Milton blog

Milton’s making a list … The Santa Claus parade was taking too long, so organizers barred politicians from marching.

The good townsfolk of Milton may have bitten off more than they can chew when it comes to tomorrow’s Santa Claus parade.

Town organizers decided this year to eliminate three levels of politicians from the beloved event which routinely draws as many as 20,000 people to the streets of Milton.

“The committee decided that for this year’s parade the only politician we’d have would be Mayor Gordon Krantz from Milton,” explained Mike Ricker, secretary treasurer of the parade committee which is made up of volunteers.

The reason wasn’t political, Ricker insists, but rather one of expediency. The parade was simply taking too long so the committee decided to cut it down, eliminating some of the politicians as well as limiting the number of entries to 70.

Little did the organizers know that their decision would prompt the ire of their federal Liberal MP, Garth Turner, who is threatening to disobey the committee and walk in the parade anyway.

“His idea is he’s the federal MP for this area and he’s going to be in the parade,” said Ricker. “I understand he plans to walk with his dog in the parade.”

Turner was too busy to comment yesterday about being chopped from the parade and of his plans to crash it anyway. His staff said he was in back-to-back meetings all day.

But Milton residents remain steadfast in their decision and are prepared for any contingency should Turner show up, with or without his dog.

“We have a plan, but I would rather not say what we’ve prepared,” Ricker said.

Still the whole fracas has left Ricker scratching his head. “We were looking at the parade in general and asking what do people come out to see – the parade, the floats, the band and Santa Claus.”

It was clear to them residents certainly weren’t coming to see the politicians, said Ricker.

The only reason Milton’s mayor is still in the parade is because the town gave organizers $10,000 to cover some safety concerns and because the parade uses the town’s facilities and streets.

And while provincial MPP Ted Chudleigh is disappointed he won’t be participating in tomorrow’s parade, he understands the organizers’ motives.

“I have been in the parade for 12 or 13 years,” said Chudleigh. “It’s a great time to walk down Main St. and wave and say Merry Christmas and it’s fun. But it’s their parade.”

His sentiments are shared by Gary Carr, Halton Region chair.

“I’m in quite a few parades,” said Carr. “I enjoy it. It kicks off the Christmas season. I like to support them when I can but I also respect the fact it’s their decision. In this case they decided they didn’t want anyone in and I respect their decision. I won’t be doing what Garth Turner is doing.”

Ricker and his organizing committee hope Turner won’t become the Grinch that stole Milton’s Christmas and turn the Santa Claus parade into a media circus. “We’re hoping everything will be fine and we’re going to do our best. … We want the parade to come off and do the best job we can for the kids – both big and little – in Milton.”

By Debra Black of the Toronto Star

When even a relatively successful operator has had it, you know Ontario agriculture is in big trouble

There’s something new growing in Bert Andrews’ field, in front of the patch of long-wilted rhubarb and the wispy, overgrown asparagus.

“For Sale/Lease, By Owner” reads the giant white sign, “Growing Farm Business, Winery and Farm Property. ”

After 27 seasons, Andrews’ Scenic Acre, on the outskirts of Milton, is going the way most farms in the area have gone – out of business.

Not because it hasn’t been profitable – this past season has been Andrews’ best to date. But he had open-heart surgery last year, and none of his children wants to take over the operation.

“I’m 64 years old – I want my Sundays off,” Andrews says on a warm fall afternoon, looking out at his fields and the russet-coloured Niagara Escarpment in the distance. The heads of his towering Russian sunflowers have long turned black and now curl downward. The last of his pumpkins have been sold. And the haystack, which visiting schoolchildren jumped on until last week, will soon be dismantled – perhaps for the last time.

It’s the end of an era, not just for Andrews, but also for agriculture in the Toronto area.This is the best farmland in the country. But we’re quickly paving it over. The Greater Toronto Area – including Durham, Halton, Peel and York regions – lost 16 per cent of its farms between 1996 and 2001. Since then, another five per cent have disappeared.

There’s a sign nailed beside the door of Andrews’ barn that reads: “Farmers Feed Cities.” It should say: “Cities Eat Farms.”

Up to 80 per cent of the produce we buy travels thousands of kilometres by truck or plane. Even apples – which are quintessentially Ontarian and can keep in cold storage for months – travel 5,900 kilometres on average to get to us, according to a recent Region of Waterloo Health study.

