This blog was published in the newsletter of the National Farmers Union Grey County chapter.
Thorsten Arnold, NFU-Grey Director. From 2009 until 2012, Thorsten co-authored the Drinking Water Source Protection Assessment Report for the Grey Sauble, Saugeen Valley region. He holds a PhD in agricultural economics and watershed management.
Thorsten Arnold is currently working with member farmers whose private wells were contaminated due to a neighbour’s harmful farming activities, particularly the mismanagement of bovine feces on geologically sensitive karst. While most farmers are responsible land stewards and neighbours, it only takes one careless farmer to contaminate the drinking water of a whole neighbourhood. Regions on karst are the most susceptible to contamination, meaning that Grey County is a hot spot for high risk zones.
Once your private well has been contaminated, your living and farming activities become almost impossible, and the value of your land plummets. The current system means waiting until something happens, and then suing your neighbour for compensation. Farmers (and all residents!) need to be protected from this happening in the first place. Please take a moment to read Thorsten’s urgent call for protecting our geologically sensitive region:
Summary:
The article critiques “development agriculture,” a model where corporate entities exploit farmland primarily for eventual real estate profits rather than sustainable farming. This approach leads to speculative land prices, harms traditional family farms, and poses environmental risks, particularly in sensitive areas like the Bruce Grey region with fragile karst aquifers. Highlighting the practices of corporations like RBJ Schlegel, which strip land of natural protections and manage it remotely, the author warns of the potential for water contamination and the ironic situation where environmental damage paves the way for profitable rezoning. The article emphasizes the need for sustainable practices to protect farmland and community health.
Introduction:
During university, I studied agricultural economics, focusing on how to maximize farm profits. However, during my real-life experience as a mixed ecological farmer, these methods proved insufficient. There were too many considerations—crop rotations, pest management, synergies between crops and livestock, adapting to the weather conditions of any given year, and creating climate resilience. Ecological farming requires attention to detail and system thinking, using one enterprise’s waste as an input for another, and a lot of foresight and care —for soil health, for animal health, and for a healthy surrounding ecosystem that keeps pests at bay. Profit maximization works best for simple systems without interdependencies, where staff have narrow job descriptions and minimal need to look left or right. This approach has brought us farmers specialization, simple workflows, and ever-increasing scale.
“Development Agriculture”
Today’s agriculture faces high input costs and excessive land prices. Agricultural economics are changing farming again, with a new corporate model that thrives despite agricultural operational losses, and is unaffected by high land prices. I call this “development agriculture.” In this model, farming is meant to minimize losses or break even, until the land is rezoned and developed into expensive real estate. The best crop rotation is “corn, corn, McMansion”, my mother-in-law always says! In the “development agriculture” model, farming ensures a low agricultural tax rate between land purchase and rezoning. Other operational losses from farming can be deducted from occasional “rezoning jackpots”, when a million-dollar farm property is magically converted into residential land worth twenty millions, with one stamp of some planning department. With such complex stacked enterprises, mortgage interest on land financing is also tax-deductible. In Development Agriculture, “farming at a loss” is a strategy that maximizes overall corporate profits!
The lands preferred by “development agriculture” are those most likely to become lucrative development sites. This would consider rezoning requirements, e.g. close to hamlets, and typically in areas where retirees like to live—near beautiful natural surroundings with access to health infrastructure. Farmland in this model does not need to be suitable for traditional farming; from a “normal” farmer’s perspective it may be entirely unsuitable for cash cropping. For the ‘development farmer’, farming is just an intermediate step to avoid taxes and deduct interest while acquiring more land.
As an NFU director, this business model raises several concerns. First, “development agriculture” can pay any price for farmland because land financing is tax-deductible from significant development profits. This drives land prices into a speculative bubble, far beyond what “real” farming can justify. It normalizes the concept of “farmers without land”—we once called such people “serfs.” It turns “family farming” into a new aristocracy of land ownership. Second, “development agriculture” harms commodity prices. If corporations can farm at a loss, they can sell commodities below production costs. This depresses prices further, and “normal” family farms lose out if they aren’t making millions from rezoning. Third, farmland preservation is crucial for societal stability, but development agriculture depends on rezoning farmland. No society can sustain itself if its agricultural sector relies on rezoning for financial survival. Finally, “development agriculture” separates land from farming—operators have no connection or concern for the place where they “farm.” In marginal lands with vulnerable resources, this leads to problems. Fragile soils, rare species at risk, clean streams and clean groundwater—most marginal areas need attention and care, something incompatible with “development agriculture.”
