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Letter: Don’t act like you can’t farm

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.
garden farm
The province passed regulations in an effort to protect farming.

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