“Greed, rules and regulations.”

Scott doesn’t mince his words. There’s no pretense, he calls it as he sees it.

Now retired, Scott has farmed on the Grimsby mountain for 51 years, 34 of them as an industrial milk producer.

Farming in Niagara?

“Niagara is done. It’s finished,” Scott says. “Good people have no chance to start and they’ve packed it in. It’s a business they can’t afford.”

Offering a warm welcome around the kitchen table with his wife, Iolla, Scott asks, “how many types of farm operators are there in Ontario?”

“There are only two,” he answers. “The ones with rights and ones without.”

Further he explains, the ones with rights are the 6,000 with quota (such as those with dairy, poultry and egg producing rights) and the 40,000 without, who make their way on the free market. He derides the quota system as an “extortion racket” and “blood money.”

Scott the said the cost of buying quota is prohibitive and prevents new farmers from getting into the business. “The quota system is a protection racket. There’s got to be a different way.”

The stronghold of democracy is in how the media reports the situation. The key to upholding democracy he says is through “free, fair and responsible media.”

And according to Scott, “they’re all running the other way.”

In the Ontario Landowners’ Association (OLA) discussion paper “Finding profits on Canadian Farms” it is calculated that the minimum startup quota needed to produce chickens would cost $850,000.

Supply-managed commodities such as dairy, eggs and poultry require the producer to hold a quota or license for production. The quota specifies an amount which can be produced annually by the quota holder. Marketing boards regulate and enforce the system.

“It’s been entrenched so long nobody thinks anything is wrong,” Scott says. “We’ve got to break up the extortion rackets, end the quota system and allow young farmers into the industry.”

When Scott was shipping milk from the farm in 1957 there were 68,000 producers, about 12,000 of them in fluid shipping. Province-wide there are now fewer than 4,000 milk producers.

A scrapyard V & R Recycling near Bismarck, Scott says, is a visible sign of a weakened agricultural sector in Niagara.

“Everybody is hauling farm machinery back in there. A guy came in with a real good John Deere four-row corn planter.”

“You should be out there in the field with that,” Scott told him, “and he says, ‘I can get more for it in scrap than at auction.’ ”

Scott was on the ground floor in forming the Niagara chapter of the Ontario Landowners’ Association. It’s been a groundswell and a growing rural phenomenon across the province that has now attracted about 20,000 members opposed to government rules and regulations and the steady erosion of their property rights. The grassroots for the Niagara chapter were planted right around his kitchen table and Scott said they were the only hope for democracy for the province.

Much of Niagara’s land is under Greenbelt legislation, through decisions made by “a government that is all from Toronto and doesn’t know what’s best for Niagara.”

His land, zoned for tender fruit, won’t grow tender fruit. “There’s no market for it anyway.”

The tender fruit industry “started to die the day they put the QEW in” with the push of development that followed.

Meanwhile, Greenbelt legislation has largely frozen lands for agricultural use. “If the city people want it, put it on their taxes and buy us out,” Scott said.

Last year he was called a one-man rural revolution as he tested the political wind blowing across the fields of his Kemp Road farm.

In a Grimsby Lincoln News article, he said: “Nobody should have to buy the right to earn their daily bread.”

The property taxes on his 95-acre had soared from $1,500 to $7,000 in 2004 when his property was no longer classified as a farm.

The farm hadn’t changed, but rather the directive to sign on with one of three large farm organizations as a criteria to be eligible for a farm tax rebate — something he refused to do and that left him ineligible to apply for the provincial program.

Complying would’ve made it a simple fix, but Scott said he didn’t want to be affiliated with farm organizations that only look out for “the farmers with rights” and he chose to stand on principle against the government’s plan he saw as controlling the land and industry.

He offers thoughts on rejuvenating the industry including the need to break the quota system and the need for free enterprise. “We’ve got to go back to the values of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Things were reasonable.”

It has cut loose over the last 15 years with the costs of production, astronomical costs to buy quota, government regulations, and urban/rural clashes that result in dragging citizens into court to justify their farm activities.

“There’s too much government.”