Take Action to protect Farmland (Editorial)

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Published on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 18:53

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The recently launched Food and Water First campaign is calling on the province to do exactly what its name suggests – create a policy protecting two of Ontario’s most valuable resources.

In fact, everyone is invited to take the pledge at the group’s website foodandwaterfirst.com. So far, the campaign has drawn the support of a wide cross section, from municipal governments to businesses to environmentalists.

Published in the "Orangeville Banner", Apr. 17, 2013

By The Editor

However, despite an 11th hour election promise, the provincial Standing Committee on General Government has switched its focus to gridlock and auto insurance instead of finishing its review of the Aggregate Resources Act (ARA) — legislation with the potential power to save vital farmland.

It's unfortunately ironic that the committee's first two priorities literally have a foundation built on aggregate, while the extensive work completed on the ARA review collects dust on a shelf.

This is unacceptable.

When the Highland Companies withdrew its application for a licence to mine 2,316 acres of land for limestone in Melancthon, they cited a lack of “sufficient support to move forward with the approval process.” If a foreign $6 billion hedge fund can bow down to widespread public outcry, why can’t our provincial government step up?

After assuming the role of premier in January, Kathleen Wynne appointed herself as Minister of Agriculture and Food. Wynne says she is focused on the priorities of Ontario’s farmers and the province’s $34 billion agri-food industry.

It’s time to show us that ‘Minister’ is more than just a title.

Municipalities push for bigger royalties

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Published on Friday, 12 April 2013 15:48

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Municipalities say they need bigger royalties from aggregate dug out of the ground and hauled out of their territories because the money they get now is far less than the cost to taxpayers of serving the industry.

Getting the province to hike the current 7.5 cents per tonne royalty paid to municipalities on royalties from aggregate products is one of the chief objectives of the lobby group Top Aggregate Producing Municipalities of Ontario.

"The situation isn't fair because we have no control over anything," says Brant County Mayor Ron Eddy, a member of a group of municipalities lobbying for changes.

"The government gets to issue licences to companies for pits and quarries and it gets to state in its regulations what kinds of trucks are to be used, and what they can carry, and issue the licences. And the government decides the standards of the roads we have to build and maintain to carry those trucks.

"The royalty we get isn't enough even to cover the cost of the roads, and that's only one of a bunch of expenses we have due to the number pits around the county."

The per-tonne royalty is paid by pit and quarry owners to the Ontario Aggregate Resources Corp., which forwards a percentage to the municipalities and other organizations.

The rate has been a bugaboo with aggregate-producing municipalities for some time. It stood at four cents a tonne for years, with 3.5 cents going to the lower level and 0.5 cents to the upper level in the case of two-tiered counties and regions. Because Brant is a single-tier municipality, it got the whole four cents.

The rate was increased in 2007 to 7.5 cents per tonne, with six cents going to the lower tier municipalities and 1.5 cents to the upper level. Brant gets the 7.5 cents.

The county recently got a cheque in the mail for $130,065.95 for 2012. Compared to Brant's roads costs last year, it's a "pittance," says Eddy.

TAPMO has been around for a few years, and was originally called the Top 10 Aggregate Producing Municipalities of Ontario.

The organization's stated purpose is to work in "partnership" with companies and other stakeholders to build a responsible, sustainable industry that also works for host municipalities.

Their complaint is that the lion's share of the province's aggregate is produced in their municipalities and they have to shoulder big infrastructure costs while the products go to other centres.

Its members - mostly rural or cities with rural hinterlands - originally included: the City of Ottawa, the City of Hamilton, Municipality of Clarington, Town of Milton, City of Kawartha Lakes, North Dumfries Township, Uxbridge Township, Zorra Township, Caledon and Puslinch Township.

But more municipalities - including Brant -- joined over the past year with the sudden appearance of some controversial applications for licences - particularly a later withdrawn one from The Highland Companies to open a mega-quarry in Melancthon Township in Dufferin County.

It would have served primarily the Greater Toronto Area market to the south but would have seriously affected several rural and small-town municipalities.

