Letter to Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe asking him to choose farmland over BESS – battery energy storage system.
No one talks about this issue but I will. We are a province, a city and a country that protects a lot of living and non-living things. We protect the birds and the trees, the rocks and the fish in the seas, the wetlands and the dry lands (Areas of Natural or Scientific Interest). We protect the owls and the butternut trees and build fences for the turtles and all of that is good. But there is something that we don’t protect and that is our farmland.
Why is it important to protect farmland? Because we are losing our farmland at an alarming rate. (In Ontario, Canada, farmland is being lost at a rate of 319 acres per day. This translates to roughly 116,478 acres lost annually.) Canada has a limited supply of good farmland and when we build on top of it we do not get it back. It is almost not profitable to farm these days.
Many of us have ideas for helping to sustain farmland and create incentives for young farmers to enter into farming. We live on a farm. We have ideas and we would like to suggest them to you. We do not think we should be putting battery plants on farmland. There are other places that these battery storage places can go to that may take a bit more work, but at least we won’t lose our farms.
Thank you very much.
Marlene Black
Farmer, rural Stittsville