Clay All Over's page

Many of you are probably wondering how I came up with my screen name. Well, it's fairly simple actually. I was looking to find as few words as possible to describe our farm. And since all of our it consists of clay, it was natural to use ClayAllOver.

We farm in Eastern Ontario just minutes from the Quebec border. The area is fairly flat with only minimal slope in some fields. It used to be the bottom of the Champlain Sea many years ago. Before the water receded fully, a bog formed and the area was covered with many feet of peat or muck soil. The first settlers couldn't farm that type of soil very easily, so they burned it off. The fires went on for several years. All there's left now is a heavy clay. The kind you make pottery with. Well almost.

The land was used for pasture and hay for many years. It wasn't much good for anything else at the time. The locals made small 7 acre fields surrounded by ditches to drain the water. When farming became more intesive, they would plow the fields round. By that I mean plowing the ground together in the center to raise the field and slope it towards the ditches. That worked well for hay and forage crops but not so well for grains and oilseeds. You would have a good stand in the middle of the field but almost nothing towards the outside.

Once fields started to be tile drained and equipment got bigger, people started to close the ditches and join fields together to make larger fields. Today, you can stil find some round fields, but most have been leveled off and tile drained. Heavy rains are still a concern because the heavy soil isn't porous enough to drain water quickly enough. Most people around here take that as fact and live with it. We have taken a different stand. We started ridge tilling the farm almost 20 years ago. By doing this, the crop is up out of the water and can continue to grow. This has boosted yield dramatically since drowned out spots are almost non existent. This system has worked well for us and we'll continue to use it.

To be continued....