Figure 1: Areas where Karst aquifers are protected by less than 1 metre of topsoil (purple) or no topsoil (pink). Source: Ontario Bedrock & Drift Thickness mapping
Download map – Soil cover less than one metre
We all love the beauty of the peninsula for its rugged rocks and natural charm. Now, several non-farm investors have found the Bruce Grey region, especially the stretch of relatively cheap farmland along the Niagara Escarpment. Much of this land is barely covered with soil, often less than 12 inches above limestone bedrock (Fig. 1). “Karst” describes aquifers made out of cracks in the limestone, where groundwater forms crevices and caves, and often underground rivers. Once polluted, a karst groundwater aquifer remains polluted for decades.
One of these players is RBJ Schlegel, a family corporation that has acquired many thousands of acres on the Bruce Peninsula between Lion’s Head and Meaford. Locals know Schlegel as the operator of turkey barns further south. They recently purchased farmland along the Escarpment between Meaford and Lion’s Head. This land is first “simplified” for easy management—all trees and treelines removed and uneven ground levelled for convenient cash cropping. Then, Schlegel trucks in turkey manure as part of their Nutrient Management plan. After harvest, I observed unusually deep ruts as the harvesters consistently missed good timing. This damages soils for many years and is ruinous for soil health. But it is also typical for investor farming, where farm operators are managed from a distant office down south.
Neighbour farmers often wonder why Schlegel buys land that they consider unsuitable for cash cropping, and then plant corn and beans anyway. For example, one farm property has almost no topsoil above bedrock—only a foot, sometimes two. This is too little to put in drainage, so it often ponds after every rainfall. Kitty-corner from the church of a hamlet, it is now one big homogeneous area after trees were cleared and rock piles removed. “I guess they need a place to dump their turkey s***? You could do that…” a farmer commented to me.
A look at Schlegel’s website reveals the operation as “development agriculture.” Schlegel’s main products are retirement villages “where our elders can live a life of meaning and purpose and continue to thrive.” Additionally, Schlegel offers health services through its “Home Health” enterprise—Schlegel villages can be situated anywhere, even without appropriate health infrastructure. Of course, Schlegel also has an “urban development” component and a farming venture, “producing poultry products to supply healthy and affordable nutrition.” So, buying marginal farmland at a hamlet is just a perfectly rational thing to do—profitable once the hamlet is connected to city services (water and wastewater).
Figure 2: The drainage ditch next to a field exposes Karst bedrock. After being in pasture for decades, this field is now ploughed every year, and soil remains bare from November to end of June.
Karst and Development Agriculture
One toxic combination worries me a lot: karst aquifers that many houses depend on for their drinking water, almost no topsoil protection, long fallow periods with bare soil, and lots of manure (Fig. 2) —what could possibly go wrong? An area further along the Niagara Escarpment, in Kewaunee County (Wisconsin) had the same worrisome combination. And thousands of drinking water wells were contaminated with manure, pathogens, and nitrates. To this day, despite strict regulations that prohibit many “normal” farming practices on exposed Karst, 60% of homes in Kewaunee still depend on trucking in water after industrial farming devastated their karst aquifers. Real estate prices are at pre-COVID levels, and the population is dropping. Nobody wants to live in such conditions.
And what would happen here if the community’s water was contaminated? This is not far-fetched: Near Wiarton, a contaminated drinking water well has thrown an NFU member family into crisis. Farming that works elsewhere is not suitable for Karst. A question to municipal staff revealed that the community would have to pay for a municipal drinking water system. Then, the community would be “on municipal services,” which is also the main requirement for rezoning this farmland. What irony: the more a “development investor” contaminates a community, the easier it becomes for them to make money.
In the next newsletter, a follow-up article will offer details on extremely vulnerable aquifers, some legalities around private well contamination, and strategies to protect our drinking water. Anyone remember Walkerton? We all should.
If you have a story to share on this topic, please reach out to “notanotherwalkerton@gmail.com
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