Battle to expand municipalities for residential growth seen around southern Ontario
Thousands of farm acres have been lost, should this trend be stopped?
By Mark
Schadenberg
Cities
are growing exponentially, sometimes some of the province's best
farmland is across the street from a residential subdivision.
It's
truly a four-way battle pitting developers creating roads and homes,
against cities wanting additional industrial / commercial acreage,
farmers requiring large tracts of arable land to feed these cities,
while the natural spaces such as wetlands must also be maintained. A
fifth member of the conflict could be other land uses such as pit
mines and valuable aggregates.
You
can't create more land.
In
Woodstock, the Havelock Corners subdivision is found on the south
side of Tollgate Road (County Road 17) and thriving farms are on the
north side. On the south side of the 401, Patullo Ridge commercial /
industrial park dominates one side of the road and is within city
limits, whereas a Norwich Township farm is directly across the road.
Before the previous municipal election, Woodstock had plans in motion
to possibly consume a farm on Patullo Road through purchasing about
100 acres (from a farming family) for industrial use and then
compensating Norwich Township in some fashion as the municipal
boundary would shift resulting in less tax dollars long-term for the
Norwich community.
Woodstock
is interesting as we promote our amazing location at the 401 and 403
interchange (www.cometothecrossroads.com)
for commerce and manufacturing facilities, but rely heavily also on
the agricultural industry, including hosting the gigantic September
trade show – Canada's Outdoor Farm Show.
It
wasn't too many years ago that the Bakker and Virtue family farms on
Parkinson Road were essentially expropriated by Woodstock to create
the Commerce Way Park, which in-turn has created lots of employment
with the arrival (or re-location of): Sysco, Tilt-Wall, Trans-Mit
Steel, Miller Zell, Ancra, Day & Ross, Scholastic Books and
others.
Read
below some of the startling statistics drawing a picture about
evaporating farm land in Ontario.
In
this article, I'm tossing out a lot of questions and feel it's a
conundrum of not being able to also supply answers. Do we define an
absolute moratorium on converting any more rural sprawling fields of
corn and soy beans into back splits, shopping plazas, warehouses and
factories?
The
province of Ontario has created its somewhat strict game plan called
the Provincial Policy Statement and has been formulating on-going
modifications of that plan since. The word at Queen's Park, which I
have written about on previous occasions, is 'Intensification', which
means several things – build up instead of out, create smaller
residential lots, refurbish old brownfield properties, and promote
severing large municipal lots to build in-fill homes.
There
are also stories posted here where the hustle and houses of the GTA
are literally next door to existing and on-going agricultural
enterprises in places like Mississauga and Vaughan.
A
Toronto Star story and video describes how massive Mississauga and
the expansion of the 401 and later the arrival of the 407 has
diminished the size of one particular family farm in Mississauga.
Oddly enough, the family surname in the prose is Hustler.
()()()()()()()()()()()()()
Over
the years, the farm’s sources of income have shifted. For decades,
the Hustlers grew wheat and oats, but the crops became less
profitable as the farm diminished in size. In 1957, when a northern
section was sold to the government to build the 401, it dropped from
100 acres to 82.6. Beginning in the 1990s, land was first
expropriated for the 407 on-ramp, then for a hydro generation project
that was never built, bringing the acreage to 52.
In
the 1960s, the farm income shifted to egg production. For 30 years,
Frank and Theresa owned 1,600 hens, and Frank sold them door to door
in Brampton. In the 1990s, they downgraded to about 100 hens, then
gave them up after Frank required heart surgery in 2003.
Their
income now comes from their cattle ― 38 head ― and the three
dozen sheep they’re raising for meat. Their farmland is used to
feed the livestock; they grow sorghum, a high-protein grain that
maximizes the amount of feed they can grow in a small area.
()()()()()()()()()()()()()
Even with improvements
in smoke-stack emissions, air quality is an important part of
quality of life in large centres.
In nearby London, the
north end of the Forest City is quickly growing to swallow up Arva.
When I was kid, there
was no Masonville on Fanshawe Park Road. London has grown northward
and westward in this area. The Sunningdale Road north of Masonville
is the site of several subdivisions – large apartment buildings
(condos and rentals) for intensification and detached homes.
Meanwhile, the Ontario
Farmland Trust wants to maintain its say and has a mandate to be a
proponent of ending this shift of agriculture to mega-lopolis, saying
in a link below:
()()()()()()()()()()()()()
In
the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) alone, more than 2,000 farms and
150,000 acres of farmland were lost to production in the two decades
between 1976 and 1996. Although farmland loss is not tracked as
extensively today as it was in previous decades, we know that the
amount of farmland in the GTA decreased by at least 50,000 acres
between 1996 and 2001 and that Ontario lost at least 600,000 acres of
farmland between 1996 and 2006.
This
includes 18% of Ontario’s Class 1 farmland
()()()()()()()()()()()()()
The Ontario Federation
of Agriculture uses Statistics Canada numbers to back its writings
about the odd battle of urban sprawl versus growing crops. The
population of Ontario is growing, people need to eat, but where's the
top-grade arable farmland to produce vegetables and other food?
The excerpt from a OFA
story below, plus many links listed at the bottom of this writing,
paints a conundrum, but in an easily understood dilemma:
()()()()()()()()()()()()()
.
. . And if losing farmland to development, urban sprawl and
encroachment wasn’t bad enough, our growing population is putting
increasing pressure on farmers to produce more on less land. Based on
the Ministry of Finance’s projections, Ontario’s population will
grow from 13.5 million in 2012 to 17.4 million in 2036. That’s
nearly 30% more people in 24 years. Feeding our own province on an
ever diminishing supply of productive farmland is going to be tough .
. .
()()()()()()()()()()()()()
You can study many
provincial areas by looking at lines on a map, defined and called:
Greenbelt, Oak Ridges Moraine, Niagara Escarpment, and of course
provincial parks such as Algonquin. If these areas do maintain their
provincial government imposed limitations on development that will
in-turn increase the land values for all properties on the perimeter.
People who believe Mississauga is too crowded, have moved to Guelph
so the home prices there have increased. People who believe Guelph is
too crowded and too expensive, will eventually move to Woodstock.
One positive in all
this, is that agricultural land the City of Woodstock currently owns
and is earmarked for future industrial purposes, is not sitting
fallow as the City does rent it out to farmers.
LINKS:
http://www.woodstocksentinelreview.com/2014/09/08/woodstock-to-pay-local-family-an-additional-17-million-for-expropriated-land
http://www.cometothecrossroads.com/news-mobile/177-two-new-tenants-in-commercewaybusiness-park
http://www.lfpress.com/2015/02/08/good-things-grow-in-southwestern-ontario
Mark
Schadenberg, Sales
Representative
Senior
Real Estate Specialist (SRES designation)
Royal
LePage Triland Realty
757
Dundas St, Woodstock
www.wesellwoodstock.com
(519)
537-1553, cell or text
Email:
mschadenberg@rogers.com
Twitter:
markroyallepage
Facebook:
Mark Schadenberg, Royal LePage Triland
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