What’s at stake: close to 9,000 acres of our province’s most productive farmland. They had been earmarked for 53 years as the site of a future airport. This is everyone’s fight. Join us and let’s win it – for all our sakes! https://landoverlandings.com/be-informed/whats-at-stake/ Share on X
The airport project was cancelled at last, on January 27, 2025. But the fight for the permanent protection of this land goes on.
Why does it matter? Because in a world caught up in a growing climate crisis, where field crops are by far the main food source for the planet’s 8.2 billion people (and counting), our future depends on preserving agricultural land that can reliably grow the food we need in order to survive.
We destroy such land at our peril. The best-quality farmland, all over the world, tends to be in the fertile valleys that naturally attracted human settlement. Over time, poor farming practices, salinization, erosion, urban expansion, and infrastructure projects (for instance, expressways, dams) have all ravaged or obliterated that best agricultural soil. The world lost a third of its arable land in the last half-century, and a recent UN-backed study found that a third of the world’s remaining farmland has been degraded by intensive industrial farming. If we humans don’t act now to save our richest farmland, we will be reduced to living off the produce of lesser land, marginal land, land that’s farther from irrigation sources, land that grows sparser and weaker crops, land that can’t grow certain crops at all, land that requires huge injections of chemicals to keep it going. We will not be able to rely on imported food; soil degradation is a global issue.
North Pickering’s prime farmland is a vital agricultural resource, a strategic national asset. It is rare Class 1 farmland, crisscrossed by freshwater streams and natural habitat corridors. It is the kind of land that feeds us, body and soul. It is a finite resource. Given the growing climate crisis, we must protect it as if our lives depended on it, which one day they will.
“No one is going to look back 50 years from now and say, ‘we protected too much green space and farm land.'”
– Jennifer Keesmaat, Chief Planner for the City of Toronto, April 7, 2015