Dirt And Stone

Well, REALLY GOOD dirt:

Drive an hour northwest from Toronto along Highway 10 and you come across some of the best farmland in Canada. Folks here call it the Garden of Eden. Atop a 15,000-acre plateau sits a layer of dark dirt so perfectly balanced with clay and nutrients that it breaks apart in your hand like potting soil. "The stuff is like butter," says a local potato farmer, David Vander Zaag, who sells his spuds to Frito-Lay. Even better: Below the rich topsoil lies a limestone deposit some 200 feet thick, creating an ideal natural drainage system. It once rained nine inches in a day, says Vander Zaag, and he didn't lose a single potato from his crop. It's that limestone, though, that has brought the farming town of Melancthon, Ontario, pop. 2,900, the fight of its life. Last spring a Canadian firm called the Highland Cos. submitted an application to turn 2,300 acres of area farmland into one of the top-producing rock quarries in Canada. One of the principal owners of Highland is the Baupost Group, a $24 billion hedge fund based in Boston and run by a secretive investor named Seth Klarman.
Highland's quarry proposal has ignited a firestorm of controversy in Melancthon. Residents have myriad concerns -- from increased truck traffic to the impact on the water supply to the unsightliness of an enormous pit mine in the distance. The farmers feel betrayed by Highland chief John Lowndes, an entrepreneur who grew up in the area. Beginning in 2006, Lowndes spent two years and some $50 million amassing 6,500 acres from some of the area's biggest farming families. Several farmers claim that he approached them by saying that he wanted to build the region's largest potato-farming operation -- which he did -- but never mentioned a quarry. Only after he owned the land, the farmers claim, did Lowndes reveal that Baupost and Highland had other plans. Lowndes declined to speak to Fortune.
The farmers say Lowndes breached their trust. But they have identified a second, bigger target for their frustration: Klarman. Why, they wonder, does an American hedge fund manager they'd never heard of until recently want to spoil their lush land? "Yeah, there's something I'd like to tell him: Come up here," Vander Zaag says, overlooking his 1,000 snow-covered acres in late December. "I want him to see the land. To see what he's doing to it."

The rest of the article is about Seth Klarman.  He is pretty interesting, but I'd like to hear more about the Garden of Eden, and the giant limestone deposit underneath it.