Brant's interest in joining TAPMO was piqued partly by an announcement that Dufferin Aggregates intends to go ahead with a 39-year-old licence to open a pit on Watts Pond Road north of Paris.

If it goes ahead, the new pit would force the county to spend millions upgrading roads along designated routes that would take an estimated 150 trucks making 300 trips per day.

Dufferin has committed to paying the cost of upgrading Watts Pond Road from the pit entrance roadway to Pinehurst Road. The county is on the hook for the rest.

The county is still negotiating with Dufferin on the details and costs of the routes. Meanwhile, council has earmarked $2 million in the roads capital budget to get ready.

"Local roads don't have the base needed to support the heavy trucks," said Eddy.

"Our taxpayers will have to pay a huge cost."

By Michael-Allan Marion

Published in the Brantford Expositor, Apr. 11, 2013

ARA Review Update

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Published on Wednesday, 10 April 2013 17:48

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"Frustration, although quite painful at times, is a very positive and essential part of success." 

  We hope this is true. Frustration has certainly been our experience in dealing with the Standing Committee on General Government and its review of the Aggregate Resources Act. For our new followers, some background: The provincial government ordered a review of the outdated ARA in the fall of 2011. The fight to stop the Highland mega quarry highlighted the many flaws in the legislation and we believed the ARA should be revised. Agricultural groups, municipalities and environmental organizations welcomed the opportunity to propose changes to the ARA. 

 The task was handed to the Standing Committee a year ago. The all-party panel held public hearings in four communities, starting in Toronto and Orangeville. Carl Cosack, Dave Vander Zaag, Christina Wigle, Donna Baylis, Ron Lehman as well as the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and Ontario Farmland Trust gave excellent presentations about the need to protect prime farmland and source water regions. The hearing rooms were packed. The media covered the proceedings. Taxpayers picked up the tab for the travelling hearings.

 However, we've learned the Committee is holding hearings into traffic congestion this week, followed by hearings into auto insurance next week. The review of the ARA is in limbo, just as it was during prorogation. The ARA review has been referred to a sub-committee which, so far, has provided no direction on whether the job will be completed and a final report issued.  There is the possibility the review will be dropped, along with all of the hard work agricultural stakeholders contributed to the proceedings. Once the auto insurance hearings are over next week, the Committee will be pondering its next move. Let's help the MPPs with that decision. 

If you haven't e-mailed the Committee members yet, please do. If you e-mailed them last week, e-mail them again and demand that they finish the ARA review.

Contact info:

http://www.ontla.on.ca/web/committee-proceedings/committees_detail_members.do?locale=en&detailPage=members&ID=145

Meanwhile, Donna Baylis has written an op-ed about her thoughts on the ARA review. Congrats, Donna B! She was published in a Cornwall newspaper.

http://cornwallfreenews.com/2013/04/lte-donna-baylis-call-to-queens-park-continue-with-the-aggregate-resources-act-review/ 

The Battle Shifts Gear

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Published on Tuesday, 09 April 2013 01:45

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With the mega quarry shelved, opponents say they’ll keep fighting until they get permanent protection for farmland in Ontario.

Before the fight to stop the mega quarry attracted national attention, it began in local farm kitchens such as the Armstrongs’. Now snug in his mother’s arms at the table with three generations of his family, baby Derek attended his first anti-quarry rally when he was just three weeks old. He is the latest addition to a family that first tilled soil in the area in 1853, and he represents the hope for the future as his grandfather Ralph Armstrong and other activists turn their attention beyond Melancthon to secure permanent protection for prime farmland and source water for Derek and generations to follow.

On a cold February evening in Honeywood, at the Taters Not Craters party held to celebrate the demise of the mega quarry, a cheer erupts when three-week-old Derek Martin is held aloft like a newborn king. As the grandson of Redickville farmers Ralph and Mary Lynne Armstrong, tiny Derek represents the seventh generation of the family who took up farming here in 1853.

The Armstrongs were among the original few farmers bordering the proposed Melancthon mega quarry who refused to sell to The Highland Companies and formed the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce (NDACT) to oppose it, trading lottery-sized buyouts for a new life of activism. So it’s fitting that the family’s newest member should be here, to celebrate the protection of his home turf and water.

