Chatham-Kent development charges will affect greenhouse expansion

Mar 27, 2024

On March 26, 2024, Chatham-Kent Municipal Council passed its 2024 development charges for water and wastewater that will result in a cost of approximately $179,000 per acre for any new greenhouse development in the municipality. These development fees will gradually escalate to $366,000 per acre by 2029 driving investment in greenhouse growth to other jurisdictions having negative impacts on the economic contributions the greenhouse sector offers in Chatham-Kent.

A delegation from Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers (OGVG) including growers and staff presented deputations to Council before its decision. Greg Devries of Truly Green, who operates a multifaceted farming operation that includes greenhouse operations in Chatham-Kent described the more than 3000 direct and indirect spinoff jobs created by the 473 acres currently existing in Chatham-Kent.

“Locally, companies like Honey Electric, Dordt, and Timbertech Construction have more than 50 per cent of their business dedicated to the greenhouse industry,” he said of local businesses. Devries further attested that “the sudden increase in development charges will increase the cost of a planned and financed 30-acre build at the Cedar Line location by $2.55M for just water and wastewater.”

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.