Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm

[Richard Eade]

Exactly who would be expected to pay the hundreds of millions (or, more likely, Billions) of dollars to design and develop a ‘Central Park’?

Leave the farm alone. It serves a purpose – even if some don’t agree. Remember, there are also those who think that professional sports are a total waste and would gladly give up sport facilities for residential towers. ‘Live and let live.’ Even if this particular facility means little to you, personally. There are lots of sites that could be developed for towers that do not impact the farm’s work.

That said; I do not believe that this particular site, at Carling and Parkdale, would significantly, detrimentally, affect the farm. Yes, it will cast some shadow onto some areas of the farm, but I would need to see actual scientific evidence that that would significantly impact the work. Greenhouses can be heated and lit – although I think that it will cost much more than a few hundred dollars to do so. And one of the goals of the Central Experimental Farm is to study urban-farm interactions, so this might actually be a positive.

Of course, the idea that the farm should simply be moved out of the city, to be among other (commercial) farms is laughable. This is an EXPERIMENTAL farm. Being isolated by an encompassing city is a good thing. If test crops were introduced out of a (semi-) controlled environment, there is a very real probability that there could be contamination of surrounding farms. This farm is a laboratory. It must remain isolated.