Clockwise from left: Kate Martin with Derek (at six weeks), Steve Martin, Mike Watson, Peter Watson (5), Nicholas Watson (1o), Ralph Armstrong, Mary Lynne Armstrong, Anna Armstrong, Margaret Armstrong, Sarah Watson. Photo by Pete Paterson.

On November 21 The Highland Companies, with little explanation or fanfare, withdrew its application to build a 2,316-acre quarry in Melancthon and cancelled its ambitions to rebuild the railway between Orangeville and Owen Sound, noting there was insufficient community and government support to continue. A significant understatement, considering that just a month earlier the Soupstock anti-quarry protest at a public park in Toronto had drawn a crowd 40,000 strong.

Highland’s final tweet, October 19, was “We’re listening, Soupstock attendees.” But nobody expected the announcement that the quarry was dead, or the news that John Lowndes, the engineer from Alton who had launched the scheme, was finished with the company.

The company hastily unplugged its PR machine, pulling down its Melancthon Quarry website and replacing HighlandCompanies.ca with a blank page. Calls to the company’s media hotline went unanswered. And Lindsay Broadhead, vice-president of Hill+Knowlton Strategies in Toronto, said her PR firm is “not really” working with Highland anymore, although she insists the company would have nothing more to say: “Everything that was stated at that time holds. At the end of the day they’re going to continue farming.”

With that, the dragon retreated – without a peep to allay the many fears that it will re-emerge with new plans to make money from wind, water, rock or rail.

“We have to remain vigilant because the laws haven’t changed, the same people own the property, and the limestone is still there. We’re still at risk,” says local resident and NDACT volunteer Norm Wolfson. Many believe that if Highland – or any company it sells to – were to apply for a smaller quarry, it would likely win approval under current legislation.

Cattle rancher and agri-tourism entrepreneur Carl Cosack. Photo Jason Van Bruggen

So NDACT’s party at the Honeywood arena on February 16 was half celebration for what NDACT’s chair Carl Cosack calls the completion of job one. But it was at least as much a pep rally for act two: seeking permanent changes to two key documents governing aggregate development in Ontario – the Aggregate Resources Act (ARA) and the Provincial Policy Statement (PPS) – so class 1 to 3 farmland and source water areas province-wide are off limits to quarrying forever.

“We want to change the policy regime in Ontario so that no other community ever faces the nightmare that Melancthon faced,” says Faisal Moola, the Ontario director of the David Suzuki Foundation.

NDACT has enough money to carry on without further fundraising. “So we’re going to keep the pedal to the metal and keep pushing,” says Cosack. He believes they can finish the job in one, maybe two years.

NDACT, along with the David Suzuki Foundation and others in the broad alliance of environmental, First Nations, and food and farming groups that came together under the banner “No Mega Quarry” have remobilized around the slogan “Food and Water First.” Expect to see the slogan on more lawn signs, as well as possible reincarnations of the massive autumn Foodstock and Soupstock happenings.

NDACT members insists it’s a small thing to ask: a simple legislative change that places prime farmland off limits to aggregate development. But the request has massive implications: sweeping changes not only to aggregate legislation and current industry practices, but also to the underlying land use policies that drive aggregate demand – our addiction to urban sprawl.

Where do we get a billion tonnes?

The Melancthon quarry would have provided a billion tonnes of limestone – enough in a single quarry to fuel the GTA’s building boom for another decade and a half.

“Before Melancthon we already had a supply crunch,” says Moreen Miller, the aggregate’s industry spokesperson as CEO of the Ontario Stone, Sand and Gravel Association (OSSGA). She points out that the government’s 2010 State of the Aggregate Resource in Ontario Study (SAROS) predicted supply shortages in the GTA within a decade. “We’re five years into that 10-year period now. In that five years the provincial government and the Ontario Municipal Board have turned down licences for 140 million tonnes of high-quality stone supply. There is definitely a supply shortage coming. There’s no question.”

Environmentalists cite contradictory evidence that there is enough aggregate reserve in licensed pits, especially if demand is trimmed through conservation and recycling. The true state of the supply is unclear, in large part because the PPS works against any clarity on the issue by directing aggregate development to proceed with no consideration of need or “any type of supply/demand analysis.”

