Community members in Wilmot Township are once again raising concerns over the Region of Waterloo’s plan to acquire 770 acres of rural land.
The Fight for Farmland group gathered outside a Wilmot Township council meeting Monday night after photos of crops being supposedly destroyed surfaced online over the weekend.
The social media post, which now has over 180,000 views, sparked further outrage amongst local farmers who say the destruction of the crops is wasteful and unnecessary.
“Literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of corn completely shredded and chopped up and then tried to hide the evidence by plowing it under the ground”, said Kevin Thomason, vice-chair of the Grand River Environmental Network.
Local farmer and vice president of Waterloo Federation of Agriculture, Mark Reusser, mirrored those feelings.
“Everyone should hold them accountable. This is food for goodness sakes. This is what people eat. This is what people subsist on. We shouldn’t treat land that produces food so lightly,” he said.
The crop in question is on land that is part of the region’s plan to develop 770 acres into a “shovel-ready site” for future development. Although it is unclear what the crop would have been used for if the land stayed in the hands of the farmer, the Fight for Farmland group calls its destruction unnecessary.
“It’s unfathomable that crops that were just a couple of weeks from being harvested would be destroyed,” Thomason said. “And this just fits with the complete lack of communications on anything here.”
Alfred Lowrick, a spokesperson for the group, adds: “We did some calculations that this is worth 2.5 million boxes of cornflakes.”
According to both Reusser and Lowrick, anger is being felt throughout the local farming community.
“In a time when people are homeless and people are food insecure to plow down, at least $160,000 worth of food is an abomination” Reusser said.
The group says the region had to hire from outside of the region to remove the crops because no one locally would do it.
“There were farmers contacted locally that were asked to take it down, they refused,” Lowrick said.
CTV News reached out to the region for an explanation about the crop cut-down.
The Region of Waterloo, in an email statement, said: “As mentioned in our media update earlier this month, the Region of Waterloo is now approaching one third of the Wilmot land assembly parcel acquired and on-site investigations are underway. Ploughing is required to complete studies as part of the continued due diligence process.”
In previous reporting, the region had said at this stage there is no investor waiting in the wings for the land, citing there hasn’t been any shovel-ready property.