Contrary to what one might think given how much of our food is imported, Canadians spend less of their disposable income on nourishment – about 10 per cent on food and non-alcoholic beverages, according to the OECD – than residents of most other developed countries. A related fact: domestic farmers make less than half of what Toronto garbage collectors earn. (The average farm earns less than $25,000 a year before expenses, according to the latest census report.)

The profession’s self-esteem is in the gutter. As Andrews regularly points out, Ontario agriculture minister was once a plum posting. Now, it’s an afterthought, rarely noted in reports about cabinet shuffles, because it’s no longer considered a powerful portfolio, even though it’s the only ministry that touches all of us many times daily.

Faced with a future of long hours, little respect and less pay, is it surprising that young farmers are leaving the land in droves?

Despite the growing local food movement, most farmers and food policy wonks agree: the future of Ontario farming is bleak. Most predict it will take a horrific event like 9/11 to wake us up to the dangers of relying entirely on foreign food.

“I have a three-month-old granddaughter, and I don’t want her to be hungry in her lifetime,” says Mike Shook, program manager with FarmStart, a Guelph-area non-profit aiming to get more farmers on the land. “If we keep in the direction we are, I fear she will be.”

Many urge the government to take action before it’s too late. The Greenbelt – which protects 720,000 hectares of land circling Toronto from development– is a start, they say. But protecting land is one thing; ensuring that food grows on it is another. Horse farms are the second fastest-growing agricultural category in the Toronto area, after cash crops like winter wheat, according to the last census.

“We need a master plan,” says Andrews.

He remains among the small minority of optimists. How else would he have survived almost three decades of farming near Milton, the fastest growing municipality in the country, as subdivisions and golf ranges replaced the fields he once ploughed?

The ultimate proof: he hopes to sell his property to a farmer.

“There are people who think I don’t have a hope in hell,” he chuckles. “But I’ve been hearing that all my life.”

To an outsider, Andrews’ Scenic Acres seems one of the most successful farms around. The 39-hectare property bursts with blackberries, pumpkins, strawberries … as well as 17,000 bottles of fruit wine a year. Andrews runs a bustling market out of one of his barns and sends his produce out to eight farmers’ markets every week.

More than 15,000 school children tour his farm each summer. And far more than that come out, mostly on weekends, to pet his goats and ride a tractor out to the fields to pick their own food. One Sunday this fall, a record 3,300 people swarmed the farm to pick pumpkins. For many city slickers, such “entertainment farms” have become their only connection to rural life.

No matter how successful and cherished Andrews’ Scenic Acres may be, is it realistic to think a farmer will buy it when speculators are scooping up property all around Andrews? Nearby farmland inside the Greenbelt is going for $20,000 an acre – a price most farmers could never afford. Farms like his that fall outside the Greenbelt border are running at $50,000 an acre. Which means only a Rosedale stockbroker would have the necessary cash.

That’s exactly who Andrews is banking on – “It would have to be somebody who had passion.”

Wayne Roberts, project co-ordinator for the Toronto Food Policy Council, has a different buyer in mind: the Ontario government. “That’s obvious to anyone concerned with the future of food security in Ontario,” he says. Not only would the province save the most productive land from being stripped of its topsoil and converted to homes and malls, but it could also boost aspiring farmers into the business by renting out small acreages to them at affordable prices – he calls them “farm condominiums.”

“Once land is changed from agriculture into something else,” he says, “it’s almost impossible to reclaim. If this farm goes, it’s not late – it’s too late.”

By Catherine Porter, Environment Reporter for the Toronto Star

The following post is by Mike Cluett. Please visit Mike Cluett’s Milton blog site here:

Just the mere mention of that intersection causes many residents in the area to roll their eyes.

Why? We have seen many near misses of vehicles driving down Yates from Thompson Road with cars coming out of March Crossing. This past weekend was no different.

Let’s go back in time to this past summer around the dinner hour. Local residents were brought out of their homes with the sounds of screeching tires, loud thumps and a big bang. What had happened was a car traveling north on Yates Drive towards Bennett Blvd. at what witnesses describe as “over the speed limit”, narrowly missing a vehicle coming out on March Crossing into the intersection. This car swerved to miss that car, lost control, jumped the curb on the opposite side of the road and smashed into a house. Luckily there was no one hurt. The car sustained some damage and the bay window of the home was damaged.

As those of us who live in the area know, kids are walking up and down the sidewalk heading to their friends’ homes or to the local parks and thank God no one was there when this happened.

Now, we go back to this past Saturday and almost the exact same thing happened again…

To continue reading this column, go to Mike Cluett’s Milton Blog.