What is certain about aggregate supply, says Ric Holt of the province-wide group Gravel Watch, is that “right now, we’re using it at such a phenomenal rate that it won’t keep up indefinitely. The cost of gravel is somewhere around eight dollars a tonne, so if I’m getting some for my driveway, I might as well get 10 tonnes because I have to pay for the truck. That’s the way construction has been going in Ontario.”

The Toronto skyline bristles with construction cranes, the suburbs march on.

The SAROS report recommended mega quarries as the supply solution and Melancthon was supposed to be the aggregate pot of gold. Its demise puts pressure back on communities like pit-riddled Caledon, the GTA’s old friend-with-aggregate-benefits. There, Blueland Farms is expected to reapply any day to mine below the water table at the old McCormick Farm property on Heart Lake Road.

REDC (People for Responsible Escarpment Development Caledon) took a cynical view of the Melancthon win, writing on their website:

“What’s the lesson here? Massive large-scale, single-site development gets massive public pushback. But the tried and true methods of large-scale aggregate mining continue to work: Start with a licence to mine a few hundred acres. Add to the operations incrementally through amendments to existing licences. And it’s under the public radar. The result is the same – the creation of colossal sites that eventually exceed the acreage of a proposed Highland Farms development and keep going.”

REDC notes that Caledon’s 3,800 acres of licensed quarry lands already surpass Melancthon’s proposed 2,316. Add proposed pits and unlicensed lands already owned by gravel interests in Caledon and the number jumps to 4,600. A satellite photo shows a lunar garland of bare grey pits and man-made lakes in the heart of the Greenbelt, what a 2007 study by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council found to be “the largest series of gravel pits in North America.”

It’s a classic case of the frog in the pot – we accept incremental change. Had all 3,800 acres come forward in a single application, as in Melancthon, would it ever have been approved? REDC is trying to change the dialogue for future projects. “Size and cumulative impact need to be addressed,” writes REDC president Christine Shain.

Meanwhile, in January Arbour Farms reapplied for its pit in Mulmur on Airport Road near County Road 21. Arbour’s company spokesperson called their 103-acre proposal “the fly on the elephant’s backside” compared to the mega quarry. By the time you read this, the ARA-mandated 45-day window for public comment on the Arbour Plan will have closed.

The primary objections to both Arbour Farms and the Heart Lake Road pit are not about farming at all, but the impact of gravel trucks on local roads. Ironically, if all the local options are rejected, gravel will be travelling farther to feed the GTA’s 60-million-tonne-a-year appetite for aggregate.

“The further-from-market options are increasingly troublesome,” says OSSGA’s Miller. “We can’t even get our communities to work every day, let alone put more aggregate trucks on the road. Are we willing as communities to balance that additional load in terms of greenhouse gases and traffic?”

Is agricultural land renewable?

The supply crunch, the distance from market – these are among the reasons that industry fiercely opposes calls to ban aggregate mining on prime farmland.

“I don’t think it’s a realistic request,” says Miller. “We already are excluded from most land uses. Class 1 to 3 farmland – it’s virtually all we have left – and we’re asking that land to do a lot, feed a lot of people, or produce aggregate, or produce wind or allow people to live on it. Going through lists of land uses and saying yes, no, maybe. I don’t see that as a long-term sort of comprehensive, balanced approach. The folks from NDACT have said there’s lots of material available elsewhere. We’d like to know where that is.”

Miller would prefer to see the aggregate industry continue to be recognized – as it is in the legislation today – as an “interim land use,” one that can dig up farmland under the assumption that it will one day put it back.

“From the perspective of our industry, agricultural land is renewable,” says Miller. “The people in Melancthon didn’t get a good taste for that.” It’s hard to believe The Highland Companies ever could have made good on its preposterous plan to farm Melancthon’s aquatic depths (which would have required round-the-clock pumping – forever), and one gets the sense that the industry at large wants the company’s bravado claim forgotten.

Miller says in Wellington County there are quarry sites where farmland has been rehabilitated and even improved – from class 5 to class 3, for example – over a period of not decades, but just two or three years.

