About the Archive

Over the 11-year period from 1986 until 1997, there was a series of Federal-Provincial initiatives which delivered excellent environmental programs, focussing on improving the sustainability of production agriculture in the Province of Ontario, while reducing pollution in the Great Lakes Basin. The overall funding for these programs approached $100 million.

The origins of this archive web site date back to 1995 when Bruce Bowman developed the Canada-Ontario Agriculture Green Plan web site, as part of the communications strategy for that Program.

Following the completion of the Green Plan Program in April 1997, archiving activities continued, adding earlier environmental programs, including the SWEEP (101 reports) and Land Stewardship Programs. Since digital versions of reports were unavailable, or incomplete in most instances, hard copies of the reports were scanned, and converted into WordPerfect documents using OCR (optical character recognition) software, which were then re-formatted and compressed into the universally-accessible PDF format for online viewing.

During succeeding years, additional environmental programs were added to the archive, including The Great Lakes Water Quality Initiative and the Ontario portion of the National Soil Conservation Program reports.

PLUARG (1972-1979) was a very significant predecessor of the 1986-1997 group of environmental programs. The funding for the PLUARG program approached $20 million (in 1972 $$), which was a joint Canada-U.S.A. environmental program of the International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes (IJC).

In mid 2006, Bruce started scanning and converting several valuable reports from the PLUARG program and since retiring in August 2006, efforts have continued to locate and scan additional Canadian- based PLUARG reports, now numbering more than 80.

More recently, Bruce has been archiving environmental programs, with their respective reports, associated with Conservation Ontario and their network of 36 Conservation Authorities, including the Clean Up Rural Beaches (CURB) (1991-1996) (78 reports), and other projects, including  the Stratford-Avon River Environmental Management Project (SAREMP, 1980-1984) (> 25 reports) and the Thames River Implementation Committee (TRIC, 1976-1982) (about a dozen related reports). Included in these latest additions are reports from the early 1950's, as well as basin-wide reports from the mid 1970's.

Since the Ontario Ministry of Environment has funded so many reports over the past 40 years that were not directly linked to archived programs on this site, we have started a separate O.M.E.-funded Report List, which now numbers over 115 reports.

On this archive web site we endeavour to provide an accurate overview of historical agri-environmental programs in Ontario over the 1970 - 2000 period, and continue to archive digital versions of these valuable reports, which now approaches 580. We welcome contributions to the archive, either in hard copy (copy of original), or in image-based PDF format, which we can process.

February, 2012

Last Revised: Wednesday, February 01, 2012 03:16:39 PM