Rural/urban debate requires clear and careful thought

As the northern boundary of Metro approaches each year, and sometimes each month, it’s more apparent than ever that Kings County remains at a confusing crossroads in development.

The municipality is the only one in the province with stringent farmland protection policies that safeguard the industry, but not necessarily the individual farmer.

It’s unfair in the extreme to have a landowner, who happens to be a farmer, to have to adhere to relatively heavy restrictions on how he uses his property when next door there are urban multiple-housing developments.

Four farmers had applied some years ago to zone a number of Greenwich farm properties to C10 commercial and R7 residential, extending the hamlet boundary to get sewer and water service extensions.

Council voted last week to zone the properties to C13 farm commercial. Then, to set things back years, councillors sent the property owners’ original applications to the planning advisory committee.

The Greenwich situation is only one of a number in recent years that show where urban development and agriculture meet, but also where farmers are almost held captive by their property; restricted in how they use it and how they draw revenues from it.

As well, we all know farmers have to add value to their products and sell them directly to the public if they’re to compete in the ever more complicated marketplace.

And if the property is not top quality farmland, capable of producing a competitive commodity, what can they do? One possible answer, in their perception, is development.

In Weston, farmer Gerry Fulton has attempted to develop some of his holdings there; first as a golf course, which is working - for someone else. But he has pushed also for relatively large-scale housing in the area given the fact there’s a big market right now for residential land, especially in the countryside.

The easy thing would be to allow farmers to conduct agriculture-related businesses on their properties through a combination of zoning and services. Strategically, development in communities in the western communities of the county -- such as Weston -- could easily accommodate large housing projects.

But then you get into water and sewer services and traffic concerns. And non-farm people already in such neighbourhoods – Greenwich, Weston or wherever – who aren’t necessarily opposed to the necessary rezoning to protect agriculture want simply to protect their own rural lifestyles. Did we say confusing crossroad?

Kings-Hants MP Scott Brison has been looking at the matter and notes the need for a means to preserve valuable land, but also give farmers an opportunity to get fair revenue from it. A form of land holding or banking, perhaps.

He has a point. Stakeholders need to think globally and brainstorm locally because farmers and the important strategic industry they conduct appear to be less and less the focus of beneficial actions by government and their fellow citizens. In that scenario, a fundamental economic base will continue to erode and, in the end, we all lose.