Cost benefit analysis of peri-urban land use policy - Plurel

Agricultural zone
Land use within this zone could include extensive arable cropping and biomass production. A
productive landscape focused in areas where more intensive management can occur without
adversely affecting the Mosslands heartland. The economic values of agricultural areas
includes provisioning values from arable cropping, as well as non-use values, such as
landscape, biodiversity, etc.
The scale of provisioning values of the agricultural lands is subject to types of agricultural
activities – horticulture, cereal cropping, etc, as well as the varieties of cultivated crops. Current
agriculture activities in the study region are predominantly cereal cropping and some potato
production, limited vegetable production and very limited livestock numbers. Non agricultural
enterprises include some field scale turf production and horse grazing. Several potential
directions of development in the agricultural zone were proposed in the visioning report, ranging
from horticulture, horsiculture, cultivation of biomass (energy crops), etc. It is beyond the scope
of this study to evaluate the plausibility in economic terms for each of these agricultural activities
or to forecast the composition of various agriculture activities in each of the three visions.
Instead, we use available resources to gauge the potential provisional values of cultivating a predefined
composition of crops, including cereal (wheat and barley), potatoes and two potential
energy crop (oilseed rape and sugar beets). Hence the scale of the gross margin from growing
these crops can be estimated in monetary terms.
Page 39 • PLUREL report No 4.4.3 • December 2010