve rural landscapes through a program that allows landowners to profit from conservation instead of selling their land for development.
Last Wednesday, Kim Good, an agrologist and researcher with the Miistakis Institute, presented research about the program, called Transferable Development Credits (TDC), to the public at the Ann and Sandy Cross Conservation Area.
The TDC concept aims to balance conservation with development by offering landowners a financial incentive provided by developers.
The first step is to define land that the community deems environmentally important. The second step is to define areas deemed appropriate for development. The third step is to grant landowners in the conservation area credits they can sell.
Development projects can only be initiated in the designated area and the developers must purchase credits from landowners in the conservation area before they can build.
Landowners can sell the land itself if they choose, but it cannot be developed.
The effect is that landowners don’t have to sell their land for profit, they profit from selling their credits and developers are financially supporting conservation.
“Who else is going to pay for conservation?” Good questioned during an interview after the presentation. “The public purse has schools and hospitals to build. With the TDC program it’s the market that pays for conservation instead of it being public money.”
The concept of balancing conservation and development through a TDC program is being used in the United States, with success in terms of land being conserved, landowners profiting from selling credits and developers buying those credits to proceed with development on approved land.
The success has attracted the attention of municipalities in Alberta.
Good said the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties passed a resolution in 2006 to pursue the development of a TDC program and they are going to lobby the provincial government to support the effort.
“For them (the municipalities and counties) to all agree and pass a resolution is a really big deal,” said Good.
The Alberta Urban Municipalities Association passed a similar resolution in 2007.
“So you have the rural and the urban municipalities working to gain the tools to help balance conservation and development,” said Good.
Frances Dover, president of the Priddis-Millarville Residents Association (PMRA), attended the TDC information session. She feels the concept is important to consider.
“We’ve got to look at this (transferable development credits),” said Dover. “If we don’t provide some form of compensation for the farmers they have no choice but to sell their land to developers.”
The sale of agricultural land threatens food supply in a time when shipping produce from California, for example, is becoming increasingly expensive, Dover explained.
“On the one hand, you’re hearing scarcity of food and on the other hand farmers can’t afford to stay producing food,” she said.
“At the heart of the issue is preserving land and preserving a culture of farming, which our country needs. There has to be a balance.”
MD of Foothills Division I Coun. Ralph Nelson attended the TDC presentation because he is interested in the potential of this type of program to create a win-win situation for both agricultural landowners and developers.
“The developer would win in that they could develop in a smaller area so their costs would be lower and (landowners) could get some benefit without actually developing,” said Nelson. “I think it would be a great tool if we can figure out how to implement it.”
The next step, he said, would be for the MD council to receive a presentation on the TDC concept to facilitate understanding of how it can be used to preserve agricultural land.
“You can do conservation easements to protect ecologically sensitive land, but there’s no tool, that I’m aware of, to protect agricultural land,” said Nelson. “We need to have everyone understand it first, before we’d actually look at (implementing it).”