Dear Paul Edwards,
Re: “Down to Earth talk about real farming,” Letters, June 2, 2017.
I run a small farm and produce delivery business that supplies the finest restaurants and hotels in Vancouver, Richmond, West Vancouver, and beyond.
You know what I’m finding? I can’t buy enough stuff. Producers regularly run out of specialty items such as sunchokes and garlic, which I have to source from as far away as Kamloops. I cannot find a good source of asparagus or shelling peas, and the current wholesale price of organic romaine lettuce is currently $90 per case!
Here’s how you can make a nice side income off your little hobby farm:
Instead of shaming the NDP and Green Party, lets do a little math — as a good capitalist, I live off this kinda stuff.
You have a third of an acre that you could potentially cultivate specialty crops on. If you have 120’ beds on 6’ centres you’d have about 20 rows.
If you were to do a few different crops such as sunchokes, asparagus, skirret, etc., you’d gross at the very least $800 per row. That brings us a total of $16,000 you could make as a part-time job in a bad year. If you were a good gardener, you could bump that up to $50,000 without much difficulty. You could supply Discovery Organics, Pro Organics, Whole Foods, or any number of other establishments and they’d buy everything that you can produce.
So assuming a total property tax deduction of $5,000 per annum because of farming activities, and the fact that you can now write off anything that can be called a business expense, we have a total tax benefit for you of over $6,000 plus a side income of between $10,000-$40,000.
Instead of writing about what qualifies as a farm and calling people socialist tree-huggers, why don’t you go buy some seeds?
Happy gardening!
Miles Smart
Richmond