Must Be an Effort to Protect Our Agricultural Land

(Aired on September 13, 2010)

Perhaps a new report out this week will finally address one of the critical problems facing us these days - trying to keep prime agricultural land from being developed in the face of increasing pressure from developers. There is a huge glut of land that is totally useful for housing, except that it may require a bit more challenge to develop. So developers want to use the best ranch land and the best arable land to develop because, for the most part, it's flat, and takes less money to put houses and condos on it than land which may be on a hillside or may not be the best to grow crops.

This new report from Auditor General John Doyle says the Agricultural Land Commission doesn't have enough staff or enforcement tools to protect land that is in the reserve. And he adds the agency doesn't have enough information to properly evaluate the results of its decision. The ALR has been under pressure for years from developers who want to continue to spread out development as opposed to trying to going to the European style, keeping green spaces while making smaller houses, and more flats and apartments. If you examine how much prime land has been destroyed around this country's largest cities, you can see how this problem is going to grow.

The ALR was a great idea, and has since been the subject of many attempts to destroy it. There have been times when I have disagreed with the ALR, but the idea of having some control over the rampant destruction of farmland is important to the lifestyle of generations to come. I don't know how many times I have heard how we'll be able to grown more on less space as technology improves, that hasn't happened. Sooner or later, it will come back to bite us, and any preventive action we take now will only benefit us down the road.