Farming in Northern Ontario: Untapped Potential for the Future

Abstract

Farming in Northern Ontario is limited to less than 1% of the total land area available. With over 2000 farms, this is home to about 6% of the province's population, concentrated in the five major southern border cities of Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins, Sudbury and North Bay, with a significant presence of indigenous (i.e., First Nations) and disadvantaged peoples. This review highlights the challenges and opportunities of agriculture in Northern Ontario and offers a few strategies for establishing and sustaining agricultural operations locally. The challenges of farming in this region include the prevalence of adverse climatic conditions, lack of crop/economic diversification, insufficient infrastructure and support services, presence of small local markets, an aging population and youth out-migration, attitudes of dependency on government and limited investment potential. Nevertheless, this region offers much potential for farming as it contains significant amounts of fertile soils, good road networks and affordable land to start up farm businesses. Furthermore, the changing climate could be a boon to improve growing conditions, with expanded cropping options and increased yields in recent years. Production and consumption of local foods, conducting innovative on-farm research that addresses the needs of local producers including First Nations peoples, fostering regional research centres, building relationships through networking, exchange of ideas through effective use of different extension avenues, and collaboration and assisting local producers with market development may help establish a more competitive and sustainable agrifood sector in Northern Ontario. Favourable government policies to support growers who have experienced damage to their crops, forages and livestock due to adverse climatic conditions will further help sustain and expand their agricultural operations.

Simultaneous multi-crop land suitability prediction from remote sensing data using semi-supervised learning

“…Cultivation in northern Ontario is very limited in regards to crop variety because the crops must be able to withstand dry weather and a short growing season 11 . Barley, oats, and mixed grains are commonly grown in such locations because they are more resistant to variations in soil-climate-landscape conditions 11 . This practice is congruent with our results from Fig.…”

The Potential of Multi-Species Mixtures to Diversify Cover Crop Benefits

“…With cooler temperatures to the east and north, there is very little growing season left after corn or soybean harvest before a killing frost, narrowing the options for integration of fall planted cover crops even when soil moisture is high [23]. On the other side (i.e., to the west and south of the Great Lakes), despite a slightly longer growing season, low soil moisture can be the limiting factor for cover crop germination and establishment [49]. In general, crops such as oats, cereal rye, crimson clovers or vetch are commonly planted as post-cash crop harvest winter cover crops in the fall [22,50], while some legumes such as red clover can be frost-seeded into winter wheat or inter-seeded into spring wheat during early to late spring [19,21].…”

Demand for provisioning ecosystem services as a driver of change in the Canadian boreal zone1

“…The provinces of Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and Northwest Territories fol-lowed similar trends, leading to high fragmentation in the southwestern boreal. Global warming and a longer growing season (Goetz et al 2005) encouraged investments in farming and ranching in northern Ontario (Chapagain 2017), Alberta and Saskatchewan (Bowen 2002) and parts of the Yukon Territory (Arsenault 2017), pushing northward the agriculture frontier and contributing to deforestation in the boreal.…”