A group of Ottawa farmers wants governments and private donors to ensure locally grown food is available to future generations through farmland trusts that would prevent developers from building on Ontario's best farmland.

"The reality is if we don't do something today, we'll soon see that in a generation there won't be enough good farmland in Ontario to grow the grain that Canadians have come to expect from Canadian farmers," said Dwight Foster, vice-president of the Ottawa Federation of Agriculture, in an interview with CBC Monday.

The federation, a local branch of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, is to meet Tuesday to discuss the possibility of expanding the province's sole farmland trust or establishing new trusts to cover more prime agricultural land.

The trusts, charities that hold and protect land for a public benefit, are intended to address a fundamental problem, said Foster: the fact that Ontario's most fertile soil is also the simplest to build on.

Foster grows corn, soybeans and wheat on his farm in North Gower on the southern outskirts of Ottawa, farming 4,000 to 5,000 acres a year.

Good farmland is flat and mostly rock free, he says, making it quick and easy for developers to dig foundations and trenches for water lines and put up many houses in a row.

"Obviously, they prefer to dig on and construct or build homes on that type of soil … versus rock or bedrock," said Foster.

Ontario has only one farmland trust to date

In Ontario, most land trusts preserve areas such as woodlands and wetlands, but there is one, the Guelph-based Ontario Farmland Trust, that was established to protect farmland.

According to that trust, Ontario lost 18 per cent of its best farmland, known as class 1 farmland, to urban development just in the Greater Toronto Area between 1976 and 2006.

Developers, who tempt farmers by offering millions of dollars for fertile land, should be forced to build on soil that isn't suitable for growing, Foster said.

Something also needs to be done to discourage farmers from selling their prime farmland to developers, he said. However, Foster said he doesn't favour laws that enforce a "greenbelt," banning farmers from selling their land and preventing them from earning the money they need to retire.

Instead, he wants governments and private donors to establish and support farmland trusts, which set up permanent agreements with the landowners called easements. The easements require the owners to use the land and treat it in a certain way. The trust compensates the farmer for not selling the land and monitors the land use. In some cases, land trusts also buy land and lease it out for certain purposes.