Your vote counts. Case in point: Ted Chudleigh’s narrow victory in Halton in last month’s Ontario provincial election.

The following post is by Mike Cluett. Please visit Mike Cluett’s Milton blog site here:

As many of you are aware, there was a provincial election recently. The campaign seemed to go on forever since Premier Dalton McQuinty closed down Queens Park early this summer and then the rubber hit the road.

During that campaign there was a referendum on our voting system that we, as voters, had to figure out and make a decision on. The future of the province was up for grabs. Did we think that the Liberals did a good enough job to carry on for four more years or did they deserve to get the boot?

Despite what side of that argument you were on, one thing we should all be able to agree upon is this: the voter turnout was dissappointing.

Just over half of the electorate came out to vote. This statistic has been continually debated after each election and a common theme has emerged. My vote doesn’t count.

Now when I hear that, it makes me shake my head. A perfect example is this year’s provincial election…

To continue reading this column, go to Mike Cluett’s Milton Blog.

The following post is by Mike Cluett. Please visit Mike Cluett’s Milton blog site here:

With the new school term beginning and the almost in-sync complaints about peoples’ “bad driving” running rampant throughout the town, a recent article by Halton Region Chair Gary Carr mentioning a community-operated program that gives residents the opportunity to report aggressive and unsafe drivers through a Citizen Report Form to police is quite timely.

Many people I spoke with during the last municipal campaign talked very passionately about road safety. In fact it was one of the core parts of my campaign. Unlike some other candidates, I ran on issues that were important to Miltonians and had a plan of action for each. For every resident I talked to, I always brought up this organization as the ones to contact and find out more information. Road safety is very important - even more now that we have our kids walking through the streets to the bus stops and along the sidewalks to school….

To continue reading this column, go to Mike Cluett’s Milton Blog.

Mexican labourers plant strawberries behind the tractor of Bert Andrews, whose farm is now the only one left growing them around Milton.

Perilous exchange sees rich farmland around the GTA sprouting subdivisions

Bert Andrews sits atop his tractor in the middle of a chocolate milkshake field.

The earth below his giant wheels is grey-brown and frothy – so soft it crumbles like foam, so moist it doesn’t raise dust. It’s also teeming with nutrients.

Just perfect for strawberries.

“This is the nicest soil you can find,” Andrews says, looking over his shoulder at the row of Mexican labourers he’s towing behind him on a finger planter.

The planter looks like a rickety CNE ride. It has four metal seats separated by miniature wheels with funnel spokes. Each labourer sits behind a stack of young, tender strawberry plants, and when a spoke comes up, he slots a plant in. The wheel spins it down and – click – plants it in the ground with a little squirt of water.

Four other workers with shovels follow behind slowly, doing quality control – tucking in exposed roots; packing down earth.

“You missed one there,” Andrews says, pointing to a plant the size of one of his fingers on the ground. He’s spent $9,000 this year on strawberry plants alone. He wants to make sure they survive.

While the pumpkins he’ll plant next year draw bigger crowds, strawberries are his biggest seller.

Ontario strawberries burst onto the scene in late June. Four weeks of mouth-bursting sweetness reminds us briefly that strawberries – like everything grown from the earth – have a season, and that some things are worth waiting for.

When Andrews bought his farm just north of Milton almost 30 years ago, there were six other strawberry growers in the area. He’s the only one left.

Once a bustling farming hub, the area has become a distant suburb of Toronto. The farm equipment dealerships have all left. Brick mansions have replaced barns. And fields that once sprouted wheat and sweet corn are now golf fairways.

It’s a perilous exchange. The farmland around Toronto is among the best in the country. It’s ranked almost exclusively class one and two – making it ideal for everything from strawberries to sweet corn. But increasingly, we’re planting subdivisions on it.

The Greater Toronto area lost 16 per cent of its farms between 1996 and 2001. Since then, another 5 per cent have vanished.

Once lost, the farmland can’t be replaced. The ground elsewhere just isn’t as fertile, and the climate not as generous. One farmer who moved fewer than 20 kilometres from Burlington to Waterdown lost the moderating effect of the lake, and with it, two whole weeks of the growing season.

“We need to be aware what we’re giving up,” says Margaret Walton, a Muskoka planner specializing in Ontario agriculture. “We can build houses anywhere. Why do we all have to live on prime farmland?”

