Farmland doesn’t just disappear if a farmer retires, or if a non-farming family buys land.
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
NORFOLK COUNTY — Ontario loses an alarming 319 acres of farmland to development each day, or so says the accepted orthodox view pushed for years in ag policy circles. But a Norfolk County farmer who has done a deep dive on the Statistics Canada numbers says it just ain’t so.
The oft-repeated claim is based on the difference in total Ontario farmland acres counted by StatCan in 2016 (12.3 million acres) and in 2021 (11.8 million acres), a 4.7 % decrease of more than 582,000 acres for an average of 319 acres lost daily. But Frank Schonberger, who cash crops south of Tillsonburg, says the alleged decline is highly exaggerated because a flawed comparison of the 2016 and 2021 agricultural census years fails to account for a significant reporting change that only came into effect in 2021. And that’s just for starters.
In 2021, according to Schonberger, StatCan changed its “farm” definition to only include operations reporting farm income to the Canada Revenue Agency. The result, he says, is that big farmland investment outfits like Bonnefield — who make money as landlords renting to farmers, without being farmers themselves — became exempt from reporting their farm acres. While those corporations’ tenant farmers still have to report their rented acres, that’s very different from a traditional owner operator who is required to report the “fenceline to fenceline” acreage of their entire farm holdings, including wetlands, forests and poorer land and pastures. A renter, Schonberger said, is more likely to be renting cropland exclusively and would report only those acres to StatCan. Lost in the shuffle are those remaining parts of the farm that a corporate investor doesn’t have to report as owner.
In effect, a farm’s less productive and fallow areas, previously captured by the 2016 census, “magically vanished” from the 2021 census if an investment outfit acquired the property and leased out only the tillable fields. The same effect occurs when a farmer retires and rents out his land, he said. Or when a farm is bought by a non-farming resident.
All of this points to farmland losses on paper, challenging the “false narrative” of hundreds of acres of productive farmland being paved over every day in Ontario. Schonberger, a third-generation farmer and 1982 Ridgetown College of Agricultural Technology graduate, spent two months and about 200 hours researching the issue.
Even when farmland is actually taken out of production, that often doesn’t mean it’s paved over, according to Schonberger, who pointed to farms being turned into wildlife preserves and parks by local watershed authorities and environmental outfits like the Ontario Farmland Trust and the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC). In his own county of Norfolk alone, the NCC has assumed 9,000 farmland acres over the last 30 years, compared to only 1,500 to 2,000 acres used for housing development in the same timeframe.
“It’s very complicated, and that’s why they can’t just take that (claim of) 319 acres a day and say it’s all going to development. Because it isn’t,” he said.
He also looked at farmland acres recorded by Ontario’s Municipal Property Assessment Corporation for municipal tax purposes. By MPAC’s measure, Ontario had almost 14.2 million farmland acres in 2021, about 2.4 million more than StatCan counted that same year. Like StatCan, the MPAC numbers show a similar 4.7 % decline from 2016, but Schonberger argues that if 319 acres were truly being paved over every day, the MPAC total should not be millions of acres higher than the StatCan total. The gap only proves a lot of farmland remains green. It just isn’t commercially active in the eyes of the feds anymore.
Norfolk County illustrates the discrepancy. MPAC counted 25,000 more acres of farmland in the county than StatCan did in 2021, a gap that increased by 5,000 acres over 2016.
He also pointed to a couple of smoking guns further debunking the Ontario claim:
StatCan’s 2021 census numbers show the Prairie provinces losing 600 % more farmland than Ontario, despite lower population growth and less urban pressure in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Schonberger concluded that if the reported 1,915 acres lost per day on the prairies aren’t being paved over, then 319 acres aren’t being paved over daily in Ontario, either. The prairie figures appear to confirm that StatCan, because of the change in reporting rules, has become blind to idled farmland held by large corporate and institutional investors, who are more of a factor out west.
A University of Guelph study by Dr. Wayne Caldwell found that, between 2000 and 2017, development consumed only 12 acres of farmland per day in the province’s Greater Golden Horseshoe Region outside Toronto, one of the most populous areas of the province. Had the study looked at the entire province, the number would have been somewhat higher. “It might be 20 acres,” Schonberger speculated. “Even if it was 100 acres per day, that’s not 319.”
Schonberger also observed that ‘new’ Ontario farmland is being brought online through land-clearing, including in northern Ontario’s clay belt.
Schonberger decided to tackle the repeated 319-acre claim because it continues to “misrepresent” what’s happening on the ground, he said. In 2023, the figure was brought up repeatedly by farm groups who persuaded the province to abandon plans for more farm-lot severances.
Schonberger, who conceded working on a proposal to sever three lots at his place, was more recently spurred into action with the release of Green Party leader Mike Schreiner’s private member’s Bill 21 at the Ontario Legislature. Co-sponsored by independent MPP Bobbi Ann Brady, the bill aims to protect farmland from urban sprawl, premised on the same old “blind faith” claim of 319 acres being lost each day. Schonberger said that rural communities should strive for diversified economies, which includes some growth, and not be locked into the proposed law’s “food belt” vision for agriculture. “I believe a controlled amount of growth in rural Ontario is paramount for our rural communities to remain viable,” he said in a recent letter to his local council.
