TRURO, N.S. – Bad farmers till too soon, too deep and too much, a former Ontario agriculture department official says.
Charles Baldwin, now a consultant, said the productive range of topsoil is six inches. If a farmer plows up 12 inches, he is not gaining a foot of topsoil.
“What you have is six inches of topsoil diluted through 12 inches of ground,” he told the Federated Women’s Institute of Canada triennial conference
Baldwin showed several slides of what happens when farmers deliberately or mistakenly clear the land. Parched land, deep gullies and wind and water erosion are the result.
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His answer is to leave more land covered, preferably with grass or trees. If land must be cultivated, then leave the plant residue and have good crop rotations or try strip cropping. If water must pass over bare land, try to lead it through on grassed waterways.
Only five percent of Canada’s land is arable and can grow food. “In general there’s no more land to settle and clear and grow on.”
Baldwin said bulldozers for clearing land were major enemies of land conservation. He queried why society was willing to spend thousands of dollars to increase the number of whooping cranes from 25 to 150, yet was unwilling to pay for land reclamation.
He recently wrote a letter to Alberta’s agriculture minister because he was horrified at the number of trees being cut down in the Peace River country. The department answer to his concerns about wind erosion was that water erosion was regarded as a bigger problem than soil drifting in that area. Windbreaks and shelterbelts weren’t seen as necessary.
Baldwin suggested farmers should preserve wetlands and leave grass margins on road allowances.
