| Agricultural land protection near the urban-rural fringe is a goal of many jurisdictions, including British Columbia, Canada, which uses a provincial-wide zoning scheme to prevent subdivisions and non-agricultural uses of the land. Preferential taxes are also used to encourage agricultural use of the land. Small scale hobby farmers are present at the urban fringe near Victoria (the capital), both inside and outside of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). The goal of this paper is to investigate whether hobby farms create problems for agricultural land preservation. We make use of a GIS (geographic information system) model to construct detailed spatial variables and analyse our parcel-level data set using an hedonic pricing model and a limited dependent... |
