MELANCTHON, ONT.—By early Wednesday afternoon, Dale Rutledge’s cellphone battery was nearly dead.

“It hasn’t stopped this all day,” he said with a laugh as it rang, again. “Everybody’s having a good day here.”

That morning, the people in Melancthon Township heard that the plan for a so-called mega quarry, which many have been fighting for years, was dropped.

The Highland Companies abandoned its application to dig a massive limestone quarry in this fertile farming area just north of Orangeville, citing a lack of government and community support. The company, Ontario’s largest potato producer, had the backing on the project of a Boston-based hedge fund worth over $20 billion.

And Rutledge, a central figure in the fight against it, fielded congratulatory calls all day long.

“Common sense finally came into this equation,” he said.

At 2,300 hectares, the quarry would have been the second-largest in North America, obliterating hundreds of acres of some of Ontario’s richest farmland. Underneath that soil is Amabel dolostone, a much-needed type of limestone used in building infrastructure.

The proposal prompted a protest that started among a few local farmers and swelled to envelop southern Ontario, with anti-quarry signs sprinkling lawns from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay. Celebrities and chefs threw their weight behind the movement, and events in Toronto and Melancthon drew tens of thousands of people.

“Everything we did, I think we put a hole in them each time,” said Rutledge, whose farm has been in his family since 1883. His children work on it with him now, supplying the province with potatoes, corn, wheat and canola.

“The land is special,” he said. “It’s my life I’m fighting for.”

A short jaunt up the straight gravel roads that cut through rolling, fresh-plowed fields, Lyle Parsons sold his farm to Highland, thinking it was simply going to be part of the largest potato farm in Ontario. It was later that he learned of the plans for the quarry.

“Perhaps I was a little naïve,” said Parsons. “Knowing what I know now, I never would have sold.”

Community members were “appalled” at what they felt was deceit on the part of the company. Highland, meanwhile, maintained its land purchases were fair and there were discussions about “different land uses.”

While Parsons said he is relieved the quarry project has been dropped, the old farm where he was born and raised is gone.

“For somebody like myself who had my history and heritage ripped down, I shed a few tears at the loss,” he said. “If I had my way, it would be nice to see (the land) go back to the community, the way it was, but I know it never will.”

Local farmer John Herndon said the reaction to the announcement was simply relief.

“It’s a testimony to what can be done if people get together and exercise their democratic rights and obligations,” Herndon said.

By Wednesday evening, locals who had fought the quarry gathered in the nearby Terra Nova Public House to celebrate what many have called a triumph of David over Goliath, of a group of farmers over a company backed by an American hedge fund.

At the head of the table, a local farmer held up a glass to something that was a long time coming: Victory.

By Jessica McDiarmid
Staff Reporter

With files from Jayme Poisson

Posted in "Toronto Star", Nov. 21, 2012

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1291208--in-melancthon-anti-quarry-farmers-celebrate-a-victory-over-corporate-goliath