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Raising the alarm

South Delta farmers warn of illegal fill dumping on good soil
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Delta Farmers' Institute president and former provincial agricultural minister John Savage looks out over some Ladner farmland. Savage and other local farmers are concerned over illegal dumping of fill.

South Delta farmers are hoping to curb a short-term, get rich scheme that has the potential to ruin good farmland.

Delta Coun. and long time farmer Ian Paton is ringing the alarm bells on some farmers who are accepting truck loads of fill—often from construction sites elsewhere in the Lower Mainland—which are being dumped on local farms in exchange for hefty fees.

The practice, Paton said, can be extremely lucrative for farmers, but is short-sighted and can all but render the soil unusable.

Paton said the lure is money—about $80 to $100 a truck load—with some farmers accepting a string of them so that the payoff for a single day could earn them about $2,000.

"You look at the construction sites in Downtown Vancouver and Burnaby and they are digging down into the ground and pulling up all kinds of stuff like rocks, bits of concrete and even asphalt to put in underground parking for big buildings," Paton said. "All of that material has to go somewhere."

That somewhere is farms up and down the Fraser Valley, including some that are suspected to be in South Delta.

Paton said there are some legitimate reasons to allow dumping fill on farmland. Building up retention dikes for cranberry farming is one.

Even then, he is suspicious of some operators who claim that's their end goal, but have yet to show a true indication of actual farming.

"I call B.S. on some of those guys," Paton said. "And it really pisses off the long time farmers here who are committed to soil-based agriculture."

Paton said those offenders are simply ruining some of the best soil in the province for short-term gain. The potential is also there for contamination from harmful substances in the fill material.

Delta Farmers' Institute president and former provincial agriculture minister John Savage said the problem rests with the inability of B.C.'s Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) to adequately police the farms to prevent the dumping and sanction those who have allowed the material to be deposited on their property.

Savage said the ALC has just two enforcement officers for the entire province.

Local bylaw officers are already spread pretty thin, Paton added, and don't have the time to investigate the situation.

And that leaves the fields relatively wide open to be abused.