Natural gas expanding in rural Ontario

Apr 05, 2018

Province announced $100-million investment in the infrastructure

By Kaitlynn Anderson
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Some rural Ontarians can look forward to future savings on their heating and farm energy bills.

The provincial government plans to invest nearly $100-million to provide 11 communities with natural gas service, according to Tuesday’s release. (The projects await regulatory approval from the Ontario Energy Board.)

The investment will allow 11,300 families and businesses to lower the costs of heating their homes and buildings. In fact, families could shave up to $1,100 off their energy bills, the release stated.

By having access to natural gas, farms that currently rely on electricity, propane or oil can become more efficient in their operations as well.

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) has advocated for this change on behalf of rural Ontario.

“We’ve crunched the numbers and we’ve shown them to the government,” Keith Currie, president of the OFA, said in a release today. “An annual investment by the government of $75 million over 20 years would see more than $1 billion dollars in annual savings for Ontarians. That’s money that could be reinvested in local rural communities.”

Rural residents in Chatham-Kent, for example, could benefit from two developments.

The government plans to invest up to $311,000 to construct a natural gas distribution pipeline to serve the Moraviantown First Nation, according to Tuesday’s backgrounder. Ontario has also set aside $8 million to build transmission pipelines, distribution mains and individual customer stations for the Chatham-Kent Rural Pipeline Expansion project.

For more information on the 11 proposed projects, click here.

Farms.com has reached out to the OFA for further comment.

mrdoomits/iStock/Getty Images Plus photo

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.