I’ve posted quite a bit lately on the struggle to protect farmland on the west coast of Canada from industrial and suburban development. I now turn your attention to the ruckus caused by the Ontario government, who has designated the Oak Ridges Moraine north of Toronto, Ontario, out of bounds to greedy developers. Farmers are screaming blue bloody murder:
By now, George and Iva had hoped to be spending dinnertime arguing over whether to move to a condo or bungalow when the sale goes through on this 80-hectare dairy farm, which George’s parents bought in 1918, six years before he was born.
…Without the possibility of developing the property, the "dickering" with real estate agents, as George calls it, abruptly stopped.
The couple are now angry that the sale of their land, which was to be their retirement fund, has, they say, been sabotaged by a government more interested in protecting pretty countryside than the fate of the farmers.
And though the government says it won’t happen, the Evanses want compensation.
Oh really?
Dave Pollard has written as excellent essay on the subject, This is the way the world ends.
As for the farmers, who lauded the Oak Ridges Moraine act, they’ve shown their true stripes in their violent opposition to this new bill which was designed to protect their livelihood.
Farmers do have it tough, there is no doubt. But as I see it, the issue of whether George and Iva should be able to retire to a condo in Florida is a tiny pixel in a much bigger picture. Populations are exploding all over the world, and arable farmland that is not gobbled up to accomodate more people is slowly (but not slowly enough, unfortunately) being sucked dry by global warming and the insatiable human demand for water. The net loss of thousands of acres of farmland each day worries me; multiply that by just a couple of hundred years and humans of the future will be reduced to growing vegetables on, much like George and Iva’s concerns, the head of a pin.
Now, before you dismiss me as alarmist, consider this: Humans have been dependant on farming to feed themselves for the past 10,00 years, and I like to operate on the assumption that we will continue to exist for at least another 10,000 years. Barring some kind of bizarre evolutionary adaption, I’m also operating on the assumption that homo sapiens will continue to need to eat. If Canada, of all countries, can’t get its act together to ensure its own food security for the future, what country will? The one we hope to buy food from for the next ten millenia? Oh yeah, I’m putting my money on that one.
People, in this case farmers like George and the real estate speculators, seem to operate on the basis of this philosophy: "Forget the consequences, I want what I can get for my own comfort today, because the world ends when I die. If it doesn’t — well, who the hell cares anyway. I’m dead." As Dave Pollard says, this is the way the world ends.
Let’s hope it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nov. 25, 2004. 06:40 AM
TORONTO STAR
In the greenbelt, a bitter harvest
Farmers are eager to sell, but developers can’t bite
Retirement stymied by provincial plan
ANDREW MILLS
STAFF REPORTER
Each day at 12:30 p.m. sharp, George Evans, 80, stops the tractor in front of the big white farmhouse, shuffles through the back door and removes his rubber boots. He washes the cow muck from his hands and sits down to the midday meal his 74-year-old wife, Iva, has prepared.
By now, George and Iva had hoped to be spending dinnertime arguing over whether to move to a condo or bungalow when the sale goes through on this 80-hectare dairy farm, which George’s parents bought in 1918, six years before he was born.
But last month, when the Ontario government announced the greenbelt proposal to protect some 720,000 hectares of Golden Horseshoe countryside from development, the Evans farm fell just inside the boundaries, two kilometres northeast of Newmarket. Without the possibility of developing the property, the "dickering" with real estate agents, as George calls it, abruptly stopped.
The couple are now angry that the sale of their land, which was to be their retirement fund, has, they say, been sabotaged by a government more interested in protecting pretty countryside than the fate of the farmers.
And though the government says it won’t happen, the Evanses want compensation.
All they seem to talk about now is how, with the help of just their middle-aged son Terry, they’ll manage to get the corn off, sell the steers, fix the combine, spread the manure, seed for next year, clean the cowshed, deliver the calves …
"Around here, there’s a lot of s—, a lot of cows and a lot of work," says 52-year-old Terry, picking a piece of hay from his salt-and-pepper hair.
Like many farmers on the GTA’s fringes, the Evanses are ready to pack it in. It’s impossible to make a profit on beef cattle, George says. They sell for a little more than half as much as they did before the mad cow scare closed the American market. Same for cash crops such as corn, soybeans and barley.
"If it weren’t for the milk, we’d be broke. Done. Finished," says Terry, who milks some 45 cows twice a day, all by himself.
It wouldn’t bother George if he had a heart attack and died out working the fields, he says, but he worries about burdening Terry, his only surviving son.
"If this were good — decent — I’d say, `Terry, take it over,’" he says, squinting hard and shaking his jowls, "but I don’t want to saddle the boy."
