A morning at the farm (on the edge of the 15)

Lemon verbena. Fairytale eggplant. Vietnamese coriander. Purple beans. Ivory peppers.

I expected a colorful visit, going to Gilles Lacroix’s farm, in Laval, but not to discover so many vegetables and herbs that I had never heard of. Plants with poetic names, which made me realize how illiterate I was when it came to plants.

The 78-year-old farmer took no offense at my ignorance. On Thursday, riding in his tractor through a cloud of morning insects, he gave me a crash course in traditional farming methods, which he has been practicing for half a century along Highway 15.

Here, a row of red and yellow beets. There, an entire “family” of cucurbits. Again: onions, cabbages, corn, tomatoes. More than 75 varieties in total, not counting the flowers grown in greenhouses.

I learned a lot about vegetables, but the primary purpose of my visit was more mundane. I wanted to see, with my own eyes, what life on a farm in the immediate suburbs of Montreal, in Quebec’s third-largest city, was like.

The context lent itself well to this: the administration of Mayor Stéphane Boyer this week submitted a tough draft regulation to shake up the owners of fallow land.¹.

The case is not so well known: Laval, a booming municipality of 438,000 inhabitants, has more than a hundred farms. No less than 29% of its territory is in an agricultural zone, but barely half of this rich arable soil is cultivated. A real waste, according to the City.

As revealed The Press On Tuesday, Laval will soon impose a royalty on individuals and businesses that have been sitting on their land, often for decades.

The lot includes woodlands, wetlands and other impassable land. But the city estimates that 1,108 hectares of fallow land could be brought back into cultivation.

Which is huge, once put into context.

These abandoned lands represent 11 km^⁠2To take a local picture, they are equivalent to 86 times the surface area of ​​Carrefour Laval, including the shopping center AND the surrounding parking lots.

Huge, I told you.

Gilles Lacroix’s farm, when you look closely, looks like many others. There are long rows of green shoots (I recognized an ear of corn) and other freshly harvested sections. Several species of birds, too, including magnificent red cardinals.

But you only have to look up a little to see that we are in a deeply urbanized area. Single-family homes, and even a condo tower, as far as the eye can see. A thin wooded strip separates the two zones: the green and the white.

The roar of the Laurentian Highway, a few hundred metres away, is constantly audible. “It bothers some people, but I don’t even hear it anymore,” he tells me.

The farmer insisted on taking a detour to the edge of Sainte-Rose Boulevard, near the kiosk where he sells the fruit of his harvests. He wanted to show me the sign he had installed in a prominent place: “Welcome to a credible and permanent agricultural zone.”

Because Gilles Lacroix doesn’t just plow his land. He has been fighting for decades to develop the arable land on Île Jésus. He has been leading the Laval section of the Union des producteurs agricoles (UPA) since… 1988!

He has seen many mayors and ministers come and go during his successive terms. He has signed many development plans, agreements and protocols of all kinds. He keeps all these documents in huge binders, including an original copy of a speech given by the ousted mayor Gilles Vaillancourt in 1993.

The man has heard many promises over the years. But the announcement made this week by the Boyer administration could – finally – breathe new life into local agriculture, he hopes.

There will be a lot to do.

Laval estimates that its new royalty on fallow land will bring in $1.1 million per year. These fairly small sums will be used, among other things, to finance the re-cultivation of certain lands.

The underlying objective, as far as I can tell, is mainly to send a strong message to landowners. Especially those who have been waiting for years for a hypothetical rezoning to build houses. It’s not going to happen, so you’d better sell your land to the City, they’re basically told.

The idea will then be to proceed with the “regrouping” of these thousands of small plots, to resell them or rent them to real farmers, who will cultivate them.

It would be a first for a major city, if it works, and a bet worth several tens of millions of dollars for the Laval administration. A dark green bet.

1. Read the article “Small agricultural revolution in Laval”