To a field near you - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

This information has been validated and confirmed over and over again, but it’s always astounding just how much prime agricultural farmland we lose in this province on a daily basis. I won’t profess to be an expert on this topic, but maybe that’s almost the point - as an outsider, non-farmer, maybe that’s what it takes to grasp the enormity of it all, something that farmers know all too well.

 

Years and years ago, I remember wandering up to Keith Roulston’s office to confirm a fact with him on how much farmland the province loses in one day. Now, it’s a figure that is quoted often by the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, but then, it was relatively new. The 2022 figure was 319 acres of farmland in Ontario being lost per day. When I first read a number that was in that ballpark, I went to Keith to confirm it. He was still the editor of The Rural Voice at that time and, furthermore, he had a student in working with him - Ursina Studhalter - who was up on her farming as well, so I was able to bounce this question off of two people who were sure to know more than I did on this particular topic.

 

Most of the land being lost in Ontario is due to urban sprawl - housing, commercial development and the like. That doesn’t make it right, of course, but it’s at least something that most people understand. However, at a time when we need all of the food security we can get and global uncertainty is reigning supreme, I am always astonished at the non-farming uses one can dream up for prime agricultural land. It can, at times, feel like there’s some anti-farmland think tank out there, shrouded in secrecy, coming up with the most creative and absurd ways to misuse prime agricultural land.

 

There was the Green Energy Act gold rush of the Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne Liberals in Ontario years ago, which saw many area farms erect solar panels and wind turbines to dot the landscape. Now, with the political climate so changed since then, they feel like relics of another time when you drive past them. Or at least that’s how they feel to me. Instead of putting these things up in city centres with high energy demands, rural areas always felt like the preferred dumping ground for these kinds of things. Put them out there where no one will see them.

 

Now, the next thing is these battery storage facilities that are being proposed all over the province. They are becoming - their proposals anyway; I don’t think they’re finding much favour with landowners, neighbours or the local municipal councils, which have veto power - nearly ubiquitous to the point that they are on the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s radar and a concern for Ontario’s farmers.

 

After attending a very loud, raucous and contentious meeting about such a project in Seaforth a few years ago - which really didn’t end up going anywhere, at least at this point - I had the pleasure of attending a meeting on a similar project in Clinton earlier this week.

 

Whether these facilities are needed or not, which seems up for debate, and whether they are safe or not, which also seems as though it’s up for debate, it just seems like another case of prime agricultural land being used for anything but growing food. Surely there is unusable land somewhere in the province that could be used for such a facility, if indeed such a facility is needed for Ontario’s long-term prosperity.

 

And yet, similar to the ridiculous debate over climate change, we all live in this world and we all have to eat. Nothing is more universal than the need for food and water. Let’s get on the same page on this and use the land we’re so lucky to have for its proper use.