Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm
 

References:

Central Experimental Farm (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)

Central Experimental Farm (The Canadian Encyclopedia)

Central Experimental Farm (Wikipedia)

Central Experimental Farm National Historic Site of Canada

Carleton looks at what the Experimental Farm's greenspace means to Ottawa's health

Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: December 7, 2016 | Last Updated: December 7, 2016 5:28 PM EST

A Carleton University team is mapping the air quality in the Central Experimental Farm, an effort to learn how much central Ottawa’s giant green space helps our health.

Paul Villeneuve’s students are measuring the air current quality as a starting point for comparing changes in the air as the farm is developed for a new hospital, and perhaps more beyond that.

“I don’t think anyone out there says we’re going to bulldoze the Experimental Farm and completely develop it,” said Villeneuve, who teaches about environmental health at Carleton.

But after one development is approved, “There will be another need five years from now, 10 years from now. So it speaks to the issue of having something there that can protect the farm space.”

This comes at a time when infill is removing green space from residential neighbourhoods, he says. With the farm, “a quarter of our population lives within two kilometres from the outer boundaries of it.”

“I would say it’s a really important health benefit and a lot of the studies that are coming out now are (showing) it.

Just what are the benefits?

• “Women who live in greener neighbourhoods tend to have healthy, high-birth-weight babies compared to women who don’t,” Villeneuve said;

• “We’re seeing a lot of studies that people who live in greener areas tend to exercise more and have lower rates of obesity (and) lower rates of mortality,” he said;

• There’s less noise and traffic in the area. Summer temperatures are lower; pavement and buildings cause a temperature rise known as an “urban heat island;”

• Lessening the noise has been linked to improved stress levels and mental health. And the farm is believed to reduce long-term exposure to air pollution, which is linked to premature mortality, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, diabetes and cognitive decline;

Grad students Keith Van Ryswyk, Erika Brisson, Mona Ahmad and Natasha Prince call themselves the Farm Squad. They spent two weeks in October setting up 41 air-quality and noise monitors around the Farm and taking daily readings. They’ll do it again in winter, and Villeneuve hopes a new squad will form in summer after the first four graduate.

The squad has had adventures. Their blog tells how they set out air monitors:

“We strapped them to lamp poles and left them there for two weeks to fend for themselves. For 14 days they have sat there, like eggs in inverted tin nests (rain shelters).” However, “some of the noise meters have been stolen.

“Their small blinking LED lights must have been too much to resist for some. In these three instances, we are at least grateful that they spared our NO2 (nitrogen dioxide — a marker of traffic exhaust) and VOC (volatile organic compounds — markers of many anthropogenic source) samples.

“Arriving at one site, we learn that an entire sampling set up was confiscated by the police, tin nest and all. It was eventually returned to us, encased in an evidence bag, but too late to make use of the data it collected.”

Still, they got their measurements, mostly:

“For one hour every morning and another at night, we have driven in and around the (Central Experimental Farm) so that we will be able map these exposures across the farm and in the surrounding neighbourhoods. In the time between our one-hour tours, we are scampering up or down ladders to maintain a network of 41 air pollution monitors that have been scattered throughout our study area. We do this because we recognize how important an issue this is to our community.”

“I would say it has an enormous footprint in the city of Ottawa, just by the sheer size of it,” Villeneuve said. “So it has enormous (health) impacts.”

“I drive past there every day and see cycling through” while others walk dogs or visit the Arboretum.

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http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news...farms-greenspace-means-to-ottawas-health

Too bad Ottawa can't have nice things.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/12...iam-iv-to-the-people-of-mississauga.html

A gift from King William IV to the people of Mississauga
Mississauga is about to get its very own Central Park, just don’t call it a park, it’s an urban farm, on 200 acres of land entrusted by King William IV in 1833.

Baloney. What about the air pollution caused by the traffic having to travel the distances around the farm? Baseline, Prince of Wales, Fisher, all big car-friendly streets running alongside the farm which sits plop in the middle of the west end, pushing everything farther apart than need be. And to make it even worse, those fields are not even useable by the public.

If by "nice things" you mean "parks", Ottawa already has more than enough.

Central Ottawa has very few parks and they are usually small and do not support many uses (they are mostly for whatever can be done on a MUP, looking at grass and admiring 14-packs of flags). Ottawa lacks a large urban park (e.g. stanley park, mount royal park, high park, central park, golden gate park, hyde park, villa borgese, etc, tiergarten, etc).

Central Ottawa has some of Ottawa's best, and best-used green spaces, including Dundonald, Minto, and St. Luke's parks. Yes, most of the big, federally-owned "green spaces", with the exception of Confederation Park, are useless grass.

