Re: Proposed new Provincial…

Re: Proposed new Provincial plan

I am in support of leniency in lot severances. For our beekeeping operation we only require a few acres to operate but in order to accomplish this we need to do some severances to financially restart our farm. Many farms in Northern Ontario are left to grow back to their natural growth due to the lack of people wanting to take up farming as a main source of income (needing large acreage) and due to the startup cost, but willing to do hobby farms (small scale operations, not needing large acreage). By allowing severances (creating smaller acreage farms) some would be young farmers would be more willing to start up farming with less of a startup cost as there is less acreage to purchase.
There is also a shortage of residential units in Ontario which these severances would help alleviate this shortage and create hobby farms in the process. At the time of this writing there were only 421 (houses/land/multi homes) listings for sale in the Sudbury area when normally the availability is in the 1500 range. Just a couple of years ago there were only in the area of 175 listings which drives up prices.
For many crops, Sudbury is too cold of a climate to operate. Some year’s frost is not out of the ground until the month of June which leaves the ground temperature too low for seeds to germinate. This would mean the need for more greenhouses in place of open-air farming, which would also mean less need for larger acreage.

In our case we should be able to do severances to:

• financially support our operation
• create new residential lots with ability to hobby farm
• we should have more say in how we want to use our land
• increases revenue for city without increasing demand on services in place
• increase the availability of land for would-be hobby farmers
• will not affect bordering farms
• would help keep farmland from going back to a natural state