Marcolongo Farm, Guelph: View of the bank barn from across the grassy meadow
Photo courtesy Mike Marcolongo
So how do you (successfully) designate a farm?
***UPDATE: On January 25, 2019, as a result of the withdrawal of the two objections to the designation of the Marcolongo Farm, the Conservation Review Board closed its file on this case.
We’ve looked at two instances where the Conservation Review Board has grappled with this question — the Banting Homestead near Alliston and a property on Hammond Road in Mississauga.
The key takeaway from those cases: Designation of a farm on physical/design grounds alone isn’t easy.
To meet the 9/06 criteria, the argument that a farm property is “a rare, unique, early or representative example” of a “type” of property known as the traditional Ontario family farm will have to be well-developed. And the classic features (or most of them) of an old Ontario farm — farmhouse, barn, outbuildings, fields, etc. — will have to still be present.
In the Banting Homestead case, the claim that the 100 acre property was a representative example of an early twentieth century farm was not compellingly made. Even though all of the elements of an old Ontario farm were extant, the CRB found the argument weak and “secondary to the association of the farm to the achievement of Frederick Banting.” Implicit in the Board’s assertion that the typical Ontario farm idea “may be more relevant to an educational interpretative theme [for the property] than a reason for protection under the [OHA]” is that it was not convinced that the farm met the “representative” standard.
One could argue that the strong historical/associative values here (with the internationally famous Sir Frederick) eclipsed the more mundane representative Ontario farm line of reasoning, which consequently was not as strongly developed as it might have been.
In the Hammond Road case the problem for the municipality was the dearth of typical farm features surviving on the property. The loss over time of most of the original hundred acres — leaving a smallish (2.5 acre) remnant parcel — and a critical mass of cultural/natural attributes was fatal to the representative Ontario farmscape claim.
Another (ancillary) takeaway: The fields will be the hardest sell.
A typical farm is not isolated. It’s a piece of a broader agricultural landscape, where farm fields, and to a lesser extent woodlots, form the predominant feature.
But fields suggest ongoing agricultural use — for crops or grazing. A field that ceases to be used for these purposes and is simply left alone turns into something else, and its cultural heritage value will be whittled away in the process. As the CRB determined in the Hammond Road case, natural regeneration is not a heritage attribute of a farm.
And because fields make up most of a typical farm property, and designation will restrict their alteration — especially for use other than agriculture or greenspace — it is understandable that owners and would-be developers would be much more likely to object to their inclusion in a designation.
This was the case with the Banting Homestead, where there was actually no dispute over the protection of roughly five acres that included the farmhouse and farm buildings. It was the other 95 acres that were the problem. Something similar happened in the Hammond Road case, where the owner resisted the extension of the existing designation of the farmhouse and its surroundings to the rest of the remnant parcel.
Marcolongo Farm: One of the sight lines from the domestic node defining the viewshed
Photo courtesy Mike Marcolongo
This situation seems also to be playing out in the designation of the Marcolongo Farm in Guelph, a case currently before the Conservation Review Board.
The Notice of Intention to Designate the Marcolongo farm at 2162 Gordon Street in the south end of Guelph was issued on March 20, 2018.[1] Described in city reports as Guelph’s first designated cultural heritage landscape, the designation — remarkably — was instigated by the Marcolongo family (and their foundation, the Foundation for the Support of International Medical Training) and has their full support.[2]
The objectors are not the owners … but two developers.
The proposed designation would cover about 35 acres — a significant portion — of the 106 acre farm, described in the NOID as Guelph’s “best remaining example of a mixed-use agricultural farm which defined the rural landscape of Wellington County beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.” The property to be designated encompasses a wealth of attributes/features “which define the farm’s mixed-use operations as cultural heritage landscape.” These are clumped into a domestic node, a barn node, an orchard/garden node, natural features, and a “rear landscape viewshed.”
Notably for our purposes, the features in the viewshed include: “the grassy meadow”, a pond, and the farm lane and adjacent wooded area. The viewshed covers about 30 acres all told — about 15 acres of meadow/fields that are still being used for agricultural purposes with the balance being a large wetland complex.
It won’t surprise you that the objectors are taking aim, not at the protection of the dwelling and barn buildings, but at the viewshed and other landscape attributes, claiming that:
The landscape features of the property do not meet the criteria for cultural heritage under the Ontario Heritage Act and its regulations in that there are no features that distinguish the farm from any other farm in the community which warrant the designation. It is neither rare, unique nor has the potential to contribute to an understanding of a community or culture.[3]
The objectors apparently would like to build houses on the property and see the designation as an impediment to that.
I’ll let you decide whether the city has made a good case, based on the NOID, for the designation of the Marcolongo farm. And what you make of the objectors’ reasons for objecting.
The CRB will likely hear the matter in spring 2019. Watch this space!
Hey, anyone aware of other interesting farm designations out there?
A farm walk hosted by the Marcolongo family earlier this year
Photo courtesy Mike Marcolongo
Notes
Note 1: See the city staff report and NOID here.
Note 2: Mike Marcolongo of the Marcolongo family kindly provided me with further background on the designation. Here are his (slightly edited) comments:
The Marcolongo family had been working with the City of Guelph since 2007 on the designation of a good part of the farm and there was a mutual understanding between the property owners and the city that the designation bylaw would move forward as development encroached towards the farm. This understanding was put into question as the city proceeded with the second phase of its secondary planning exercise for the area called the Clair-Maltby Secondary Plan: https://guelph.ca/plans-and-strategies/clair-maltby-secondary-plan/.
The city’s own consultants (ASI) identified in Phase 1 of the secondary plan the need to consider the impending designation of the Marcolongo Farm: “… [T]he property at 2162 Gordon St. has been identified as a potential cultural heritage landscape that warrants protection under the Ontario Heritage Act. Accordingly, the scope of that designation, including the property’s range of heritage attributes, should be understood as it relates to development of land use planning objectives in the Clair-Maltby secondary plan area.” (from https://guelph.ca/wp-content/uploads/Cultural-Heritage-Resource-Assessment_June-2017.pdf, p. 22)
However, starting in November 2017, the Marcolongo family, who had been participating in the secondary plan process, were made aware that an arterial road through the farm’s cultural heritage landscape was a possibility (with a trail and an “Active Transportation Connection” among other options).
Unfortunately, on April 9, 2018 — despite the City of Guelph posting the Notice of Intention to Designate on March 20 — city staff released the preferred Community Structure Plan for the secondary plan that included an arterial road through the Marcolongo Farm CHL.
For the next two months, the Marcolongos held a number of farm walks, worked with the local chapter of Architectural Conservancy Ontario and other organizations to form the Protect Our Moraine Coalition (https://www.protectourmoraine.ca/) and used social media to mount a campaign for the removal of the arterial road through the CHL. As a result, in mid-June, city staff recommended the Community Structure Plan no longer include the road through the CHL.
However, in the interim — within the 30 days for objections following publication of the NOID — two neighbouring landowners (local homebuilders Thomasfield Homes to the north and Fusion Homes, as future builders on a property owned in part by the Avila Group, to the south of the Marcolongo farm) decided to object to the designation.
Note 3: From the March 29, 2018 notice of objection of one of the objectors. The other notice of objection has virtually identical wording. (Note that notices of objection, like other documents filed with the CRB, are part of the public record.)