I learned something.

Yes, I learned something that day, too. I learn something almost every day. I don’t use it that often, but I learn it.

Anyway, Ridgetown: Almost everybody knows Ridgetown. There’s also an ag college there. A lot of people go to the Ridgetown ag college. It’s pest research and soil management.

Simcoe is fruit and vegetables. Vineland is what everybody thinks: It’s orchards, vineyards, greenhouses and mushroom production.

I’m almost running out of time. Can you believe that?

Winchester is specifically for eastern Ontario crop producers, because, again, in different climatic conditions, you use different methods. As an example—and some people aren’t going to like this; some farmers might not like this—there are different ways of tillage for crops. Most of us have been to the IPM, the International Plowing Match, where they plow. There are very few farmers that actually plow anymore, right?

Some farmers use minimum till, so they use a machine with tines that disturbs the soil, and then when they plant, they use another machine to make it flat and then they plant. Some farmers use no-till. For no-till, you don’t disturb the soil at all. You use a different seeding machine and it goes right into there. No-till is beneficial because it’s really good for erosion, because you don’t disturb. It’s good for animals in the soil, the worms and stuff.

But it has been our experience that in northern Ontario, I think because our season is shorter, if you do minimum till—the ground is darker; there’s nothing covering the ground, so it warms up much quicker in the spring, so we do it. We minimum till to warm the soil up. You do some tillage in the fall to rough up the soil, so in the springtime, when the sun hits it—there are people who do no-till successfully in northern Ontario, but most don’t. So that’s an example of how a different tillage system might work fantastically in Ridgetown, and you bring it to Cochrane and it might not.

I’d like to quote someone—he departed. His name is Rod Inglis. His grandson still runs a tile drainage business in the New Liskeard area, and Rod Inglis brought tile drainage to our area.

My dad tiled his first farm with Rod in 1971. Rod was a great guy. At a public meeting—and when he brought tile drainage to northern Ontario, a lot of people didn’t believe in tile drainage because we thought that tiles, or my predecessors thought the tiles would freeze out of the ground. No, because at our place, we can’t have frost go deeper than tiles. Two feet of frost is not a big deal, right? So it took a while. But anyway, at a public meeting, someone asked—when he was bringing people in northern Ontario, someone asked, “So what exactly can you grow in northern Ontario?” And this still holds true. He got up and he said, “You can grow anything in northern Ontario. Harvesting, that might be a different story”—and that’s still the case.

Getting back to research, why research, why New Liskeard is so important, why Emo is so important is, if you want it, research has to be, especially crop research, site-specific. One of the things about research is that farmers do a lot of research themselves. It’s mostly through trial and error. Most farm research is, “Okay, we’ll try to do this,” and the next year you go, “No, we’re not doing that again.” That’s why you need actually organized research, and not just research but—again, I’m not dissing anybody, but research done solely by input, companies that sell input, is always going to favour input.

When we were paying tribute to Mr. Riddell, in the tributes, his father was an extension agent, an ag rep, and he was an assistant ag rep. We don’t have ag reps anymore, but we should, because something that ag reps did that’s really important—I can remember when the extension agent came to our farm. Because they see so much, they provide unbiased—have you tried this or have you—and again, I am not dissing any company, but when you get an extension agent who comes from a company, their advice could be very good, but it’s not always unbiased, and it shouldn’t be. If you’re getting paid by the company to go visit farmers, you’re not going to say, “Well, no, you shouldn’t use our product because you don’t really need our product. You should use X.” But extension agents were very good for that.

Specifically, as we talk about agriculture in northern Ontario, that would be something very important to think about: Who provides the research? Because some of the things I see that are happening in the new agricultural areas in Ontario are some of the things—we’re repeating the same mistakes we made before.

So again, I’m going to go back to Minister Riddell, who was very focused on soil erosion. Soil erosion is a huge issue. Where soil erosion becomes an even bigger issue is with tile drainage. Tile drainage, if you put systematic tile drains in your field—necessary in northern Ontario. You can’t farm without it, just can’t farm without it.

Most of northern Ontario is sitting on 100 feet of clay. On my farm, there’s 100 feet of clay and then you get bedrock. If you don’t tile—if it’s not tiled—it doesn’t drain, right? Clay doesn’t drain, and we face this in Timiskaming. So you have 200,000 acres in Timiskaming on the Ontario side and 200,000 on the Quebec side of clay that doesn’t drain. It originally had trees on it, and the rain falls—and the rain doesn’t really go anywhere. It takes a long time for it to get to the lakes, right?