However, apart from measuring against the arbitrary and meaningless guidelines for how much park space a population is supposed to have, central Ottawa has plenty of park space. Ottawa needs more urbanity, not more grass. It needs better buildings and better enclosed spaces, not edge vacuums and ceremonial nothings. Pyongyang has lots of big ceremonial open spaces for them that are into that sort of thing.

That's a feature, not a bug. Ottawa has the same amount of park space, or more, given its area and population, just chopped up differently.

I do not take it as self-evident that there is a set point of parks that a city needs or that its population is somehow entitled to, and I despise greenspace-fetishism in every form.

Ottawa's parks are something that outsiders admire about the city. Paving over everything should not be our goal.

I'm not looking for more "greenspace" - central Ottawa has lots of "greenspace" (lawns of federal buildings, lawns of parkways, the CEF, Rideau Hall lawn, giant cemetaries, Hurdman, Lebretton, wasteland on the side of the highway). What central Ottawa lacks is parks that support activities other than grass admiring, flag admiring and MUPing.

Tiny neighborhood parks with one or two potential uses are nice, and the other cities I have mentioned have such tiny neighbourhood parks as well. But in addition to those, most cities have large parks that support a wider variety of activities and act as a destination.

We have the canal, riverside linear parks, the Hog's Back/Mooney's Bay/Vincent Massey set of connected parks, the arboretum/Dow's Lake area, and Major Hill Park, to name but some. How can anyone argue that Ottawa lacks parkland? The Experimental Farm is no park It is inaccessible huge fields of crops, the urban equivalent of a wasteland which simply makes commutes and travel more clumsy.

If that is meant to suggest that the CEF should be given over to urban development, I suspect you'd have very little support, existing parkland notwithstanding.

IMHO parks and lawn are not the same thing. Parks usually support a variety of uses, lawns do not. The federal government severely restricts uses of its parks and lawns to the officially-sanctioned NCC activities of grass admiring, flag admiring and MUPing and maybe the odd festival. The actual parks of the central area: Dundonald, Minto, St. Luke's, Jack Purcell, Strathcona, Mcnabb, Sylvia Holden, Plouffe, Brewer, etc. are quite small and generally support only neighbourhood activites. Macdonald Gardens is a good size, but it has largely been neglected (and as a former federal park has retained very restricted uses). The closest significant multi-use park to central Ottawa is probably Mooney's Bay, but it is a good distance from the city centre.

If you compare this to pretty much any other city, they have have larger parks in the central area that support a range of activities (I made a list earlier in this thread).

Nor should moar parks solely for the sake of moar parks or fulfilling some arbitrary formula.

I don't see Ottawa's parks as being anything particular more admirable than, say, Montreal's or Toronto's... and in those cities people actually USE urban parks much more so than in Ottawa, whose fetishized "green spaces" tend to be viewed as things to look at, rather than to use.

The Ottawa equivalents, then, are Major's Hill and Confederation Park. Maybe, eventually, that windswept plain at Lebreton will join them, but the depends on whether the surrounding development ends up being urban or more functionally suburban crap.

Other than demolishing billions of dollars worth of perfectly good real estate and replacing it with plants, there's no opportunity for Ottawa to have a central park in the Olmstead school any more. That's not such a bad thing, given Ottawa's tendency towards edge vacuums.

MacDonald Gardens was the city's cemetery from the 1840s to the 1870s. There are still likely bodies buried there although most were transferred to Beechwood and Notre Dame. This places major restrictions on what we do with it.

There are a fair number of sizable chunks of land in central parts of the city that don't require any demolitions, including the site they just gave to the hospital, part of the the CEF, Hurdman, the land between the LAC and river (mostly parking lots), the poorly-defined greenspace between the Veterans Memorial building and the claridge condo (including the GPT), part of the Lebreton flats). It probably isn't possible to get a Central Park sized park (unless the CEF is fully-converted to a park) but there are lots of places to fit a good-sized park. It would also be possible to convert an existing greenspace (such as Vincent Massey/Hogg's back) into a less-restrictive space that could support a more diverse range of activities.

None of those locations would be terribly well-used spaces; they suffer from the same inherent problems that too many other Ottawa parks do: edge vacuum, not stitched into the urban fabric, green space for green space's sake.

The only thing central about the Central Experimental Farm is the word in its name, which has nothing to do with its location in Ottawa.

Ottawa might lack in animated urban parks... the solution is not to establish more city-deadening public space. It is to better stitch existing publicopengreenspaces more tightly into the urban fabric, including by tightly surround them with things that aren't parks (how many green spaces border other green spaces?), and to get the collective board out of the arses of the city and NCC to allow people to let their hairs down a little.

If anything, Ottawa's parks helps the boring and bland city moniker.

Yes, they go a long way towards making the city blander and boringer.

Your definition of central is far too restrictive. Pre-1945 Ottawa was far too small to have a 'Central Park' sized animated park.

And let's get to the bottom of this. Define an animated park?