Nevertheless, the aggregate industry has a poor track record in Ontario. From 1995 to 2005, it only rehabilitated one acre for every 2.3 it dug up. Still, it wants another chance with the land that remains – prime farmland included.

Farmland in crisis

Food and Water First activists say the farmland that’s left is too precious to risk on more promises. They are working to get the word out that Ontario’s $33 billion agri-food sector is the province’s biggest economic driver – greater than the auto sector. They report the sector employs 250,000 and is growing at 10 to 20 per cent, but depends on a tiny and rapidly shrinking land base.

Only 5 per cent of Canada’s land is suitable for agriculture and only 0.5 per cent is class 1 farmland. In the three decades from 1971 to 2001, Canada paved over prime farmland at a rate of one Melancthon mega quarry every two weeks. And it continues. A David Suzuki Foundation study found that development in the “whitebelt” (undesignated land) around the Golden Horseshoe is on track to consume natural lands twice the size of Mississauga in the next 30 years.

All that development will require aggregate. And until we quell our crushing appetite for stone, implementing the kind of long-term changes that render another mega quarry unnecessary, the issue of aggregate supply will pop up again and again.

“Today, most of Canada’s towns and cities are at a crossroads,” wrote David Suzuki in a late-February op-ed piece that broadcast the Food and Water First message nationwide. “Our political leaders and citizens must seize this opportunity to embark on a visionary path to grow our communities smarter and protect Canada’s near-urban nature and farmland.”

People power

If such wholesale change to land use in Ontario seems unlikely, it’s worth remembering where the No Mega Quarry movement stood just a few years ago.

The giant pit in Melancthon looked like a fait accompli. Legislation lined up in its favour. The province needed the aggregate. The land fell outside such barriers to development as the Niagara Escarpment, Greenbelt and Oak Ridges Moraine. The rock could even be shipped out by eco-friendly rail. Unlike hotly contested Caledon to the south, there was a scant population in Melancthon to oppose it – and who else had even heard of the place? One can imagine John Lowndes rubbing his palms over a PowerPoint presentation in a Boston boardroom.

Then along came YouTube and Twitter and the Arab Spring – social media activism’s coming out party. Foodstock, on a Sunday afternoon in October 2011, was the farm-field equivalent of inviting the entire planet to a block party on Facebook, physically putting enough voting bodies into a potato patch to get it on the political map. The organizers are convinced something has shifted in the public consciousness, that a policy window has opened – a golden opportunity to reform legislation that protects the sources of local food and clean water.

Dave Vander Zaag on his Melancthon potato farm. Photo Jason Van Bruggen.

“Timing is just as perfect at it’s going to get,” says Cosack. Until prorogation last fall, the Legislature was in the midst of reviewing the ARA, and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing is currently leading a review of the PPS. (The public comment period has officially ended, but the ministry says further comments emailed to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. will still be considered.) Our new premier Kathleen Wynne is also the minister of agriculture. Before winning the position, she met personally with Food and Water First activists.

At the Taters Not Craters party, sometime after the appearance of baby Derek, Guelph agriculture professor Rene Van Acker summed up this political moment in a speech: “There is a wave building of a food culture in this country that links urban people to the farm, and this is an example of how that’s going to drive legislation.”

Dave Vander Zaag, the potato farmer who hosted Foodstock’s 28,000 visitors, saw this phenomenon for himself in the form of a long thread of traffic leading out of the city right to his doorstep.

“It was like something out of the movies – cars as far as you could see and people just streaming across the field coming in. I had a friend who said it brought tears to her eyes. ‘People finally get it,’ she said. ‘People finally realize how important this is.’”

By Tim Shuff

Published in In the Hills Spring Edition, March 31, 2013

Food & Water First - The Legacy of the Mega Quarry Fight

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Published on Monday, 08 April 2013 02:34

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Published in Local Magazine, Green 2013 Edition

Click here to view online edition.

