From racetrack to farm: the Sandown Centre in North Saanich

Rows on the old oval

The land at 1810 Glamorgan Road in North Saanich still has the shape of what it used to be. For about fifty years this was the Sandown racetrack. Now it grows flax, berries, herbs, trial lettuces and young farmers.

The track opened in 1955 on land that had been farmed until then. According to the District of North Saanich, the last races ran in 2005, although local press has reported live racing continuing a little later. Either way, by the early 2010s the property's future was a planning question, and the answer was that most of it would go back to agriculture.

How a racetrack became public farmland

The deal turned on the Agricultural Land Reserve, British Columbia's zone for protecting farmland. In November 2011, the Agricultural Land Commission gave conditional approval to remove a 12-acre strip fronting McDonald Park Road from the reserve for commercial development. In exchange, the District added 12 acres of its own municipal land to the reserve, so there was no net loss. The remaining 83 acres stayed in the reserve and were transferred to the District of North Saanich in 2017 as a community asset.

Owning farmland and farming it are different jobs. Through 2020 the District assessed proposals from would-be operators, and a staff report that April weighed them against each other before the choice was made. The draft terms ran the lease to December 31, 2030 and committed District funding for the first three years: $135,000 in 2020 and $125,000 in each of 2021 and 2022. The operating lease was signed in December 2020 with the Circular Farm and Food Society, a non-profit founded in 2019. The Sandown Centre for Regenerative Agriculture began operating in 2021. Its stated mission is short: "To empower farmers, restore land, and secure our food future."

The centre acknowledges that it sits on the traditional, unceded lands of the W̱SÍḴEM (Tseycum), BOḰEĆEN (Pauquachin) and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.

Farming on a parking lot

The soil is the first thing anyone at Sandown talks about, and for good reason. The District's own description is blunt: the ground is significantly compacted, with excess rock and gravel, and the 2017 reclamation did not remove all the remnants of the grandstand, discontinued drainage tiles, pipes and roadways. Some of the growing area was a parking lot.

In this setting, regenerative agriculture mostly means repair. Building organic matter, keeping roots in the ground and limiting disturbance are slow ways of turning fill back into soil. Early on the centre also put the problem to use: rocks pulled from the beds went into French drains. Rocks were the one crop the site never had to be taught to grow.

A Vancity-funded project, the Sandown Soil Lab, was set up as a three-year effort led by biochemist Brooke Hayes, with soil testing and custom soil extracts among its tools. It is a reminder that the site doubles as a place to measure what regenerative methods actually do to degraded land.

What happens there

The incubator plots

The centre's best-known initiative is the Regenerative Farmer Program. In its first seasons, a "Farmpreneur" intake placed seven new growers on leased plots, growing everything from flax to berries and herbs. The current model is an incubator. New-entrant farmers with less than five years of experience lease a quarter-acre or half-acre plot for a three-year term that can be renewed, and run their own businesses on it.

What makes the model work is the shared kit. Participants get mentorship and access to tools that a beginner could not justify buying: a BCS walking tractor with implements, Jang and Earthway seeders, a flame weeder, greenhouse space, a wash and pack area and a walk-in cooler. Land access is a familiar barrier for new farmers around Greater Victoria, and a plot at a fraction of the cost of buying or leasing farmland lowers it.

Community gardens and the learning farm

Not everyone at Sandown wants to sell vegetables. The community garden gives residents a plot of their own, and the Learning Farm works as a living classroom. Through the Growing Young Farmers program, young farmers run the Learning Farm, lead school field trips and grow produce that goes into school meal programs in the region.

Workshops, tours, volunteer days and a CSA round out the calendar. In 2022 a weekly "Grow Your Own Food" course for home gardeners, designed by Stephanie Jacobs of Fireweed Farms, was set up so that participants had their own plot to learn on.

Seed work

One quarter-acre at Sandown has a job that reaches far beyond North Saanich. FarmFolk CityFolk's Vancouver Island seed security coordinator, Lisa Willott, established a seed-growing site there and uses it for variety trials and breeding work. Her trials have shown that the varieties thriving on the island can be very different from those doing well on the mainland, which is exactly why local trials matter. In autumn she takes a mobile seed-cleaning trailer, carrying a thresher and cleaning machines, to growers across the island and the smaller islands nearby.

That kind of trial ground is where crops from outside the usual seed catalogue get tested. Warm-climate plants such as cowpeas, the plant behind black-eyed peas, or grain and leaf amaranth have to prove themselves in a cool maritime summer before anyone grows them by the row. The guide to culturally relevant crops on Vancouver Island sorts those crops by what the island's weather allows, and the companion piece on African and Caribbean leafy greens covers the leaves.

The 2026 lease and what comes next

In January 2026, the District announced an amended operating lease. The area leased to the Circular Farm and Food Society shrank to approximately 13.5 acres, on a three-year renewable term. The youth, new farmer and community garden programs continue on that land; the District kept flexibility to evaluate future uses for the remainder of the 83 acres and said it expected to give an update on long-term plans during 2026.

Food grows on the old racetrack now. New farmers have built businesses there. How much of the oval stays in vegetables depends on what the District decides for the other seventy or so acres.