A professional agrologist, based in Middlesex County, predicts cropland in southern Ontario will be depleted in 77 years if we keep allowing it to be taken away by urban and industrial development.
Gary Eagleson of G. R. Eagleson Consulting Inc. made the comments during a presentation to Lambton County Council on Wednesday.
Eagleson said the projection is based on the fact the region lost an average of 320 acres of agricultural land per day between 2016 and 2021.
"This means your grandchildren, and definitely your great-grandchildren will be affected," said Eagleson. "The date will be about May 17, 2103, based on a November calculation."
Eagleson said Ontario should be looking north if it wants to further expand its population. He notes the province was home to 16.1 million people in 2025, up from about 14.2 million in 2022.
"If you start thinking about this, and all of the reasons why we're having discussions about housing and developers scrambling to build these developments, they really should be built north of North Bay," he said. "That's where the land is, and it's not where our food is being grown. We grow 56 to 65 per cent of the food that Ontario actually eats. There's another amount of food that we export. If we start getting lower and lower numbers, the price of farmland is going to increase and supply is going to decrease. The world's population has increased from four billion in 1970 to 10.2 billion now and is going to 12.8 billion in probably 2050. It isn't a pretty picture."
For every one million increase in population, Canada has lost 530 square-kilometres or about 131,000 acres of prime agricultural farmland, mostly near urban centres. This is due to a big jump in pollution and demand for food. Between 2001 and 2021, Canada lost 9.9 million acres of land to development. As of 2021, there were about nine million acres of cropland in Ontario, with a significant majority in our region. Eagleson said we could rely on imports to help ease the burden but most other countries are facing rising population numbers.
Meanwhile, countries like Russia, China, and Japan are experiencing decreasing population growth, which is a warning sign for their fiscal economic stability.
Eagleson said the USA is facing similar problems.
Between 2017 and 2022, our southern neighbours lost 20.1 million acres, or 2,000 acres of cropland per day.
He claims they have 880 million acres left, but that is only expected to last for the next 218 years.
Eagleson encouraged councillors to research the topic more and be open when it comes to discussions surrounding the issue.
