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The Soil Whisperer: Farming in Canada. [1]

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Date: 2023-04-14  

This is where I grew up. Yes I know most people grew up in a single place or a series of discrete places. My parents, aunts and uncles, and their cousins had farms and ranches all over this map. This is what is known as the Land of the Midnight Sun.

I made a promise in my last diary that “I am going to take you to the ignition point of what is believed to be the largest contiguous forest fire in North America.” I should have course said, “in North American history.” The Chinchaga Fire, which happened a number of years before my birth has shaped my entire life. In no small part because it brought into my life the Soil Whisperer.

The blue flag is where the Chinchaga Fire ignited. The green flag hidden partially behind the blue is where my parents were ranching when the fire ignited on June 1st, 1950 and began burning northeastward and expanding. It caused the Great Smoke Pall of 1950 across North America and Europe.

This map will give you an idea of the path of the fire.

I first saw this map in the Boreal Institute of the University of Alberta. I believe it to be accurate and to have originally been produced in the early 1950s by the Government of Alberta.

My family had to run for their lives. All they saved was themselves and their livestock. My parents decided to rebuild. One of my Indigenous Uncles, Francis, who everyone called Fran, came to help.

Growing up I had Indigenous aunts, uncles, and cousins and white aunts, uncles, and cousins. Only as an adult did I realize my Mom’s family split into two at some point. Some of her siblings chose to honor their Indigenous heritage. Her parents, she and her other siblings picked their white heritage to honor or chose to pass. I am not totally sure. Being Metis is like that.

Uncle Francis went bush, that is what I was taught to say, “my Uncle Francis went bush.” My Granddad told me Uncle Fran, “talks to the soil.” I was five the first time my Uncle Fran took me bush. He forgot to tell my parents I was going bush. Only by fluke did they see us leaving Rose Prairie in the tall grass and short shrubs that filled the burn scar of the Chinchaga Fire.

Now lest I make Uncle Fran sound even stranger than he was, here are a few facts. That spring day that Uncle Fran took me bush he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a very esteemed Soil Scientist specializing in Pedology. He studied soil in situ over time and in immense detail. All that was before he formally identified as Métis and Indigenous.

Uncle Fran didn’t stop being a scientist when he changed his racial identification. He just added Indigenous Science to white Science. He had learned from his father that you can taste, feel, hear and see differences in the soil from year to year and that this is how you decide what to plant, when to plant it, and when to harvest the crop. Grandpa Fred was a wildly successful farmer and he learned from his Ktunaxa dad all these ways of studying the Earth and thinking about what you are learning.

My Uncle Fran, was studying the soil changes during post Fire Succession in the 4 million plus acre Chinchaga Fire. It wasn’t just a huge fire it produced immense amounts of smoke. This smoke eventually reached England and Holland but it was on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and in Ontario that it was the most spectacular.

“in places such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Fort Erie and New York, it was so dark that the lights at baseball stadiums had to be turned on to illuminate mid-afternoon ball games.”

“Anyone who witnessed it, as I did, the great smoke pall of September 24 to 30, 1950 can never forget the eeriness of the occurrence and the extraordinary gloom,” Canadian astronomer Helen Swayer Hogg wrote in The Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 15 years later. “The sun was turned to various shades of blue or violet over much of the eastern part of the continent.”The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star newspapers wrote articles and published illustrations explaining why the city of Toronto had to turn on the street lights at midday.

Uncle Fran lived on my parents ranch in the summer while he studied the changes in the soil that was healing from that burn. Never, in my presence or that of any of his children or graduate students did he speak to the soil. He did listen to the soil. Much of his research time was spent listening to the soil through a souped up stethoscope he’d built himself. He gave me one, all his kids had them.

I can sort of imagine how it must have looked. A mad scientist, gone bush, in the middle of a massive burn mark in the Boreal Forest, down on all fours listening to the soil with a stethoscope, surrounded by children of various ages also on all fours using stethoscopes to listen to the soil. I’m pretty sure most of you are wondering why I am telling this story.

You see, over time I started recognizing the sounds, hearing patterns in all that noise. The soil is very, very noisy. I say over time because for years, whenever I had a week or two I’d go visit Uncle Fran in the Chinchaga and listen to the soil.

When I came back to Canada, to Edmonton, with the TBI I thought had ended my military career, my wife found me impossible, and I was. Uncle Fran showed up about two weeks after I got home and took me bush. We went to the Chinchaga Wildland Provincial Park (the Red flag on the first map) and spent a field season there listening to the soil, barely speaking.

The soil of the regenerating Chinchaga Forest healed me. Yes, I listened to it, but I did talk to it, a lot. More to the point it responded. It spoke directly to me. It said I should be a farmer.

It would be a decade before I realized the soil was right. My wife, me ex-wives, my friends, my daughters, my granddaughters, and generations of students will tell you it taking a decade for me to admit to being wrong is par for the course. Ten years to the day from the soil talking to me the first time I stepped on to my own farm land for the first time.

