
TRESPASSING
The perennial problem of
trespassers on farmland
BY ARON FRIESEN
lan Neurenberg’s wheat was nearly ripe
when a 70-year-old cottage owner drove
an ATV through the standing crop one day
last summer.
After catching the man red-handed,
Neurenberg said he owed him $400. The man
looked at him as much as to say, “What’s the big deal?”
The big deal was, of course, that if a spark from the ATV’s
exhaust had started a fire spreading through his wheat (it’s
been known to happen), Neurenberg could have lost $400,000
worth of crop.
Neurenberg, who farms 5,500 acres near Lac du Bonnet,
didn’t get his $400 that day. What he got, he says, was another
case of neighbours from an old established cottage area along
the nearby Winnipeg River trespassing on his land and either
potentially, or actually, causing damage.
It happens all the time, says Neurenberg. Cottagers with
off-road vehicles take shortcuts through his crops to reach a
nearby municipal road. Kids on ATVs do wheelies on his fields
and leave muddy tracks. Snowmobilers in winter go over his
alfalfa field and cause winterkill. Neurenberg figures he loses
at least $1,000 each year in crop damage and soil trampling.
Sometimes Neurenberg catches trespassers in the act.
Usually he doesn’t. He’s reported incidents to the authorities
and appealed to the local municipal council. He gets sympathy
but, in his opinion, no real action.
Neurenberg and his neighbours faced an even bigger
problem earlier this year when the Lac du Bonnet Planning
District initiated a bylaw to re-designate 18.8 acres out of a
56.95-acre parcel of land in the area from “agriculture” to
“resort.” A local developer was proposing an 18 or 19-lot
subdivision for cottage and residential development.
Following a public hearing, the Municipal Board of
Manitoba rejected the planning district’s bylaw, saying in a
report that re-designation “would result in land use conflicts
with surrounding agricultural operations.”
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“Just dropping in is not trespassing. But
if the owner asks you to leave and you
don’t, you are considered trespassing.”
– Richard Buchwald, Pitblado Law
Manitoba Farmers’ Voice § Fall 2019 § 15