Map of the Week: Loss of farms in southern Ontario, 1991-2006

ASSOCIATED PRESS

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The top 15 Ontario counties (or county equivalents) for farm loss include Ottawa, Hamilton, Peel, Halton, York, Durham and Middlesex, all in areas which have seen suburban expansion. Here is a map.

 

Nerd box:

For the first time, we're using the Google Charts API in a map. As these things go, it was pretty painless to break up the code, put it in an Excel spreadsheet and reassemble it with the correct numbers to form a .png image, which is the chart. It actually worked the first time, something which is more or less unheard of around here. Click on any area to see data displayed in a bar graph.

Here's an example of what it looks like:

and here is the code that creates it:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chd=t:32,25,20,13&chs=250x100&chl=1991|1996|2001|2006

Try pasting it into a browser window and changing the numbers in the sequence 32,25,20,13 or 1991|1996|2001|2006.

While we're on nerdboxery, it's also the first use of our new polygon set for Ontario county equivalents, which I look forward to using for census data. Our boundary sets can be labour-intensive to put together (they're either hand-drawn from scratch, which is a lot of work, or generated from .shp files, which always need a lot of manual intervention), and I like to reuse them.

Maps elsewhere: The 100-mile diet

My own view is that if we’re not going to be able to import asparagus from Peru in February in the future because of peak oil, we might as well enjoy it now. But then again, I’m a Bad Person, at least now and then.

Many people are Better People, particularly the advocates of the 100-mile diet, in which (as you probably already know) all your food has to be produced no more than 100 miles from your plate.

We’ve written about this several times in the last year or so: link, link, link, link, link, link, link.

This sort of thing is more practical in southern Ontario than in some other places. Vancouver authors Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon wrote a book about their attempt to follow the 100-mile diet in Vancouver.

The Lower Mainland being mostly mountain, it creates endless problems, both in their kitchen and to their relationship. Having not thought the thing through completely, and having rejected fish, they live almost completely on potatoes for months at a time, struggling with cravings for fresh bread. Eventually, driven by desperation, they find a rare Rocky Mountain wheat farmer, buy a bag of grain, grind their own flour and do some baking.

Whatever the merits of the concept itself, their implementation of the API is excellent: enter any postal code or U.S. zip code and have your personal 100-mile map automatically generated.

Our own 100-mile circle bisects western Ontario in an awkward way (the farm near Aylmer in the image at left is sliced in half by the line), cutting out the rich produce areas south of London where the first Ontario berries and asparagus come from in the spring – Essex County strawberries are the earliest, and it seems kind of masochistic to ignore them until the Simcoe ones come in a week or so later. Later in the season, it cuts out Aylmer field tomatoes.

To the east, we would find ourselves buying wine from some Prince Edward County vineyards but not others.

On the other hand, it includes a lot of land northwest of Peterborough and Orillia which has never really been arable. It also includes several counties of western New York, and the tiniest imaginable shred of Ohio.

I like the concept of supporting local farmers much better than this very literal-minded, Procrustean approach to it.