You take all the trees off, clear all the land, put drains in and dump all that water into a few gully systems that run to the lake. So that water that used to take a month, two months, to get to the lake at a slow speed now gets there in three days—with pipes this big or this big. If you don’t have measures in place to make sure that that doesn’t erode, you are going to have massive erosion problems—massive. We’ve had them in Timiskaming. We didn’t know about it. Honestly, we didn’t know better. But we do know better now. But I’m not seeing any better responses. It’s an issue.

I have townships in my riding, two or three—I’m going to get this trouble for this—not family farms, but big corporate farms, basically, people who invest in land for agriculture, control the township. There are huge drainage problems and they’re fighting the township to fix them, and there’s not really any funding to fix that. But there are huge areas farther north that are being cleared, are being tiled, and we’re going to run into exactly the same problem.

And it’s understandable. When I was a farmer—I’m still a farmer, but when I farmed full time to make a living, it cost a lot of money to tile drain. I’d like to commend the government. In northern Ontario, the heritage fund has a program to make it a bit more affordable. I did a lot of work before I was elected MPP to get that program going in northern Ontario. It costs a lot of money to tile your farm. But it also costs a lot of money to protect the outlets. There is a municipal drainage program to help protect the outlets, but often in unorganized territory, they don’t get protected, and it causes huge issues, and it shouldn’t have to. We should be able to make the changes so that we know when we get too close to water courses. We used to, if there was a gully in the way, just bulldoze the gully, and then we wondered why we had erosion problems. Now we know these things. And that’s why there needs to be site-specific research, even on something as proven as tile drainage—something that could work with tile drainage and we haven’t really ever thought about.

Right now, in northern Ontario—I always talk about northern Ontario; it’s something I know. This probably applies to other parts of the world and other parts of southern Ontario. All tile drainage does in northern Ontario, where we are, is it lowers the water table. So you put the tiles in the ground two feet below and the water table no longer goes up. And it takes some of the rain, but it’s mostly the water table.

What happens if it gets too dry? That might happen, right? Weather is weird. We could be doing research to see if we could plug up the tiles, if we could regulate the tiles to actually irrigate it if we ever needed to. Now, farmers themselves don’t have the money to do that, to figure out if that’s going to work. Neither does a tile drainage operator, but that’s something that could be done at a research station in northern Ontario, in the riding of Mushkegowuk–James Bay.

It’s stuff like that, if you’re serious about—we are losing agriculture land every day. We are. We can argue about how much we’re losing, how little we’re losing, but we are. Every time I drive down here, I see a building on something that used to be a field. I’m not anti-development. I’m not saying you can’t—no, I’m not anti-development. But we need to make sure we do it correctly—to develop agricultural land.

We also have to realize that no matter how great a job we do at farming in northern Ontario—I’m proud of this: I have some of the best farmland in northern Ontario, and around Earlton. I don’t think anybody would disagree, because a lot of people want to buy it. I’m really proud of that piece of land. But if somebody said that I could trade that land for half as much land in Oxford county, the smart money would go to Oxford county, because we’re never going to grow in Timiskaming what you can grow in Oxford county, ever, and anybody who tells you that we are is wrong.

I think eventually the government is going to say, “Oh, no, we’re not losing land; we’re gaining, because we’re clearing twice as much as is being paved over.” You’re still losing productivity, and we have to realize that. For every tillable acre of class 1 land, the goal of that should be—and I’ve put this forward in the Legislature, and I’ll put it forward again: It should go through an agricultural impact assessment. And for every tillable acre, the best use is to grow food. If there’s a better use—and there might be. A vegetable sorting facility in the Holland Marsh might be a better use of those acres of agricultural land, because it services the rest of the area, right? A beef processing facility in Bruce county: You can make a pretty good argument for that. But highways and houses? You can make the argument, but you have to show that that’s a better use than actually growing food—because in this, we are given a gift, and that gift is going to become more and more precious as the world becomes more and more unstable.

I’ve got one minute left to talk about Woodstock. That’s the last of my tour of ARIO. I was born in Ingersoll, so I know a little bit about Woodstock. My uncle Mr. Hardeman has been the MPP for Oxford county for a long time. Woodstock is where they have the outdoor farm show. That’s actually where the research station is in Woodstock. Woodstock is a great place to farm. Oxford county has also been one of the hardest places to get a severance, because they know how great a place it is to farm. Does that mean there’s no development in Woodstock? Absolutely not. There’s all kinds of development in Woodstock, in Oxford county, but they’re very selective, and that’s what we need to be. Whenever I hear the government say we need less rules—we need responsible rules, because without responsible rules, we’re going to end up slowing everything down.

Thank you very much, Speaker, for allowing me to ramble for this hour.