County grain farmers were pretty pleased last month at the news that Picton Terminals would open a bulk grain shipping terminal on Picton Bay with a Canadian agricultural firm called Parrish & Heimbecker. 

This paper’s editor, Jason Parks, who hails from a County farm, and is well known to lean to the sentimental side of things, immediately wrote up a news story called “Barley Days,” summoning the glory days of farming in PEC into the present. 

To a native islander, the idea of grain being shipped by boat is pretty much irresistible — no matter who is involved in the deal.

When the Loyalists arrived in the late 18th century, the first and only thing to do was to start clearing all the trees to build homes. Burning the wood produced ashes, which contain lye, essential for soap. It was their first cash crop. Before the lye industry, much of the surfeit of wood was shipped to Europe in the form of square lumber. 

After all the logging, newly cleared fields meant cultivating grain. In the 1840s, Ameliasburgh, Hallowell, and Sophiasburg started with hops, which add flavour to beer, stop undesirable ferments and aid yeast production. 

Then there was the boon of the American Civil War in 1861. To raise money for the fight, the U.S. government raised taxes on whiskey 400%, putting it beyond the reach of those who could have used it the most. Beer was the alternative. New York brewers suddenly needed vast quantities of barley. And there was Prince Edward County, right across Lake Ontario, the granary of the north. 

Excellent County barley — something about the long, hot summers made it extra flavourful — was produced in vast quantities to meet this new demand. The crop soon covered a third of the available farmland. Prince Edward County’s legendary Barley Days lasted until 1890 — when the Americans imposed a hostile tariff and stopped the imports. Between 11,000 -17,000 tonnes of barley were shipped to New York every year. 

Shipbuilding was a related, flourishing industry. Magnificent schooners and freighters built here from the mid-19th century on carried passengers and freight across the great lakes. 

The wealth generated by these days of yore is an important part of the County’s heritage. Beautiful 19th-century houses, halls and hotels of wood, brick, and stone are now scattered across the landscape, underneath equally gracious, centuries-old trees. 

This still-standing history of the County is now one of its most important assets, along with its farming culture, still flourishing, though in 2024 suffering a serious blight of low crop prices. 

Certainly, anyone who cares about sustaining local farmers, or the County’s primarily agricultural economy, or just about plain farmland, never mind the history of this place and its revered farming families, would have felt pulled in at least a couple of directions at the news that P & H was partnering with Picton Terminals to build a grain shipping port on Picton Bay.

The August 15 press release seemed timed to influence a contentious vote at Council on September 10. A bylaw vote was on the agenda, to formalize terms of settlement the County sent to Picton Terminals in June, and which the Terminals signed back without any changes. No changes were required: the terms were entirely in their favour.

As it happens, Council delayed that vote to seek legal advice on its agreement. The bylaw to create a permanent settlement with Picton Terminals is hanging in the balance, like a sword over the head. 

If it is approved, the County must request that the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing grant a Ministerial Zoning Order. If granted, an MZO would re-zone all the lands Picton Terminals owns MX Industrial-Extractive.  

Not just the lands it owns now, but all the land it can acquire at its White Chapel Road property by September 30. 

The lands the Doornekamps are after are the properties on its borders. Its neighbours. They are zoned rural, part of the hundreds of acres of farmland that end at the cliff on White Chapel Road, one of the oldest spots in the County. 

The Doornekamps want to knock down all the nineteenth-century brick farmhouses they can get their hands on. They intend to turn that old farmland into lands ancillary to a rock quarry, which is how they are really using their property. 

The Doornekamps have quarried and sold at least $65 million in stone barged mostly to Toronto from this unofficial, hidden rock quarry. I took a walk along White Chapel Road the other day. Huge boulders, shipping containers, and wire fences block all public access to the property. It is impossible to see what is going on there. Bylaw officers from the County are denied entry, as Picton Terminals claims its operations are above County laws. 

An MZO, if granted, would seal that deal.

An MZO will allow whatever is going on there to go on as usual, with zero interference or oversight from the County. 

An MZO is a very high price to pay for a grain shipping terminal. Which is why it is excellent news for all concerned that no MZO is necessary to operate a bulk grain shipping port on Picton Bay. 

The representatives from P & H I spoke to last week assured me they were relying on the 2018 Ontario Superior Court judgment that upheld the grandfathered bulk cargo shipping activities at the port as legitimate. They need no more in the way of zoning. They have no interest in shipping grain in containers.

Picton Terminals is already zoned for a bulk cargo shipping port. It can already ship all the grain it wants as bulk cargo. It is not doing this. But Parrish & Heimbecker want to do it, and they know how to do it. They have been successfully engaged in that enterprise across Canada and all around the world for over a century.

To local farmers, the news must feel like a rain in a dry, parched year.