By Mel Luymes
To celebrate the Rural Voice magazine’s 50th anniversary, let’s take a walk back in time and see how far Ontario agriculture has come! This month, we’re looking back only 10 years to the March 2015 issue and reflect on the major stories inside.
Cover story: On the cover, we had Terry Hoover standing outside in a plaid jacket in front of his shed. An article about Hoover’s Maple Syrup outlines his operation and what made it organic maple syrup.
Terry and Diane Hoover are still going strong with maple syrup production on their farm (and 50 acres sugar bush) near Atwood.
In case you didn’t know or didn’t see the article, most maple trees would be considered organic because they don’t receive any fertilizers or crop protection products; however, it is in the cleaning of the lines and processing equipment that determines Hoover’s organic status. Ten years ago, when Lisa wrote the article, Terry used an age-old organic strategy to clean. He left the last sap of the season in a pan to ferment for a month or so, and it turned into a acidic gel that was a powerful cleaning agent.
“But it smelled so bad,” Terry admits. Since the last article, Terry has switched to cleaning the evaporator by boiling permeate from the reverse osmosis process and, as for the sap lines, he vacuums them and then uses isopropyl alcohol per tap, which was approved for use by the organic standards in Canada.
Back then he was “knocking on the door of 2,000 taps” and “looking long-term at reaching his woodlot’s 3,000 tap potential.” Ten years later, has 3,127 taps. He knows exactly how many because taps are $0.50 a piece and come in bags of 100. Terry can reuse the taps because he uses a new insert over them, which protects the tree (which is only $0.20 a piece and he sends off for plastic recycling). He has 15 kilometers of line for sap to flow through, and in the last decade he has switched from a pump that pulls to the sap shack, to an electric pump in the sugar bush that can push 600 gallons/ hour up to the shack at the front of the property for processing.
Over the years, the sap output has went up and down, but mainly up. Ten years ago, Terry and Diane would count on an average of one litre of syrup from each tap, but now that is one and a half litre average. While last year averaged 1.3L, the year before that was 1.74L.
The “Rule of 86” in maple syrup production is that if you divide 86 by the sugar content of your sap, that is how to estimate how many litres of sap you would need to make a litre of syrup. Over the years, the average sugar content (measured in Brix level) has nearly doubled, which accounts for the rise in production. Terry and Diane credit the rise of the sugar levels to all the work they have done in the bush to thin it and remove the dead ash.
“Managing the bush is all part of our long-term sustainability plan,” says Diane.
After the story came out, Terry went on to become the president of the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers Association (OMSPA) for two years. He hosted the association’s summer tour that same year and had 300 people over to the farm. During his time as president, the major issue he dealt with was adding traceability for all maple syrup producers into Ontario Regulation 119/11.
Better than Groundhog Day, the first tap of a sugar bush captures the promise of spring and the flowing of sap. But when will farmers begin to tap? That has changed over the years and depends on the winter. Maple syrup producers go by the weather and the forecast. Ideally, it is a stretch of sunny days, just around -1°C, any colder and the tree’s bark might split. It takes Terry and his crew three to four days to tap his entire sugar bush. Last year, he started February second because we didn’t have much of a winter; but 2025 has been a different story. The ceremonial tap was cancelled due to a snowstorm, but Terry expects to begin tapping once the weather turns.
“As much as I’m checking the weather, I’m also figuring out when other producers are tapping and don’t want to be too much after Brad Martin,” laughs Terry.
In the last few years, Terry and Diane have also led the local 4-H maple syrup club, and with both of them now retired, they have no plans of slowing down with the maple syrup.
Organic dairy: The March 2015 issue featured a panel on organic production at the Dairy Xpo that featured both Tom Boon and Paul DeJong, among others. In the last 10 years, Tom has made a host of changes at Boondale Farms near Woodstock, starting with a new free stall barn built in 2015 and the installation of the EASYFIX aeration system on his below-barn manure pit. Since the story, he has nearly doubled his herd size, now milking 94 cows; he has started a succession plan with his son and daughter-in-law, while his two other sons have started their own dairy farms nearby through the DFO Organic New Entrant Program. He no longer has the mastitis challenges he had described at the Expo and remains enthusiastic about organic farming, striving to improve management on all fronts: in the soil, the crops and the cows.
