Lies about agricultural sustainability; truth about education

rose hip along the North Saskatchewn River

In a given day, like anyone, I hear my share of lies and then every so often a piece of truth falls into my lap. The lies are plentiful, comforting, and easy to act upon. The truths are rare, disturbing, and, all too often, hard to act upon.

Today I received another notice inviting me to attend a conference about “agricultural sustainability.” They are calling it “Balancing the Bottom Line: practical tools and solutions for successful, sustainable prairie farms.” Over the past few weeks I have received several notices about the conference and while I could not tell right off where they stand on questions of agricultural sustainability, things became clear soon enough. The conference is funded by Viterra (the Wheat Pool updated with a corporate-sounding name concocted by an ad agency). I am sure the people attending this conference will all be fine gentlemen (very few women seem to be involved; contrast that with the food security alternatives conference I attended recently, which was 80% women), but I am also pretty sure they are conventional farmers who run massive, high input, high impact farms as they ride the monster that grain and oil seed farming has become today. Their idea of sustainable farming is using pedigreed GM seeds, high doses of glyphosate and artificial nitrogen to make their beleaguered soils produce maximum yields with minimum interference from weeds and other unwanted organisms. Yes, they are becoming more aware of the environmental issues that farming faces, but they don’t want to be outflanked by environmentalists, or by alternative agriculture and organics so they have caught onto the concept of “ecological goods and services.” In fact they are only too happy to point out that they are providing such services—and therefore they should be receiving payments or else why should they continue to keep that slough or patch of bush when it is clearly a liability?

In the end, there is a deep cynicism running through this kind of agri-business speak that comes from the technocrats and businessmen who run the grain industry. The farmers themselves are either naive or willing to take some comfort whenever it is offered: “You mean I can farm 34 quarter sections, spray it with approved chemicals and fertilizers, get enough yield to take a vacation in the Dominican Republic, and call myself sustainable? Wow, sign me up!”

But life offers the odd piece of truth and wisdom too. My good friend Joe Milligan sent me this short and powerful treatise on education by David Orr this morning and, though it is hard and uncompromising, as truth usually is, reading it felt like an act of absolution for my own participation in a world that is so very fond of its myths. Take a minute and read this, What is Education For, by the great and wise David Orr.

lichens on rock

Our History is our History. . . but it is never too late to set things right

North Saskatchewan River valley, near Ruddell, Saskatchewan

I received a letter the day before yesterday from a friend. He enclosed an article he wrote a couple of years ago for a Saskatchewan magazine in which he does a fine job of outlining the environmental catastrophe we have wrought upon our grasslands. A lawyer and a clear thinker, he suggests that the die was cast by the early 1900s. The Dominion Lands Acts and federal policy at the time handed over virtually the entire ecoregion to private interests, principally farmers. Why did we not hold a small percentage back, even a few hundred square miles, to be protected as natural landscape or wildlife habitat?

Things would be much better if we had, he says, and of course he is right. He recognizes that ranching has allowed some of the land to be kept under native cover, but that acreage is declining in quality where the land is managed poorly and over the long run some of it is vulnerable to cultivation, depending on the inverse pricing between grain and cattle markets. As much as 2 million acres of native prairie in Saskatchewan that no one thought would ever be ploughed was destroyed and turned into cropland between 1976 and 1981.

As I read the letter I thought about some things I had seen and heard both in Edmonton and in North Battleford in the past week. In Edmonton, where I was participating in a literary festival (the only all non-fiction festival in Canada), I got to attend the launch of a new book by my friend and mentor, Myrna Kostash. In The Frog Lake Reader, Myrna gathers together historic documents, fragments of private journals, excerpts of fiction, and first hand reports of the events around the only mass hanging on Canadian soil. Desperate for a way to feed their people and encouraged by the events along the South Saskatchewan River, a band of young Cree warriors killed nine settlers at the Frog Lake settlement in 1885. Later that year, Wandering Spirit, Big Bear’s son, Imasees, and six others were tried and hung for what has come to be known as the “Frog Lake Massacre.”

At the reading, Myrna gave a vivid account of what it was like to come upon the monument and mass grave of the hung men tucked behind some bushes on the shores of the North Saskatchewan River, near Battleford. I was heading to Battlefords myself in the next few days to participate in “Inspired by the Land,” a multi-disciplinary show being launched at the Chapel Gallery. Along with other writers, artists, and First Nations elders, I was interviewed for its centrepiece, a video production (a sample here) with a prairie soundscape created by Charlie Fox. I performed a brief reading at the reception along with Sharon Butala. We all visited and delighted in the images, voices, and sounds that curator Dean Bauche and his staff had brilliantly assembled for the show, which is going to travel to other galleries after its run at home in North Battleford. At the end of the evening, I asked Dean if he could direct me to the grave site Myrna had described.


The next morning, I got up in the dark and with Dean’s map in hand, managed to find the grave just before sunrise. Both Myrna and Dean had said to scan around for the tipi that rests over the site. In the barest glimmer of pre-dawn, I swept my binoculars over the valley and there it was, 100 yards downhill from where I stood, just downstream from historic Fort Battleford, the silhouette of the naked tipi poles poking up from the willows and poplars on a broad shelf above the river.


Walking through the bush and standing before the granite monument, I thought of that moment in our history: the bison gone for a decade, Big Bear refusing to sign Treaty 6, his people hungry and desperate, the Indian Agent refusing to give them any food, and then Wandering Spirit and the others killing the agent and settlers when showing their guns was not enough to get him to change his mind.

Food. It was about food. Next year it will be the 125th anniversary of the events at Batoche and Frog Lake, and food is still an important way for the land to speak to us, ask us questions of what we will allow, and how we will live here. Still the great teacher and mediator in our engagement with the prairie.

