Welcome to FUAL

Welcome to the  FUAL Blog.

We have a situation here where it looks as if our mayor and council are trying to take down a functional market garden (Compassion Farm) while verbally supporting food gardening and urban agriculture.

We want to work with our Council and will be offering to meet with them as soon as possible to look for common ground.

We will accept FUAL Lantzville, FUAL RDN and FUAL elsewhere members. To join us, get in touch with Andrew at andrewmostad@gmail.com or 250-327-2285,  let us know where you live, and sign on to our principles:

·        support urban agriculture                   ·        treat everyone with respect

·        consider everyone's interests                    ·        use accurate information.

We want Lantzville to become a shining example of urban agricultural planning and we need a made-in-Lantzville by-law to support that goal.

Our efforts have been frustrated by lack of clarity in communications from our council. The mayor consistently separates the issues of urban agriculture and Compassion Farm despite strong rejection by Lantzville residents of the use of Temporarary Use Permits (TUPs) for agriculture in the residential zone.

It is our position that Compassion Farm should be let alone pending the design of a new zoning bylaw which will look after the interests of all residents.

Conflict is healthy when all parties commit to finding common ground as a basis for a win-win solution. It gets ugly when the aim is to polarize.

When someone feeds reporters misinformation about what we think, we get further from a solution. We don’t support noise, stink or contamination any more than the mayor is opposed to food gardening.

When a reporter makes comparisons with Walkerton, where the problem was incompetent and reckless officials and implies that agriculture and population density can never mix, then we're not getting balance, we're getting polarization, which is what we're trying to avoid.