It was useless farm land having driven at least 3 farm families into bankruptcy. But I knew just what to do. I got down on all fours and touched the soil with my stethoscope and started to listen. I am still listening. Maybe I talk sometimes.

Now everyone who reads me regularly knows how much I love a twist in the tale. My being the Soil Whisperer isn’t the twist. This is the twist. White Science is finally starting to catch up with Indigenous Science.

Soils are biodiversity-dense and constantly carry chemical flows of information, with our mental image of soil being dark and quiet. But what if soil biota tap sound, or more generally, vibrations as a source of information? Vibrations are produced by soil biota, and there is accumulating evidence that such vibrations, including sound, may also be perceived. We here argue for potential advantages of sound/vibration detection, which likely revolve around detection of potential danger, e.g., predators. Substantial methodological retooling will be necessary to capture this form of information, since sound-related equipment is not standard in soils labs, and in fact this topic is very much at the fringes of the classical soil research at present. Sound, if firmly established as a mode of information exchange in soil, could be useful in an ‘acoustics-based’ precision agriculture as a means of assessing aspects of soil biodiversity, and the topic of sound pollution could move into focus for soil biota and processes.

Apparently, utterly unknown to me, that day I stepped on to my own land and began to listen to the soil I was pioneering ‘acoustics-based’ precision agriculture. Today I use much more sensitive sound sensing technology. I have also added more than thirty years of experimental reclamation, regeneration, and agricultural experience being directed in my farming decisions by the sounds the soil makes.

Next up:

How grasses and legumes communicate with each other and why it really, really matters!

When Farming in Canada continues.

And finally a twisty footnote. The newspaper article from which I drew the first two quotes were drawn from an article by Ed Struzik that the Edmonton Journal published on May 21st, 2011. From the same article, this is the thought continuation of a quote from Peter Murphy former Dean of Forestry at the University of Alberta and coauthor with Cordy Tymstra of some of the best scientific research papers on the Chinchaga Fire.

But he believes that the system is going to have to find ways of adapting to the new reality that is evolving in the boreal forest. Climate models suggest we are going to see hotter temperatures, more lightning strikes and fires similar to the one at Slave Lake. this week that move quickly. Murphy is not alone in speculating that firefighters are already seeing blazes that are hotter, moving faster and increasingly behaving in chaotic and unpredictable ways. Some recent fires in Alberta have been so hot they created their own weather, producing thunderstorms and lightning that in some cases started other fires.

Peter Murphy was right, on April 30th, 2016 the Beast was born. It was the beginning of the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history. A boreal forest Fire so intense that arguably the best fire fighters in the world and massive fire fighting resources couldn’t stop it before it burnt nearly a million and a half acres and swallowed a large chunk of the City of Fort McMurray.

In very plain prose from the Canadian Disaster Database of Public Safety Canada.

Fort McMurray AB, April 30 to June 1, 2016. In May 2016, wildfires broke out in northern Alberta resulting in the most expensive natural disaster in the history of Canada. The city of Fort McMurray, located in the heart of the Athabasca oil sands, was hit by a massive system of wildfires that swept through the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. The first wildfire was discovered on April 30, north of Fort McMurray. The Regional Municipality declared a local state of emergency and a mandatory evacuation order for Centennial Park on May 1 as well as another evacuation order for Prairie Creek and Centennial Trailer Park on May 2. The Fort McMurray fire grew rapidly due to hot and dry weather conditions, doubling in size to 2,656 hectares in a manner of hours. On May 3, the wildfire intensified and crossed over Highway 63, cutting off the route to evacuees, prompting the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to declare a state of local emergency and a mandatory evacuation order for Fort McMurray’s Lower Townsite and downtown area, which included the communities of Gregoire, Beacon Hill, Abasand, Waterways, Draper, Saline Creek, Grayling Terrace, Thickwood, Wood Buffalo and Dickinsfield. Later in the day the entire city of Fort McMurray was under a mandatory evacuation order. During the evacuations two people were killed in a car crash. On May 4, the Alberta government declared a provincial state of emergency. The Fort McMurray fire quickly grew to 85,000 hectares as the wildfire spread further north and east eventually passing through Fort McMurray. Evacuees that fled north of Fort McMurray had to be air lifted to safety. Some evacuees were taken to Lac La Biche, while the majority where sent to Edmonton and Calgary. On May 10, two of the main Fort McMurray fires joined together and formed a massive blaze of 229,000 hectares. On May 16, all workers in work camps and oil sand operations north of Fort McMurray were forced to move south as the wildfire spread further north. Residents of Fort McMurray were allowed to return home on June 1. In total, the Fort McMurray fires burned approximately 579,767 hectares of land causing the evacuation of over 90,000 people and destroyed 2,400 homes and business, including 530 other buildings that were damaged. At its peak, there were over 2000 firefighters working the fires daily, including helicopters and water bombers. In addition, firefighters received help from 200 firefighters from the United States, 60 from Mexico and 298 from South Africa. Firefighters and emergency response personnel received help from the Canadian Red Cross who assisted with evacuation efforts.

Yes, I have been there, north of Fort McMurray listening to the soil heal from a horrible burn.

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