Re. Severances on…

Re. Severances on Agricultural Lands

Our family is strongly opposed to allowing more residential severances on agricultural lands. WE are farmers, my son farms full time, and his sons also want to farm.

Farms and farmland - that is the basis of our food land producing systems -need to be given the same high degree of protection as underground resources and environmentally sensitive areas. The food system in Ontario cannot contribute to economic growth if the basic resource to support it - productive farmland - is lost.

In an urban setting, houses would not be allowed in an industrial area, and vice versa. To reduce the same kind of neighborhood conflicts in farming areas, residential uses need to be kept apart from farms, that produce noise often 24/7 in parts of the year, and smells from livestock, dust from machines, and paranoia from the use of chemicals fertilizers and crop protection agents. Most new home owners adjacent to farms are not aware that they are not living in a park, but rather in an intensely managed, semi-industrial area.

Modern machinery that contributes to efficiency - ie cheap food -needs large fields, with a minimum of obstacles, of areas requiring stopping, starting, turning around, that severance produce.

While a small number of farmers may desire the ability to carve the farm into small parcels for financial gain, the majority, and any with successors interested in farming, and therefore take a long view, rather than just cash in the bank today and nothing tomorrow, will be opposed to the proposition to effectively roll back land use planning by 50 years.