This cartoon was inspired by the green-washing of the Melancthon Quarry site, which makes the whole thing seem less disruptive than farming (chemical-free processing! no more nitrogen residue or water use than farming!).

I just had fun with the locavoracious idea – gravel instead of food.

That gravel pile took about an hour to ink. I'll sue Highland for a repetitive stress injury!

There was one comment that stood out somewhere in Highland's marketing – that aggregate is one of the bases of civilization. It almost made me spew my coffee (oh, when our civilization goes down, that will be what humankind will miss), but I couldn't find a home for it in the cartoon.

In a way, I'm just repeating a lot of Highland's claims ("chemicals aren't used in the processing of the gravel"), but they seem so absurd it's funny.

Additional sources:

$18 million per acre:
http://rabble.ca/news/2011/06/monster-mine-plan-cuts-deep-ontario-farmland

If you're looking for in-depth information about why this would a create sort of mini-tarsands in Ontario, check out  North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce. There's a lot of good information here. The site for the No Mega Quarry movement is here.

I was going to caricaturize the Highland rep, John Lowndes, who met with farmers to buy their land, but he is a bit of a shadowy character without good photos on the web. The money behind him is Baupost Group (their site is locked – also very shadowy) which is a hedge fund led by Seth Klarman. There are plenty of photos of him. See this article for more about him.