Our piece de resistance for this year’s Green issue is Donna Tranquada’s article about Food & Water First. First of all, we were thrilled to have a talented journalist like Donna writing for Local and to have her words accompanied by the brilliant photographs taken by local photographer Natalia Shields created one of the prettier layouts we’ve run. As important as the talent is the movement itself. Food & Water First is the follow up campaign to the Stop the Mega Quarry movement that led to Soupstock in the Fall and a win on the part of the movement. While the mega quarry application was withdrawn however, everyone who got a glimpse of what could be lost is keen to ensure that this significant and arguably sacred land is saved for the long-term. Enter Food & Water First. Read the article for all the details and then get your lawn sign at the Grinder cafe and probably other locations TBD. We’ll try to keep you in the loop in our May issue.

Click here to read Donna's article with photos. (1008.8 KB)

Food & Water First

The Legacy of the Mega Quarry Fight

STORY: Donna Tranquada – a volunteer in the movement to stop the mega quarry.

PHOTOS: Natalia Shields

Ralph and Mary Lynne Armstrong stood on a small hill at Woodbine Park last October and were amazed by what they saw. On that brilliant Sunday afternoon, tens of thousands of people carrying bowls and spoons cheerfully lined-up for soup as musicians played on the outdoor stage. The throngs had gathered at the park for Soupstock, a culinary protest against a proposed mega quarry on prime farmland 90 minutes northwest of Toronto. “Seeing all those people, with the Toronto skyline behind them, was overwhelming,” says Ralph Armstrong.

Earlier that morning, before boarding a bus for the city, Ralph and his wife, Mary Lynne, rose at 5:30 to carry out chores on their farm in Melancthon Township, Dufferin County. Their land has been in the Armstrong family since the 1850s and they helped lead the campaign to prevent the proposed Highland mega quarry from destroying the rare farmland adjacent to their property. “My heart was so thankful that people understood the mega quarry had to be stopped,” says Mary Lynne Armstrong. “The sight of that huge crowd brought tears to my eyes.”

For the Armstrongs and other farmers who made the trip to Toronto that day, Soupstock was a testament to the newly-formed bond between urban residents and the farming communities that border the Greater Toronto Area. The fight to stop the mega quarry launched an unexpected grassroots movement that grew in the vast fields of Melancthon and spread quickly to downtown neighbourhoods. City residents who had only seen potatoes and other veggies in the supermarket joined forces with 5th-generation farmers for a common cause.

It was an unlikely alliance that was forged not long after the Highland Companies, a numbered company backed by the $25-billion Baupost Group hedge fund in Boston, started buying potato farms in Melancthon in 2006. Highland purchased 3,240 hectares (8,000-acres) of prime agricultural soil known as Honeywood loam, and originally stated it wanted to become the largest potato producer in Ontario. But in March 2011, Highland filed an application with the province to excavate the largest quarry in Canada on the best farmland in Ontario and at the headwaters of five river systems. It was to sprawl 930 hectares (2,300-acres) and plunge 61-metres (200–feet) below the water table. Word spread about the potential impact of the limestone quarry on prime agricultural soil, water and the environment. In the spring of 2011, the $10 red-and-white Stop the Mega Quarry lawn signs that were popular throughout the countryside soon sprouted in Toronto front yards.

Residents in the Beach raised concerns about the mega quarry with their MP Matthew Kellway (Beaches-East York.) He travelled to Melancthon in the winter of 2012 and toured the area with rancher Carl Cosack, the chair of the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce (NDACT), the citizens’ group fighting the mega quarry. “The loss of water resources and local food sources struck me as a tragedy,” recalls Kellway.

Kellway then organized a ‘field trip’ for constituents and fellow New Democrat MPs Craig Scott, Peggy Nash and NDP MPP Jonah Schein last summer. About 50 people spent the day aboard a yellow school bus exploring Melancthon’s fields, forests and rivers. The farmland sits on a 6,070-hectare (15,000-acre) plateau at the highest point of land in Southern Ontario known as the Hills of Headwaters. The region provides an estimated 50 percent of the potatoes consumed in the GTA. “Part of the magic is the sheer productive capacity of the land.” says Kellway, who filled his water bottle at a fresh spring gushing from a hillside. “Everywhere things were growing and water was running.”

