Farmland Shrinking In Ontario

The following London Free Press article scares me. Not in the typical "help me mommy, the monster is coming!" kind of way, but a more realistic "oh shit, this is serious" kind of way.

The author, John Minder, talks about how the South western Ontario region will be struck by a devastating blow. That blow is the loss of our farm land.

A quote in the LFP article really caught my attention.

It reads:

“If you can’t grow food within your own region, you are really cutting off your independence. If you pave it over, you are cutting off all your options for the future,”.

I could not have stated that better myself.

Tue, April 24, 2007

By JOHN MINER, SUN MEDIA


Canada’s thin slice of fertile land that can reliably produce crops is disappearing at an increasing rate — and Ontario is taking the worst hit, losing thousands of acres a year.

For a province with more than half the country’s best farmland, the pressures from urban sprawl are ringing more and more alarms.

There’s even a risk that with a new greenbelt now designated around the Toronto area, urban growth will punch into prime farmland in the London-Kitchener areas, “the most important land to protect,” said Bronwynne Wilton, a co-editor of a new book on farmland loss in Canada.....

Source: http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Local/2007/04/24/4126526.html