Editor:
For many months I have seen full page ads in The Echo warning of a dangerous new development that threatens to ruin our rural landscape and clog our roads with traffic. It is not a quarry or a subdivision that is causing so much fear — it’s a flower farm.
Some people might think that mobilizing to stop a flower farm is a particularly ridiculous form of NIMBYism, but what bothers me most about the ads is the tagline that reads, “Real farms don’t sell tickets.”
As the owner of what I like to think is a real farm (one that occasionally sells tickets) I find this assertion offensive.
Who gets to decide what a “real farm” is?
What if someone ran an ad in The Echo that said “Real farms don’t have swimming pools”, or “real farms run John Deere, not BMWs”? No one would do that, because that wouldn’t be nice.
Rather than lecturing people on what real farms don’t do, perhaps we can agree on what they do. Real farms make money. Real farms employ people and generate economic activity that benefits the entire community. If a local farm can do that by plantingflowers and selling tickets for folks to look at them, then that’s a good thing.
Our township and the Niagara Escarpment Commission are well equipped to deal with issues like traffic and parking.
Brent Preston,
Dunedin.