I fully support the…

I fully support the amendments to remove land from the Greenbelt for housing to help ease the housing crisis in the GTHA. I have lived and operated a farm in Niagara for 27 years. The Greenbelt has done nothing to help sustain family farms. Family farming is unsustainable on acreages of less than 40 acres because it has become unprofitable. Over the past three decades the required acreage for a farm to be economically viable has increased beyond the size of a traditional family-run farming operation. High costs and reduced revenues have squeezed family farms out of business and many of these once-farmed smaller acreage farms have been abandoned or had the orchards and fruit trees pulled out and converted to rented land for large cash croppers. There is no point saving these lands for fruit farms because these small acreages are not economically capable of being used to grow fruit or other high value crops. Instead of forcing these smaller family farms to remain unproductive in the Greenbelt, these farms should be allowed to be rezoned and converted to residential development uses. This would help ease the housing affordability crisis in the GTHA and would not materially impact fruit or farming production in Ontario since many of these smaller acreages are currently not being farmed anyway. Smaller acreage fruit farms that may have been profitable in the 1980s or 1990s are unprofitable today, resulting in these lands no longer being farmed. It makes sense to take these lands out of the Greenbelt since the Greenbelt is not helping these smaller family farms as originally envisioned. Instead it makes sense to use these abandoned and unprofitable farming lands for much-needed housing.