Ruth Butt was a soil health champion

A recent donation by Woodstock’s Rev. Ruth Butt led to the creation of a Canada-wide committee dubbed “Soil Champions.” The Ontario agriculture community certainly lost a soil health “champion” with her passing on Dec. 15, 2023.

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She was 96.

“It wasn’t necessarily planned out this way, but when you look back on her life, there turned out to be so many synergies around the values that she held true throughout her life and what she was able to accomplish,” reflected John Butt, one of Ruth and Dr. William Butt’s eight children, when speaking with Farmtario.

Why it matters: Sizeable donations by Ruth Butt over the past decade helped build capacity for soil research and knowledge-sharing at the University of Guelph and at Glacier FarmMedia’s two major agricultural trade show properties in Ontario and Saskatchewan.

John Butt says his mother first learned about the value of soil health as a child in Saskatchewan, first in Saskatoon and then Lloydminster. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a superintendent of education.

“She was very exposed to the Dust Bowl years in the ‘30s,” John Butt said.

She retained a “visceral memory” of feeling wind-blown soil sting her legs as she walked to school, and learned from both her parents (her father became the voice of CBC Radio’s regular feature “The Prairie Gardener”) about the reasons that soil was lost from farmland.

Decades later, Ruth would tell her own children about viewing a museum display depicting the soil profile of her home region under the native Prairie grass landscape.

“That was a bit of eye-opener, she said, in terms of the importance of what’s under the soil.”

Decades after that, she would follow through on a life-long commitment to spread the word about preserving soil health by transferring $300,000 in proceeds from the sale of the family’s Woodstock-area farm into a nationwide initiative hosted by the Soil Conservation Council of Canada (SCCC).

The Soil Champions committee, which “will work to ensure the care and protection of Canada’s agricultural soil through education, knowledge transfer, forums for collaboration and other activities,” was announced in July 2023 during GFM’s Ag in Motion trade show.

Soil Champions committee members are SCCC chair Ian Boyd, Syngenta Canada past-president Jay Bradshaw, Ontario farmer and conservation advocate Don Lobb, former Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association executive director Andrew Graham, SCCC executive director Jim Tokarchuk and GFM’s Danielle Maynard.

Ruth Butt travelled east to study home economics at what was then the University of Western Ontario in London. There, she met Bill Butt, who later became a doctor and established a family practice in Woodstock. The couple purchased a farm just north of the city and settled into caring for their growing family and community.

In 1979, Ruth became the first-ever female chair of Oxford County’s United Way social services fundraising committee.

“She spoke of having some pushback from some of the gentlemen in the community who thought that wasn’t a role that a woman should be taking on,” John Butt recalled. “It’s very accurate to say that she was a feminist before the word was invented.”

The committee surpassed its fundraising goal in 1979.

On the farm, the Butts sharecropped with Don Hart of Hartholm Farms. Hart’s early adoption of minimum-till and no-till practices really resonated with her, John Butt recalled, “because of what she knew to be important for soil health.”

Bill Butt moved from private practice into the public sphere, accepting the role of Medical Officer of Health for Oxford County. In the early 1980s, the family relocated to the Maritimes when he took over a similar position serving three counties in Nova Scotia.

Ruth again broadened her horizons and continued her lifelong interest in serving the community by enrolling at the Atlantic School of Theology. By the time Bill retired and the family returned to Woodstock and the farm in 1985, Ruth was a nearly 60-year-old graduate with a Master’s in Divinity and an eagerness to serve the United Church of Canada as an ordained minister.

She took an internship at a church in the northwestern Ontario town of Ignace in 1985-86, then returned to Oxford County to serve in an associate minister role at St. Paul’s United in Tillsonburg.

There, she helped set up a program linking young people interested in church involvement with seniors who could offer insight but weren’t able to mingle as much as desired in the community.

On the farm, new neighbours had arrived. Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show relocated to the former research farm directly across the road from the Butts and, as the annual early September show grew, the couple agreed to make available part of their farm for parking.

Ruth’s husband of 63 years passed away in 2010 and when GFM bought Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show and expressed interest in building an agricultural research hub on the site, Ruth developed a vision for promoting her lifelong cause of soil health.

John Butt acknowledges that, with eight heirs to account for, the prospect of selling the family farm required significant conversations, soul-searching and professional input. In addition, “she didn’t seek the spotlight. Her philanthropy was quiet and understated.”

But Ruth recognized that GFM and the Outdoor Farm Show “were going to be in a tight pinch if her farm went to developers” intent on turning the property into houses.

And “she recognized that the sale of the farm would give her the opportunity to pay it forward” by supporting an event she believed had become crucial to the long-term economic well-being of the Woodstock area, and by writing into the agreement a commitment to continue promoting soil health on the 90-acre farm.

“As when the previous owners, the Butt family, owned the land, it will be maintained as a working farm throughout the year and used for parking for the three days of the show,” declared a news release about the sale in 2019.

Also in the agreement is a commitment by GFM to maintain an existing hardwood woodlot and three-acre pond.

“She knew from childhood experience that clearing the land was part of the (soil degradation) problem,” John Butt said.

In 2020, Ruth was inducted into the Order of Ontario Agricultural College at the University of Guelph, recognizing significant financial contributions by individual donors to the OAC Foundation.

An earlier donation was used to create the Butt Family Memorial Soil Knowledge Mobilization Fund, which supports the delivery and dissemination of research-based soil management knowledge and practices at U of G – including through the Soils@Guelph research collaboration and at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show.

As for the new Soil Champions committee, the public can add to the effort by donating in the name of Ruth Butt at soilcc.ca.