By Keith Roulston

    Looking at columnist Jeffrey Carter’s column a couple of months ago, I find it hard to believe how far the population of Ontario (and Canada) has gone from the reality of us needing to eat.
    Jeffrey was dealing with the loss of farmland to urban development in southwestern Ontario and elsewhere.
    As I wrote in a column in another publication, recently, I remember when it was said that one-third of families in Ontario had ties to growing up on the farm. That was before the Canadian population doubled in size to more than 41 million. We’re adding nearly a half-million people every year, despite a decline in the birthrate, as the federal government tries to fill the needs of employers.
    Those people need somewhere to live, and with a Toronto-based premier and a Montreal-based prime minister, the solution is simple: grow our southern cities bigger,
    Recently on the news there was a story that the Town of Caledon, (once a village) was planning to expropriate hundreds of acres of verdant farmland so that several hundred homes could be built. Jeffrey mentions in his column that in the Dresden area there are plans to construct a landfill to receive tonnes of garbage. 
    Meanwhile, he writes, in Wilmot Township, the Region of Waterloo is threatening to expropriate 770 acres of farmland for an industrial park. Near St. Thomas, another 1,500 acres of prime farmland was chosen for Volkswagen’s battery plant for building electric cars.
    The premier attempted to siphon off hundreds of acres from the Greenbelt before he was opposed and had to abandon the idea.
    Part of me, as a former editor,  gets excited. Thousands of jobs! But I’m also a farm boy.
    All the extra people we’re importing need to eat. At the same time, we are taking land out of food production at a rate of 300 acres every day, in the last 35 years – a total of 2.8 million acres, 18 per cent of Ontario’s precious farmland.
    Our urban politicians fail to see farmland as precious, however. And when they go into our supermarkets and see shelves in the vegetable section overflowing with produce, they’re unlikely to be more worried, especially when voters in rural Ontario keep electing Progressive Conservatives in every election.
    The problem is, once farmland is gone it’s too late. If we wake up and the grocery store shelves are empty, we can’t get back the farmland we’ve paved over.
    We have a huge province in a bigger country, but the farmland being paved over is rare. We have fewer productive acres to grow our food. If the growth was taking place near North Bay or Sudbury, we’d have plenty of food-producing land in southern Ontario. But the growth is on prime farmland, and the 300 acres that we’re losing today, and tomorrow and the day after that, is so valuable to grow food that it’s criminal to waste it. We must change!
    Rural Ontario has become less important politically, even if we weren’t fooling ourselves by electing supporters of our urban-minded premier. We need somehow to get the political power to stop the criminal loss of essential farmland – to steer growth to northern or eastern Ontario where our future food supply isn’t being endangered. 
    I’m all for growth of Canada and Ontario and offering a home and jobs for the poor of other parts of the world, just not at the expense of the food those people, or their children and grandchildren, will need. In a huge country we can have people and jobs without losing farmland.
    We’ve got to get over being excited about what’s new in farming. We need to recognize the importance of simply having a full plate for supper. ◊