About Huronview

The Huronview farm is located just south of Clinton, Ontario and was acquired by Huron County in 1895, as the site for the county’s House of Refuge. It was a working farm for the area’s poor, disabled and elderly. Over the years, the facilities evolved into a county nursing home and the 50 acres of rolling land, sloping down to the Bayfield River, were rented to local farmers on a three-year basis. 

Over the years, the Huron Stewardship Council and the Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority worked to retire actively eroding land to trees, and wetlands were created in the lowest part of the field.

Huron county councilors, many of them farmers themselves, went a step further. In 2015, they agreed that instead of continuing to rent the field to the highest bidder, they would rent it to the Huron Soil and Crop Improvement Association (HSCIA) for a 10-year lease, and for a dollar a year. The purpose was to use this field to demonstrate sustainability in action. 

The farmer-led board of directors of HSCIA now takes responsibility for the field operations, bringing their own equipment in to do the job. They have planted grassed waterways over the gullies that were forming down slopes and have planted cover crops that overwinter and keep soil in place until planting. They are transitioning to a continuous no-till system in order to build soil health and aggregate stability in order to reduce erosion and nutrient loss to the Bayfield River and to Lake Huron.