For farmers like the Evanses, selling land to speculators seemed the perfect solution. With suburbia sprawling out of control, it seemed inevitable that sooner or later, a deep-pocketed developer would come along to transform fields into cul-de-sacs. He would pay top dollar — $300,000 or so an acre for the best locations, some real estate experts say — and farmers could live out a handsome retirement on the proceeds.
But the greenbelt, the farmers fear, has spelled an end to all those plans and the dreams that went with them.
"I just don’t like the idea of someone telling us what we have to do. It’s our land. It’s all paid for," says white-haired Iva, training her eyes on the kitchen table, on which rests a dog-eared Bible and cooling blueberry pie. "If they want to use our land for a greenbelt, they should buy it."
But there has never been a guarantee that Ontario landowners can develop their own land, so the government won’t be compensating any farmer whose land is in the greenbelt, says Victor Doyle, manager of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs’ greenbelt planning team.
In some parts of the United States, a landowner’s right to build whatever he or she wants is constitutionally guaranteed. In some jurisdictions, if the government puts restrictions on what an owner builds, it is obliged to compensate that landowner, Doyle says.
Not so in Ontario, where, "historically, you could live on your land and farm your land, but that was it," Doyle says. "If you wanted to pursue development, you had to apply to the crown.
"We have a policy-led system and can regulate what people do on their property," he says.
That’s the legal reason given by the provincial government for its refusal to compensate farmers affected by the greenbelt.
`There’s nobody south of the Number 7 who knows what’s going on up here’
–John Doner, farmer
The practical reason is the province simply couldn’t afford it, Doyle says.
The government’s solution is to find ways to make agriculture more profitable: going to bat for farmers at the World Trade Organization, he suggests, or finding ways to limit the middleman’s profits so farmers can keep more. "We agree that more can and should be done," Doyle says. "But we’re not going to wait to protect the land before we get the viability sorted out."
Tell that to Terry Evans, who’s heard similar promises before and seen little change.
Yesterday, he was in the barn until a black and white heifer delivered her first calf, at 12:30 in the morning. At 7:30 a.m., he was back, this time in the milking parlour, dodging warm manure as he attached each cow to the milker. He was to be back for evening milking at about 5:30 — that is, if he and his dad got the combine repaired and a good portion of the far cornfield harvested on time. If not, the evening milking would have to wait until more like 8:30.
"Milking by yourself is a lonely life. … You’re married to your cows," says Terry, a father of three whose wife works in Newmarket as an emergency room nurse. How long, he wonders, will it take for changes, for example at the WTO, to trickle down to the milking parlour where he has stood every morning and evening since he was about 15?
What he needs now is relief.
"I’d like to afford to have some help," he says. "Even some part-time help. Anything."
No matter what the government proposes to do to help, little is likely to make these farmers happy. They want out.
"There’s nobody south of the Number 7 (highway) who knows what’s going on up here," says John Doner, a grain elevator operator near Aurora who grows cash crops on some 1,620 hectares of mostly rented land. He owns 40 hectares that have been in his family for 198 years.
"The farmers are far more of environmentalists than the city people are," Doner says. "It’s not that we’re against this sort of thing. We’re willing to pay our share. But we’re not willing to pay your share."
Just how much GTA farmers stand to lose is becoming clear to Bill and Elsie Kingdon. They put their 39-hectare farm up for sale in mid-October. South of the Evans farm on Warden Ave., it’s close to Highway 404 and minutes from Newmarket. They listed their place at $5.1 million.
Two weeks later, the government announced the greenbelt boundaries, and the Kingdons haven’t heard from their real estate agent since.
What makes it even more bitter is that they had turned down offers in the past.
"We were waiting for the market to peak," says Elsie, 66. "We wanted to cash in. And we like living here. It’s nice." Now they fear they waited too long.
But farmers like the Evanses and the Kingdons may still have a chance to sell, says Roger Irwin, an associate broker at Royal LePage RCR in Bolton. For more than 12 years, he has dealt in large plots on the Oak Ridges Moraine and the Niagara Escarpment, where owners saw lost opportunities after the province halted development.
While that land doesn’t fetch what a developer might have paid, Irwin says it often sells for more than the $20,000 to $30,000 an acre undevelopable farmland goes for, simply because buyers want a piece of preserved countryside.
"You have a piece of property people want to live on because you can’t create more of this, and the land actually increases in value," Irwin says. "I put more stock in whether it has nice trees, nice views, nice water, how easy is it to get to. … There’s a buyer for all of these."
All of that exists on the Evans farm, with its tree-lined driveway and century farmhouse atop a hill, with views of gently rolling fields in four directions.
Who knows whether that will be enough to make a sale?
If you ask Terry, he certainly thinks not: "Nobody," he says, "wants to buy a dead horse."
POLLENATRIX 