PROFILE
The Man Who Changed the Way Ontario Farms
By David Morris
“In my whole time, no one did more for Ontario agriculture than George Jones.” Those words from Dr. Jack Tanner, a former colleague at the University of Guelph, summarize how Jones is viewed by those who experienced the changes he helped bring about during the 1950s and 1960s.
Dan
Rose, who started with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs
(OMAFRA) during Jones’s heyday remembers that grain corn really wasn’t an important
crop in much of Ontario then. “George sold himself and everyone else,” Rose recalls.
“He said that anyone who wasn’t growing corn, shouldn’t be farming. He could be
brutally blunt, but he was highly respected by farmers.”Max Ricker, who farmed near Dunnville, remembers George as an annual feature at meetings in Haldimand County. “He told us what seemed to be some pretty wild stories, but they turned out to be the truth. He was really pushing hard for better corn production and better weed control.” And he succeeded. As Tanner says, “George Jones changed the landscape of Ontario.”
Jones grew up on a dairy farm on PEI. He began his professional career there as a school teacher at the age of 18 having completed Grade 11 and a summer course at Normal School. He describes himself as a terrible teacher...but who wouldn’t be, with 47 pupils in 10 grades, in a one-room school? He taught one year and earned $557.50, which enabled him to help his sister finish High School. She returned the favour the next year.
By then, World War II was in full force and Jones enlisted in the RCAF, in which he trained as a navigator and served on Lancaster bombers. So was it his wartime experiences that made him fearless when speaking his mind? “My wife would say it’s because I came from a family of show-offs,” deadpans Jones.
In the spring of 1946, Jones was discharged from the Air Force. That fall, he started at Ontario Agricultural College, majoring in field husbandry (i.e., crop science), got married and “promptly started having kids.” He and his wife, Thelma, have three children – Deborah (Whale), Douglas and Robert. The Jones' divide their time between their home in Fergus and a cottage on PEI.
After graduation, Jones obtained a Masters’ Degree in soybean breeding and joined the staff of the Field Husbandry Department in 1952. He says that two factors contributed to that decision – personal finances and his personality. “We were too poor to move anywhere else and I thought I was better suited to research and extension than to sales,” he said. (Of course, he showed later just how good a salesman he was.) George remained at OAC until 1971 when he accepted a position with Stewart Seeds in Ailsa Craig.
His task in the department was to work on corn and soybean breeding, and he initiated small programs in each – small because he had no technical help and no budget. After all, corn and soybeans were “minor crops” then. Always the thinker, Jones says “I looked around and realized that we were living in the ‘State of Ontario’. Our competition was the neighbouring states in the USA, so we had to be able to produce on the same level they did.” So he set about finding a way to provide them with that.
Many people remember Jones as a strong proponent of continuous corn. However, he says that monoculture was never part of his thinking. He believes it became the norm largely because corn was the most profitable crop to grow. “I was trying to sell a system that would let our livestock people compete with the mid-West. I figured that with two acres of corn and an acre of soybeans, you could put together a complete ration, but I knew it wasn’t that simple, and that there’d always be a place for corn silage, wheat and alfalfa. I never really believed that you could grow continuous corn without a yield loss.”
In Jones’s mind, the real breakthrough was the development of chemical herbicides – products he calls “modern day miracles”. Initially, much of the challenge was simply figuring out how to use them, since chemical weed control was a new concept. Jones credits the late Professor Glenn “Andy” Anderson in this regard. “Andy was the reason this succeeded. He did the plot work and could remember everything we’d ever done and how it had worked.”
Jones and Anderson first tested simazine in 1956. When they saw what it did, they wanted to try it on a whole field the next year, but had no field sprayer. One night, they “borrowed” an orchard sprayer from another department, but then had to figure out how to rig a boom on it and make it work. “But Andy did it”, Jones recalls. “We sprayed the field with two active pounds simazine and then didn’t touch it for the rest of the summer. When I came back from holidays at the end of July, the first thing I did was to go look at that field. It was perfectly clean, except where we had missed. The next morning, I called Don Huntley (chairman of the department) at 7 a.m. to get him out to look at it. The next day, Huntley took Dr. McLaughlin (President of OAC) to see it. After that, I had all the money I needed.”
Following that success, Jones hit the road and convinced several farmers across Ontario to try simazine the next year. Unfortunately, 1958 was a dry summer and there were lots of failures. Then in 1959, everyone learned about the effect of simazine residues on spring grain. This was not the pinnacle of Jones’ career. Some people within OAC even tried to get him fired for tarnishing the image of the College.
The next year, however, atrazine became available and simazine was history. Once again, the team of Anderson and Jones led the way, being the first researchers to publish a paper on the use of atrazine and oil. I’ve heard Jones recount how they worked out the recipe on a napkin while having breakfast in a restaurant.
Throughout this era, Jones travelled the province extensively, promoting the new technology. “I was obsessed”, he says. “I can remember speaking at over 200 meetings some years. Sometimes, I’d be in a room full of farmers, and I’d get so hyper I wouldn’t even know what I was doing. I was under lots of stress, but I loved it.”
Besides advocating atrazine, Jones is remembered for promoting Pride 5 as the one hybrid to grow. Now, he describes it simply as “a reliable, early hybrid, but not spectacular.” A key factor in his decision to promote it was that it belonged to a trustworthy Canadian company. When he thinks about some things he said and did, he says, “It’s a wonder that I didn’t get more criticism than I did – in fact, it’s a miracle I didn’t get canned.”
Archie McLaren, long-time corn researcher at Ridgetown College, remembers that although Jones created lots of discussion, he always had things well thought-out in advance and as a result, he had the respect of farmers. Once, he was threatened with a lawsuit for saying a product was “about as useful of shooting an elephant with a pea-shooter,” as farmer Ricker remembers the story. Tanner recalls that when farmers heard Jones might be sued, they started planning to raise money for his defense. As it turned out, the case never proceeded.
Although events sometimes proved Jones was not infallible, he was never at a loss for words. Tanner recalls one meeting in Chatham in the late 1960s. The price of soybeans had just broken some magical price ceiling (Tanner thinks it was $3), and Jones was enthusiastically promoting them as the crop of the future. “You’ll never see $3 beans again,” he raved. By the time of the same gathering the following year, the price had fallen and a grower challenged Jones. “Last year, you said that we’d never see $3 soybeans again and now they’re only $2.80. What have you got to say for yourself?” Said Jones: “You’ll never see $3 soybeans again.”
The accomplishment that gives him the most satisfaction was his work with OAC students. “I had a captive audience, but we had a great time,” he says. “They always called me George. I taught them to think about things differently, and to control their own resources. I’ve heard some of them say that they learned how to farm in George Jones’ classroom. As a group, they’re the ones who changed agriculture in this province. I may have given them the ideas but it was the farmers who made it work. They were the innovators who really designed the system.”