“Where there is a way, there is a will.

Give players a chance to do it right and they will.” — Ken Dryden

In Ontario, based on 12,000 to 23,000 annual samples from the SGS Agri-Food Labs, from 2002 to 2016, soil organic matter (SOM), on average, declined from just under 4.3 per cent to below 4.1 per cent. The data were compiled by Chris Brown of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

It was concerning to see in the same report that Lambton County, in 1957, had an average SOM level of 7.14 per cent, whereas the average level of the last 15 years was 4.16 per cent. That’s a drop of three percentage points in about half a century; speeding downhill, in soil time.

Our home farm was on the border of Waterloo and Wellington counties. I took it personally when Brown said the average SOM level in Waterloo-Wellington was above five per cent in 2002, and by 2016, had dipped to less than four per cent, below the provincial average.

I appreciate that some Ontario farmers are doing an excellent job of arresting SOM decline, and in fact, are on the long, slow, upward climb. Nevertheless, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada data presented to the Ontario Soil Health Working Group, SOM levels are now decreasing on 82 per cent of Ontario farmland.

My farmer-researcher colleague and a committed cover cropper, Woody Van Arkel, notes that it is much tougher to increase SOM than to lose it, so at the very least, we should manage crops in order to stop losing SOM. SOM undergirds productive capacity, especially in bad weather years.

Another disturbing number is that over half (54 per cent) of Ontario farmland currently has an erosion risk that is too high. It takes 200 to 1,000 years to form 2.5 centimetres of soil with natural processes. This is a renewal rate of 0.3 to two tonnes per hectare per year, while soil is disappearing faster than that, on many fields.

My long-suffering students over the last 28 years have had to memorize the gospel according to Martin: “Keep your soil covered.” Today, across Ontario, only one in five acres of cropland have high to very high cover (i.e. more than 300 days covered). When bare ground is pounded by rain, it erodes and loses SOM.

Beneficial management practices (BMPs) are important, but it is crucial to adopt them in appropriate combinations for each specific field, in a persistent manner. It is not enough to promote putative practices, especially if they are only done when it suits or in response to temporary incentives for one BMP at a time.