Food and Water First
Food Water FirstHighland sells land in Melancthon, leases it back
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- Published on Tuesday, 16 July 2013 14:54
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NDACT remains focused on Food and Water First campaign
The North Dufferin Agricultural Community Taskforce (NDACT) is taking the sale of The Highland Companies’ land in Melancthon with a grain of salt.
That skepticism will always remain, even if the new outfit says the land will continue to be farmed in the long-term.
“We’re all realists. We know the rock isn’t going anywhere,” said Carl Cosack, chair of NDACT. “We now know what could be done to it. It’ll be up forever and forever, I’m sure.”
On Tuesday (July 16), Bonnefield Financial, a farmland investment and property management company, announced it acquired more than 6,500 acres of land from The Highland Companies.
Highland’s potato growing operation won’t leave anytime soon, however, as it basically sold the land to Bonnefield only to turn around and lease it back.
The land will continue to be used for farming purposes for the foreseeable future, explained Bonnefield vice-president Lisa Courtney Lloyd.
“We’re all about farmland for farming,” she said. “That’s our reason to be. That’s our strategy. To work with local farmers, to help them work the land they want to work.”
The land purchased by Bonnefield holds a close place in many local residents’ hearts. Before it withdrew its application last November, Highland planned on gaining an aggregate licence to mine 2,316 acres for limestone in Melancthon.
Armed with a bounty of environmental concerns, local residents quickly rallied together in fierce opposition to Highland’s plans.
“It has just become increasingly clear that there just isn’t sufficient support to move forward with the approval process,” John Scherer, principal of Highland, told The Banner last November. “We made a business decision, The Highland Companies did, that the right thing to do is to pull the application.”
When asked whether Bonnefield is willing to even consider aggregate extraction, Lloyd outright rejected the premise. The financial company’s investors are solely interested in backing farmland, she said.
“Our job is to make sure that land is always healthy for farming,” Lloyd said. “We certainly don’t purport to tell farmers how to work the land, but … they must agree to promote the sustainability of the land for the long-term.”
That doesn’t mean the land deal won’t raise a few eyebrows in Melancthon. As Cosack explained, NDACT never knows what any new owner might ultimately want to do with the land.
“We don’t ever know these things about any private enterprise,” he said. “We’re just looking forward to the fact the land remains to be farmed, stays productive and does what it’s supposed to do, which is grow food for people.”
Due to confidentially reasons, Lloyd declined to reveal how much Bonnefield paid for the land. Unable to speak to the details, she confirmed Highland has a land lease in place.
Bonnefield targets what Lloyd termed “progressive farm operators” who need large pieces of agricultural land to work without necessarily being tied to ownership. The financial company buys land and leases it back to farmers on a long-term basis.
“There is that farmers live poor, die rich (saying). They live poor, because often they need land … so traditionally what they’ve done is gone and taken out loans,” Lloyd said. “They are realizing they don’t have to own the land on which they work.”
Bonnefield has secured about 35,000 acres of farmland in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick since its inception in April of 2010. That doesn’t include the recent purchase in Melancthon.
“We’ve been working with investors, investing in land across Canada, and leasing it back on a long-term lease,” Lloyd said. “That’s our model.”
In the meantime, NDACT will continue to focus on lobbying the provincial government to rework the Aggregate Resources Act (ARA) — a provincial review is currently underway. Ensuring agricultural land is adequately protected in Ontario will always be of utmost importance to NDACT, Cosack said.
“We knew it was up for sale,” he said. “Ownership has never really been the crucial part. It has always been with what they do with it.”
By Chris Halliday
Published in the "Orangeville Banner", July 16, 2013