The visit also gave city residents an opportunity to walk the potato and vegetable fields, and chat with local farmers, including the Armstrongs. “We discovered the mega quarry was our fight, too,” says Kellway. “I hope they discovered that in us, their city cousins, they have friends.”

A few months later, the Beach community hosted Soupstock bringing country and city residents together for the second year in a row. Soupstock was the sequel to Foodstock, which was organized by the Chefs’ Congress of Canada along with NDACT, and held in the fall of 2011 on a large potato farm in Melancthon. An estimated 28,000 people – ten times the population of the township – gathered in the muddy fields and forest on the property, dining on local food prepared by 100 chefs while musicians Jim Cuddy, Ron Sexsmith, Sarah Harmer and others performed on a small stage. Then, last October, the Chefs’ Congress partnered with the David Suzuki Foundation to bring Soupstock to Toronto. “We wanted to have an event that would educate and connect urban dwellers to important issues like maintaining local food security in an engaging way,” says Dr. Faisal Moola of the David Suzuki Foundation. An estimated 40,000 people enjoyed 200 kinds of soup served by 200 chefs in the autumn sunshine. The fight to stop the mega quarry was now heating up in Canada’s largest city.

Exactly one month after Soupstock, on November 21st, 2012, the Highland Companies suddenly announced it was withdrawing its mega quarry application, saying it “does not have significant support from the community and the government.” Highland announced it would focus on growing potatoes, just as it pledged seven years ago. But is the company truly “Committed to farming for the future” as its Melancthon billboard states or will it re-apply for a quarry one day? Opponents to the mega quarry remain suspicious and are pressing ahead with an ambitious plan.

From the beginning, those fighting Highland believed stopping the project was just one goal in a wider campaign to change provincial land-use policies. In September 2011, the grassroots movement convinced the Liberal government to order a review of the Aggregate Resources Act, arguing the legislation was flawed and outdated. Prime farmland (Classes 1, 2 & 3) is not exempt from aggregate operations, so under the ARA, aggregate trumps agriculture. Rock takes precedent over food.

Last spring, the Standing Committee on General Government held hearings into the ARA. Representatives from agricultural groups argued that the rarest agricultural soil in the country and vital water resources should be protected. Similar suggestions were made in the review of the Provincial Policy Statement that guides governments on land-use planning. The message to Queen’s Park was clear: Food and Water First.

Canada is the second-largest country in the world yet a mere .5 percent of our land mass is comprised of Class 1 farmland, the best soil for food production. More than half of Canada’s Class 1 farmland is in southern Ontario. (96 percent of the farmland Highland wanted to destroy for the mega quarry is Class 1 soil.) According to the Ontario Farmland Trust, the province’s farmland is the single most important agricultural resource in the country. Ontario’s agri-food sector is the largest in Canada, pouring $33-billion a year into the provincial economy and employing nearly 700-thousand people. Yet, according to the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, we are losing farmland at an annual rate of 51,000 hectares (127,000 acres) to non-farm development such as urban sprawl and aggregate operations.

As for water, Ontario has one-quarter of a million lakes, rivers and streams; fresh groundwater runs beneath its surface. Yet many quarries are allowed to excavate below the water table and often turn into lakes once the aggregate is extracted. The proposed Highland mega quarry would have required the pumping of 600-million-litres of groundwater a day in perpetuity in order to keep the mine from flooding. If the application had been approved, this staggering amount of water flowing into five river systems would have been at risk forever.

A Food and Water First policy for Ontario would ensure the best agricultural soils and water resources would take priority in all land-use planning. It’s a move Kellway supports. “With 100,00 new people coming to Toronto every year, it only takes a moment’s hesitation to lose what could provide us with sustenance forever,” he warns. “Such a policy would ensure our governments keep their focus on sustainable urban development and the protection of vital sources of our survival.”

During the month of May, farmers and city residents will participate in a unique “spring planting.” Food and Water First lawn signs will pop up in farmers’ fields and Toronto front yards as rural and urban residents push for land-use policy changes. “There are people in the world who don’t have food and water,” says Mary Lynne Armstrong. “We in Ontario and Canada must stop destroying our own foodland and water resources.”