Food Self-Sufficiency on Vancouver Island
Where does our food come from. The ground. Other animals (we’re animals ourselves). Locally. From distant lands. These answers are a hot topic of passioned debate around how to be environmental through food choices. The debate grows more intense when the food is in short supply. On Vancouver Island, that “short supply” can happen very quickly.
A 3-day supply of food on Vancouver Island is a piece of local legend that is also supported by academic research. Does it really matter if the actual number is 3 days, 4 days, or 7 days. Not really. With 85% of the food for Vancouver Island residents coming from off-island, there are multiple ways that the weak-link (ferries) in the supply chain could be disrupted.
Demographics
The population of Vancouver Island is 881,685 (2020) people. Half of those (425,503) live within 50 km of the southern tip of the 460km long island.
Vancouver Island is replenished with supplies by ferry. That is the only way to make consumables and durable goods available to the island residents on a mass-scale. There are manufacturing facilities on island, but many are craft-oriented and don’t have the capabilities to supply the bulk of the residents.
1st Order Approximation
Let’s make a “1st-order” approximation of how much land would be required to supply the population of Vancouver Island. A 1st-order approximation means that we’ll use average, or median values instead of more detailed numbers that partition the variables like diets, foods calories, meals, and pounds / acre. We’ll assume that the variations cancel out when each person’s diet, and each food’s growing requirements are considered as data points in a large experiment.
We’ll make some initial assumptions first to help define the situation in the middle of March 2021.
- 890,000 people
- 2000 calories / person
For a year’s worth of food consumption, we multiply those figures to get calories / year for the island as a whole. Remember, we’re using a 1st-order approximation, so we’re averaging out variations.
649,700 calories (million)/ year
Vancouver Island wide
How many acres would be necessary to grow enough well-balanced foods to supply that many calories? Let’s look next at what kind of foods we’d need to make well-balanced and healthy diets.
Canada’s dietary recommendations gives a few guidelines. We’ll omit several very import considerations to a healthy and well-balanced diet. We do this for the simple purpose of determining an approximate number of acres to supply Vancouver Island in the event of natural, or social/political disruptions to our food supply chain.
Dietary guideline are complex. From Canada’s recommendations we can deduce:
- Vegetables Fruits: 50%
- Grains: 25%
- Proteins: 25%
We’ll also assume that these proportion distinctions are caloric, rather than based on weight or volume. Let’s also consider animal based proteins at 10% of a person’s diet without justification or debate, but acknowledging that this is a crisis response approximation where the food supply chain has been disrupted
Now the question becomes: How much land do we need to grow the following quantities:
Food Group …………..Calorie (million)
vegetables: ……………..324,850
grains: …………………..162,425
Protein — non animal: …..97,455
Protein — animal: ……….64,970
At this point we could make the assumption that food will be grown on a local neighbourhood level. That might be possible in many locales, but it will be a challenge in highly urbanized areas. The “Victory Garden” approach is a valid one, but it could be explored another day.
We’ll further our exploration with a farming-scale where knowledge is specialized to a degree that the individual enterprises become economically viable, yet not so specialized that the consumer is disconnected from the food source. Of course, defining that gray area could easily be the subject of a PhD dissertation. But for our 1st-order approximation, we’ll consider
for each of those four categories
Food Group ………………calorie /lbs
vegetables: ……………….100–200
grains: …………………….300–600
Protein — non animal: …..500–1000
Protein — animal: ……….400–800
Food Group …………….lbs / acre
vegetables: ………………18000
Grains (wheat): …………..6000
Protein — non animal: …..4000
Protein — animal: …………1000
Crop yields aregiven for specific foods. So, we just used a common central tendency without regard to dietary preference or agriculture methods. The “pound per acre” reference is biased towards vegan diets and has different quantities than were found for the individual food groups, but confirms these average values, considering the bias. For the animal protein pounds per acres, we used half of a record yield. The 4000 lbs/acre for non-animal is data from a mixed nut yield that lands somewhere between a government recommendation and a featured high producer.
Apply a little math and we get acres for the proportion of a Canadian recommended diet for the population of Vancouver Island.
Food Group ………..Acres (thousands)
vegetables: ………….90–180
grains: ……………….45–90
Protein — non animal: 25–50
Protein — animal: ……80–160
Total: ……………….240–480
So just under a 1/4 million to a 1/2 million acres. Vancouver Island is 31285 square kilometers. This land required to feed the population would require about 3–6% of the land mass of the island. The lower estimate is twice the amount of land that is currently in the Agricultural Land Reserve for the Vancouver Island Coast Development Region: 1.4% of the Island’s land.
Methodology
As an alternative to this top down approach, an estimate could start with what people would eat at each meal. Take few, or several, sample meals, and look at the individual ingredients and multiply that by the population. It would be interesting to see if that approach gives similar or very different estimates.
Considerations
There are any other considerations that would need to go into such a local and regionally self-sufficiency endeavor. How do we get there? Where can these new farming endeavors going to be located within Vancouver Island? We likely will need to increase production capabilities such as flour milling and oil pressing. Can distribution be handled through our existing distribution networks? However, this article is already long and dense enough.
Disclaimers
This estimate gives a quick look at a big issue. This is not a research study, and we only used a few accessible resources that were readily available at first glance on the web. So we didn’t closely examine any references or investigate them further. Although we did try to include government provided figures when available.
How would you approach computing food self-sufficiency? Top-down? Bottom-up? Do you know of other resources that could collaborate or dispute this approximation?
