Ontario abandons proposal to sever farmland lots in response to farmer opposition

May 31, 2023

TORONTO - Ontario has backed off a housing proposal that farmers say would have had a “catastrophic” impact on farmland and livestock operations.

Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark proposed a series of regulations along with a bill that would allow for more housing to be built beyond urban boundaries and in rural areas, including allowing up to three new lots on parcels of farmland.

But more than a dozen farming organizations, including the National Farmers Union — Ontario, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the Beef Farmers of Ontario and the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, issued a joint letter urging the government to abandon the proposal.

Those changes would hamper growth of livestock farming, fragment the agricultural land base, and risk inflating farmland prices, shutting out prospective new farmers, they said.

Premier Doug Ford met late last week with farmers, and the government has decided not to proceed with the lot severance proposal, Clark wrote in a letter to the OFA

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids