Good top soil is not just dirt - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Recently, the Municipality of Bluewater made news when council unanimously rejected a plan by developers which would have stored 500 megawatts of electricity in a compressed air energy storage situation. The storage facility would have stored surplus energy from Bruce Power at night, when we don’t need it, so it would serve our needs in daytime.

 

The process would have occupied 135 prosperous farming acres.

 

Meanwhile, the public near Port Elgin faces a decision for an energy storage facility that would occupy 29 acres. Many are opposed.

 

I’m sure there are many people who look aghast at these decisions that mean electrical power will be wasted because it cannot be stored. I suspect those who grow crops think differently.

 

Local councillors have saved valuable farmland from being buried under equipment to store power. Urbanites don’t understand how valuable good, food-growing land is. After all, we lose 320 acres of farmland every day to urban development - new roads, new suburban housing developments. Developers view topsoil as just something to build on. Our government doesn’t see that we need soil to grow the crops they eat, the pasture on which our cattle graze.

 

For most urbanites, dirt is just dirt. They don’t understand that some soils are better for growing food than others. It was a lesson I learned early as a farm boy. Our farm, northwest of Lucknow, was located on clay soil. My uncle, who lived with us, had a farm northeast of ours. His soil was so gravelly he later sold off a huge hill to a gravel company.

 

Farther up our concession, the land became so sandy that crops didn’t grow properly. One farm was an early example of reforestation, as it was planted to evergreen trees.

 

It’s scary that we have built highways, subdivisions and shopping malls at the same time as we have doubled our population. We have more people to feed and less land to grow food to feed them. Yet, it’s hard to have urbanites understand that because our grocery stores are flooded with fresh food. This will, no doubt, continue for as long as I have left on this earth, but what is the future for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren?

 

Someone was pointing out on television the other morning how big Ontario is. It can take two days to drive from Toronto to the western border. Most of the province has land that is not productive for growing food, yet nearly all our growth is on productive farmland in southern Ontario. With a Toronto-based premier, we can’t make government understand how valuable that farmland is. 

 

So, I understand the many people who oppose using some of that land to store excess power from Bruce Power. At the same time, I’m a conservationist, so being able to store power at night for use in the daytime makes sense. Perhaps if we weren’t losing so much good farmland for urban expansion, the loss of 150 acres in western Ontario for power storage wouldn’t matter as much. Ironically, if Bruce Power closes some day in the future, this land lost for storage will be unusable for growing food.

 

We are both blessed and cursed by the free-enterprise system. Developers see an opportunity to make money by buying farmland and converting it to housing or buying land to build storage capacity for electricity from Bruce Power. It’s governments, whether at the local level at the Municipality of Bluewater or the province of Ontario, that look out for the public interest. When a government buys the arguments of developers, the best interests of local citizens can be at risk.

 

So I must applaud Bluewater councillors for standing up for local residents who don’t want their land being lost for farming to an energy storage facility. Who knows, though, if the developer may have connections with the Ontario government which will cause it to step in “to protect the public interest”.

 

We live in a complicated world. When we first moved to our farm after World War II, the first thing my parents did was install electricity. Today, our farmhouse is heated by geothermal heat. We use no fossil fuels, but are totally dependent on electricity to pump heat from the earth to heat our house.

 

Today, much of our electricity comes from nuclear power plants that generate electricity by splitting atoms. We have difficult choices to make every day between growing food that is essential for our existence and storing energy which has also become necessary for our future.

 

Still, I must applaud Bluewater councillors for standing up to pressure to protect their valuable farmland. Who knows if, at some point in the future, the 135 acres they protected in turning down the storage facility, might be enough to keep some people from starving.