As for Paul DeJong of Ventry Hill Farm near Dundalk, you may be wondering where he went. According to the Beef Farmers of Ontario’s Beef North media campaign, Paul made a big move up to Northern Ontario in the fall of 2017 with his partner Kim Inglis. He moved to a 960-acre farm near Englehard and has transitioned to beef production.
Precision Agriculture: Ten years ago, there was a panel at the Grey Bruce Farmers week about precision agriculture, featuring Paul Raymer, Mark Ribey and Craig Trelford, moderated by Blair Scott of Sprucedale Agromart. We caught up with them to see how precision agriculture has changed in the last 10 years, how many more farmers are using it and what might be on the horizon for the next decade. Blair went above and beyond the call of duty and sent the Rural Voice a detailed email, which we’ve included here as a pop-out column.
We caught up with Paul Raymer, the co-founder and President of SoilOptix. Ten years ago, SoilOptix® was in its early days, just getting off the ground. Since then, it has grown to 27 countries around the world. Outside of North America, it has contract service providers making SoilOptix® mapping in the E.U. and U.K., in Chile and Argentina and this month, he’ll be on a trade mission to Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines to see how the technology can help farmers there.
“There is still a strong appetite for soil maps,” says Paul. “Farmers want to understand their field and improve efficiency with their inputs, and that hasn’t changed.”
SoilOptix® field maps are created using a sensor mounted on a collection vehicle that drives up and down the field, and the sensor measures gamma radiation to map soil texture. That technology hasn’t changed, but it used to take hours to synthesize all that information into zones and now it can be done in seconds. Paul credits an incredible team of young staff that are on the cutting edge of using AI (these days, AI means artificial intelligence, but 10 years ago it likely still meant artificial insemination!)
The soil zone map determines where a soil sample should be taken that would be representative of that zone. So, there is still a bottleneck with the soil collection and analysis.
But there are a few technologies that may help over the next decade. Precision Planting’s Radicle Labs is an autonomous soil lab that could be run out of a farm shop and have soil analysis done in a matter of hours. It works with cans of soil that are automatically RFID tagged from the field with the exact location they were taken from, so it cuts down any manual data entry. As well, there is Laser Ag, using lasers to do soil analysis and a few other technologies out there trying to get to real-time soil analysis.
Once real-time technology is here, and some are optimistic it will be in the next 10-20 years, the industry would start to see on-the-go variable rate fertilizer, variable rate seeding, variable rate everything!
Ten years ago, Mark Ribey was already using variable rate technology, but it was, and still is, based on recommendations from a real-life agronomist. Mark is a partner with Biermans Farms HM Ltd and farms about 6000 acres near Dobbinton. The farm has always been on the cutting edge of technology adoption, purchasing a yield monitor back in 1996 with the John Deere 9500 combine harvester, and GPS guidance installed in a sprayer and planting tractor in 2003.
Mark had a read through the article and laughed, “I hardly remember what we were doing back then but yeah, we had Apex on a CD drive.” Apex was the data management software he used and remembers taking variable rate prescription maps on USB sticks. Now they have switched to John Deere’s Operation Centre which is entirely cloud-based. (In other words, the data and maps are on the internet and hosted remotely, not on a CD drive or computer)
Mark has fields mapped with SWAT MAPS, a SoilOptix® competitor, and works with the SMS system to make fertilizer and seeding maps with variable rates. Using yield data, he is also able to make profit maps at the end of the season. Profit maps help a farmer understand what parts of the field are making or losing them money, but it doesn’t tell you exactly why or what to do about it. Mark is starting to look at his field mapping on a crop nutrient removal basis, as a soil fertility bank, but still relies on an agronomist, Deb Campbell. From Blair Scott’s article, you’ll see that this is another bottleneck area that may be solved in the next 10 years, with AI and machine learning technologies (the “brain box” as Blair calls it) being able to make agronomy recommendations.