What makes the land around Toronto so good? When the glaciers receded 10,000 years ago, they left minerals essential for plants – magnesium, potassium, calcium, zinc. The resulting soil is a fine mix of sand, silt and clay, making it easy to manage. It clumps well, allowing roots to take hold, but not suffocating them after a rainfall. And it’s deep and relatively stone-free. “That’s the ideal,” says Ray McBride, a soil-science professor at the University of Guelph. “That’s why Toronto is where it is. Pioneers looked at the area and saw it had sandy, good soil, lots of water, and not a lot of snowfall.”

Even more important than the soil is the climate. We have more frost-free days here than almost anywhere else in the province.

Despite those advantages, we truck in as much as 80 per cent of our fruit and vegetables.

We could soon be trucking it all in.

Even in the heart of our strawberry season, Loblaws sells California imports cheaper than Andrews can at his own farm.

It’s an economy of scale. California boasts seven times Ontario’s strawberry fields – 14,000 hectares compared to 2,000. The state grows them all year round, which is why you can still find them in January.

The only advantage Ontario growers have is your mouth. “They’re picking (California strawberries) when they’re not ripe, so they’re not going to be as sweet,” says Andrews.

It’s sunny and warm – perfect for planting. Big fat clouds dot the sky. A train moans in the distance, and Porfirio Contreras Vazquez, one of his workers, is singing a love song. “Tengo mied.”

These plants won’t bear fruit until next summer, when they’ve matured and begun to fill in – sending out sprout-like runners, which root down into the earth, forming “daughter” plants. Those then will put out delicate white flowers next May, which, if pollinated by one of the bees Andrews rents from a local beekeeper, will form into berries.

Given enough water, no pests and winter protection, this tiny plant will grow more than 100 berries over the next three – maybe four – years, before Andrews ploughs it under to make way for winter wheat or sweet corn.

“They just get old and not productive – like a lot of things,” chuckles Andrews, 63.

Having finished planting the last row, the Mexicans head back to the farm for lunch. Andrews follows slowly behind them on his tractor.

Halfway up the field, something catches his eye. He leaps down, bounding like a fawn along the straw that separates the row of calf-high strawberry plants that he put down two summers ago.

There, at the top, in a cluster of neon-green berries, are two blood-red ones. “That’s what it’s all about,” Andrews says triumphantly. “All this effort, all this work, now we’re seeing, as they say, the fruit.”

The Last Straw: Did you know?

- Strawberry farmers traditionally put straw between rows. Hence the name, although some historians peg it to how strawberries “strew” – or spread through tendrils.

- The straw is used for many things. In winter, , it is put on top of the plants to protect them. In summer, it becomes mulch, keeping down weeds, and also makes for softer picking on your knees.

- As with apples, there are many varieties of strawberries. They vary in shape, size, colour and time of ripening. A farmer can extend the season by two weeks by growing Annapolis berries, which ripen first in June, midseason Miras, and late-blooming Cabots, which bear fruit at the end of June.

- “Day-neutral” berries are becoming more common in Ontario. From California, they don’t depend on a certain amount of daylight to bloom, putting out berries through the summer and into the fall. Unlike local varieties, they are usually grown in raised beds, covered by plastic. Both techniques aim to keep the soil warm during the fall and spring.

This column was written by Catherine Porter, Environmental Reporter for the Toronto Star.

Prime real estate, free to a good home: The town is offering an area of land just west of the GO Station free to a post secondary institution. Is this a good move?

The following post is by Mike Cluett. Please visit Mike Cluett’s Milton blog site here:

For those of you who haven’t heard, the Town of Milton is making it known it has some coveted land available free to a post secondary institution… almost like a first-come, first-served.

The town has been talking about this for some time now. It’s been in the works for months and they’re finally moving on the pitch. If Milton could scoop up a university/college campus, it would be a major coup. Mississauga was/is trying for the same thing.

There is a shortage of spaces available at post secondary schools in Ontario and since getting rid of Grade 13, it only got worse with more students looking for a place to go. It’s a huge piece of land and giving it away might sound like the wrong thing but the long term goals outweigh the short term…

To continue reading this column, go to Mike Cluett’s Milton Blog.

The following post is by Mike Cluett. Please visit Mike Cluett’s Milton blog site here:

Town council was told recently by the budget department of Milton that an 8 percent increase in taxes for 2008 and a further increase of 5 percent in 2009 will be needed in order to sustain existing service levels.

8%?? Thats not a small increase now is it? Back in 2007, taxes only went up a minimal 2% but that was just before a municipal election. We are now close to a year into the term and this comes up for discussion…

To continue reading this column, go to Mike Cluett’s Milton Blog.