I am writing to submit a…

I am writing to submit a comment regarding the proposal to sever up to three parcels from farm plots. I am a farm owner and manager myself, and I would like to offer an alternative to the opposition that has been reported in the media.

According to various media reports and news articles, one would think that most farmers are against the idea of being able to build additional housing on farmland. I, on the other hand, think that a well-managed strategy to allow for housing and severance is not the boogeyman it’s made out to be. We run a small 150 acre farm in which margins are very tight. In spite of these tight margins, we were able to tile 95 acres of land, which is now in organic production, only because we were able to sever and sell a surplus dwelling from the property. Without the ability to leverage our property to reinvest into the farm infrastructure, we would not now be producing over 90 acres of organic food. Farmers need to be able to make the decision to do what’s best for their farming operation. For too long, we have been at the mercy of municipalities and (what can be) arbitrary rules, which have impeded small farmers and concentrated more land in the hands of larger corporate farmers.

I could offer more input about my experience and why I think that allowing farmers some leeway to build housing and sever small amounts of land can have the effect of making farm operations more viable and productive, but hopefully this suffices to offer a brief counterpoint. We need to protect our farmland, but sometimes protecting a resource requires decisions to make an operation viable.