The 2015 article mentioned GreenSeeker’s NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) technology, which may be the closest we have come to real-time variable rate nitrogen application. It measures the “green-ness” of a corn plant to determine how much nitrogen it should get for optimal growth. Mark doesn’t use the GreenSeeker anymore but is still focused on optimizing nitrogen and has been doing split application on corn and wheat for years, to time nitrogen applications when the plant needs it most. For the last two years, he was able to get an OFCAF (On-Farm Climate Action Fund) grant to use inhibitors that slow the release of nitrogen, which has an environmental benefit as well.
For Mark, the last 10 years have meant chasing the details on the planter as well, investing in electric seed metering, hydraulic down pressure and SmartFirmer sensors that adjust seed depth in real-time, based on moisture in the soil.
Looking forward, Mark’s next sprayer is going to have See & Spray™ technology which means that it will only put out an herbicide where there is a weed. See more on this in Blair’s column. He hopes this will help cut some costs for their (IP) identity-preserved soybeans.
Biermans Farms HM Ltd is also a trial farm for Upside Robots and last year, they trialed a small robot that was able to drive up and down corn rows to put down small amounts of nitrogen every 10 days. “We talk about spoon-feeding nitrogen to a corn crop, and now there is a technology that can actually do it,” says Mark, who saw incredible results on nitrogen efficiency in 2024, and is excited for another trial this coming year.
International Year of Soils: The United Nations declared 2015 the International Year of Soils and there was a lot of fanfare about soil in the media globally, and in our associations locally, as noted in Kate Procter’s column in the March issue. (If you are wondering, 2025 is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, as well as the International Year of Cooperatives and the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation)
Farm safety: The issue included a story of Jason McKee and the farm accident that cost him a good part of his leg in September 2012. While we didn’t reach out to Jason, we thought we’d follow up with statistics on farm injuries and fatalities since then. A recent report suggests that farm fatalities are going down in Canada, but came with a warning that the number of farms and farmers is also decreasing, so that may be the reason for the decline. According to the Canadian Agriculture Injury Reporting (CAIR) report Agriculture-related Fatalities in Canada 1990 – 2020, the most fatalities are from equipment rollovers and runovers and the highest fatalities are in men and those over the age of 60.
Wildlife damage: Ten years ago, there was an article on coyote control. As of last year, coyotes continue to account for the majority of claims (over $800,000) through the Ontario Wildlife Damage fund and kill six times more livestock than the weasel, which is in second place.
Woodlots: In this issue, Steve Bowers was still writing the monthly column on woodlots. We caught up with him and are happy to report that he is still enjoying long walks in the woods with his wife, and now with four grandchildren. He lives on a treed property and just had a successful thinning/ harvest over the winter. Steve wrote for The Rural Voice for 16 years and says he didn’t consider himself a writer when he started. He admits there were some late nights getting the column in at the last minute before a deadline but that it was rewarding; he enjoyed writing as a way of connecting to the community.
Vertical farms: In his column “Urbanites have lettuce-in-the-sky dreams,” Keith Roulston wrote about two of the “hot trends” in Canadian Business magazine that year and discussed both cricket farms and vertical farming. He was amused with cricket farming and, as we know, cricket farming is still a real thing, with one of the world’s largest farmers in London, ON. Keith was more skeptical, however, about vertical farming in the city.
Turns out, he was right! They had been hailed as an important breakthrough for food production and garnered billions and billions of investment funding, but the hype has waned. Turns out it is extremely expensive to take city real estate and then pay for both sunlight and water to grow food, when both come for free in the great outdoors. Still, there are some examples of businesses making a go of it for leafy greens (ie. GoodLeaf Farms in Guelph) and you can still find them on grocery store shelves, but it will be interesting to see if and how vertical farms evolve in the next 10 years. ◊