Agricultural Development in Northern Ontario’s Great Clay Belt: Participants on this pre-congress tour would learn about the on-going research and agricultural development efforts in a region of northern Ontario called the Great Clay Belt. This region is expected to experience agricultural expansion as its climate continues to warm. The soils of this region are diverse, ranging from those formed on sandy eskers, to silty clay glaciolacustrine plains, to those on shallow loamy till deposits over bedrock. Since 2017, the Ontario government has been funding research projects that seek to understand barriers to establishing livestock, model changes in soil carbon and greenhouse gas dynamics, with the conversion of land from boreal forest to agricultural land use, as well as to establish of baseline water and soil dynamics, to enable monitoring changes through the land conversion process. The tour would showcase this research and provide insight into the effects of land conversion.