I am a land surveyor and…

I am a land surveyor and former mayor. As the former, I have walked many of the fields in the Town of Erin, and have driven iron bars into the ground here for over 30 years. I have first-hand knowledge of the soil types in my community.
While mayor, the province brought in new regulations preventing the use of prime agricultural land for severances or other non-agricultural uses. I support the protection of the agricultural land base in our province, as one item in a range of policies needed to keep agriculture viable in our rural communities. When I went to school here, I was the odd one, a townie in a community of farmers. Now it has switched around completely with only a handful of my cohorts still farming. More land is taken up for horse farming, which is not bad, but does not increase the food production in our community. There is also a move to organic farming which requires smaller parcels due to the labour demands. Finally there are the traditional cash crop farms which range from 600 to 1000 acres. An appreciation of the variability of land base requirements should be embedded in any agricultural policy.
Much of the land in our town, Erin, is based on class, 3, 5, and lower soils, and agriculture is not always the best use for those lands. While mayor, our council invested a lot of time, money and public consultation in creating a database of agricultural capability. The end result was mapping which, although not perfect, did reflect in large part the lands which needed to be protected, and those which could be used as a resource for other activities. This was fine until the previous government introduced new mapping for the prime agricultural and natural heritage areas. This paid little attention to the previous detailed mapping that we had produced, and virtually closed the town to alternative uses of the rural land base.
As one example, rural severances, which had been a key component of population growth in our community are almost now non-existent. Severances put money into the pockets of local landowners, not big developers. When the lots were sold, local trades were retained to design and construct the new homes. After they were built, there was a demand for landscaping, maintenance, snow plowing and other trades. Severances were a key component of a healthy local economy. I welcome the province's willingness to move back to our previous mapping, as it is more locally accurate than the broad brush mapping that the Province applied.
I trust that the new government will carefully consider the value of previous local decision making, and support our evaluation of the land's capability, and consider the wide range of economic activities that can take place in a rural economy.