Bigger is Better is a Dead End Street

[cakadu]

The following message appeared in the Canadian Farm Business Management Commenataries this morning. I'd be curious to get your reaction to the comment.

The historic pattern of doubling production from our farms
every 20 years cannot hold.

Each year, 40,000 new residents move into rural and small-town Ontario.
Agriculture's freedom to adopt new technology, to expand, to capture
economies of scale is now constrained by the growing urban shadows.
Your freedom ends where my toes begin!

Minimum Distance Separation formulas have kept a semblance of order in
this scattered approach to rural development and in many communities
it's still possible to expand if the family farm is growing from 120 sows to
250 or from 80 cows to 140. But the opportunities for yet bigger are
fading fast.

Our barns have doubled in size and could do so again, given today's
technology. All the impacts from these expanded production facilities
cannot be managed by reasonable distance rules.

Ontario municipalities are adopting new tools to protect the interests of
production agriculture's neighbours.

* One municipality has capped barns at 600 livestock units.

* Another has restricted density of livestock to 1.5 units per acre.

* A dozen municipalities have enacted interim control bylaws stopping all
expansion beyond 50 livestock units until a permanent bylaw will manage
production livestock operations.

* Fifty plus municipalities have adopted Nutrient Management Planning
bylaws that require a detailed, public and third party reviewed nutrient
management plan with any building permit application for a large livestock
facility.

Ontario agriculture must turn away from the big technology, megabarn
model of U.S. livestock production. It is the only way to maintain a
working relationship with our increasing number of non-production
neighbours.

Of course, it won't be easy. If we do not adopt the latest, biggest
technology, how will we maintain our competitiveness in the North
American marketplace?

That is the challenge that a new vision for rural development must define
in this new millennium. The present pattern won't hold.

For CBC commentary, I'm Elbert van Donkersgoed with the
Christian Farmers Federation in Guelph, Ontario.

[nakodo]

The interaction of the rural resident and rural-urban interface with the farm and farmer is going to be a major issue to those in areas attractive to new residents.

Rural development calls for new people to move to our towns, more kids to keep our schools open, more patients and funds to keep doctors and hospital beds but each new resident lives in town or on an acreage and does not like the smell of the farm, the water runoff in the spring, the spray planes, the sounds.

How do we reconcile this conflict, to put it bluntly there are more residents than farmers, votes count, even tax base arguements and economic production arguements are often not in our farm units favour. The employee of a gas company may pay more in taxes and his company generate more jobs than the farms in the region.

Do we put the large farms where we can (depopulated Saskatchewan?) and build acreage burbs like Millerville near Calgary. Then we find out even the Saskatchewan farms that are your neighbors dont want the hog barns down the road, hutterites (the most efficient larger is better farmers) are blocked from expansion and other "rural issues" emerge, Linda your question over what will we do may be resolved by the population and economic pressures if we do not get our act together soon.