Richmond’s new 11,000-square-foot limit won’t slow loss of agricultural land, warns councillor. Harold Steves of Richmond has been fighting to save farmland for a long time. Steves’ activism was spurred by a municipal decision to zone his father’s dairy farm for housing. When he became an NDP MLA in 1973, he helped create B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve to shield farmland from development. Today, Steves — who’s remained a fixture of Richmond politics as a long-time city councillor — is fighting to save farmland from a new threat, one born out of Metro Vancouver’s hot property market. Large mansions are being built on agricultural land, and evidence suggests that buyers are in it for tax breaks, not farming, as the Globe and Mail reported earlier this year.