The show at the gallery was sponsored by the Office of the Treaty Commissioner, and they paid for the chicken wings, vegetables and dip, sausage and other appetizers that we ate at the reception. We sat at round tables, indigenous and settler people together, some distance from those days when treaties were signed as a way of “extinguishing Indian title.” Today there is a growing awareness that, like it or not, we are all treaty people (see Roger Epp's new book of essays) and our treaties are about sharing title not transferring it from the first peoples to colonizers.

Unlike the legislation that gave the prairie over to my ancestors and thousands of other farmers, however, the full promise of the treaties has not yet been fulfilled. Can we go forward and feed ourselves from the bounty of this land without destroying the birds and other creatures who had co-existed with the bison hunters for millennia , and who have been suffering ever since we took title in abrogation of the spirit of those treaties? What would it take for us to begin to live in the spirit of the treaties, with reverence and respect guiding our every relationship, nation to nation, and people to land.

Miracles? Perhaps, but nature specializes in miracles when we let it lead the way. In this part of the world, that means taking our lead from the grass that has always known how to feed the prairie and its dwellers.


From a grave site overlooking the northern plains’ greatest river, with the bones of hungry warriors at my feet, I could not help thinking, “too late, 125 years too late”. Then came the words of an epitaph on another gravestone, resting above the remains of one of the prairie’s great souls: “Courage my friends. It is never too late to make a better world.”

Grass,Sky, Song nominated for GG and Sask. Book Awards

Right about now I'm feeling very grateful and more than a little abashed at the nominations this book is getting. A couple weeks ago it was the Writers' Trust Non-fiction Prize shortlist and just yesterday the phone rang and it was Phyllis, my editor (who is terrfic and who I am still having a hard time believing I can call "my" editor).

"Congratulations again!" she said. (I knew it was the morning of the Governor General's Award shortlisting but was trying hard to not think about it.)

"No," I said.

"Yep, we just got back from the press conference."

I had to check the Canada Council website press release for sure just to be certain there wasn't some mistake.

After lunch, here in Regina, the Saskatchewan Book Awards announced their nominations placing Grass, Sky, Song onto three shortlists: Non-fiction, Regina, and Book of the Year.

Here is an article that appeared on the front page of the Regina Leader-Post today.

I'm going to celebrate now, before the awards are actually handed out, and while I am still able to convince myself it doesn't matter to me whether my book wins or not.

Ted Perrin, native-grass-fed beef in Saskatchewan

the Missouri Coteau, south of Moose Jaw

From time to time I run into someone who is raising and finishing cattle entirely on grass. Often they are using non-native grass, which is still far better than finishing them on grain in a feedlot--better for birds and other wildlife and better for whoever ends up eating the beef. Last week, though, I met a Saskatchewan rancher whose cattle are raised and finished entirely on native grass.

I was at a Food Secure Saskatchewan conference in Moose Jaw where I had been invited to talk about the importance of grass in transforming prairie agriculture toward a healthier engagement with the land. After one of the afternoon workshops I wandered out to look at the book table and started talking to a man who had every sign of being a cowman. (Most of the other attendees were women, and many of them worked for NGOs and government.) He said his name was Ted Perrin. His land is on the north side of the South Saskatchewan River near Beechy. I must've said something about liking the prairie in that area, because the next thing Ted said was, "We can thank the Texans for it". He smiled, wondering if I knew what he was getting at. "You mean the Matador?" I asked. The Matador Ranch, once a vast holding in that area, was owned by Texans as part of their ranching operations all over the Americas, the Matador Land and Cattle Company. The pieces of it remaining in Saskatchewan include some of the northern Great Plains best examples of well-managed rangeland.

Ted said his ranch is called Castleland, named for the locally famous Sandcastle formation.


the Sandcastle near Beechy, Saskatchewan

From the Cypress Hills to the Frenchman River and Wood Mountain to the South Saskatchewan, you will meet people like Ted Perrin who not only graze their livestock on native grass but know and care about the grass and the other creatures who depend upon it. They know the cattle will come and go, but the grass abides. And they know that if they don't have enough grass for the wildlife on their land they probably won't have enough for their cattle. For the Perrins, though, there is an additional reason to conserve the grass. They finish their cattle on native grass, which means that there has to be enough grass left when the animals are in their last few weeks and getting near to slaughter. Others might be able to graze their pastures hard all summer and count on the feedlot to do the fattening, but when you are finishing them on grass, you have to leave enough in reserve to get them to condition for slaughter.

Recently, the Perrins hooked up with a new processing facility in Tugaske, West Bridgeford Meats, which offers customers an array of meat products and the capacity to trace every product to the producer and animal of origin. West Bridgeford has several grass-finished meat producers it works with and so you can request grass-finished or beef from a specific ranch such as the Perrins.

One of the identifying characteristics of men and women who have learned how to take care of native grass is a natural humility. Ted was open and affable but almost blushed when he admitted that a couple of years ago the Society for Range Management recognized him and his wife Olive for their example and long-term committment to the ideals of good range management.

This is a big deal in the world of grassland conservation so back at home I looked it up and found this story on Jean-Claud Harel's excellent blog about Saskatchewan people, landscapes, and culture. Here is a quote from Ted shortly after receiving the citation:

“I guess the award must have come for our rotational grazing on the summer range. We make six pastures instead of two, and we rotate the cattle around the six pastures all summer long. We try to graze each of them only once. That area is allowed to grow until June. It is all native pasture, mostly cool season grasses, but with a bit of warm season grass in there as well."

A year before that, the Perrins won The Duke of Edinburgh Habitat Conservation Award

The grassland needs more people like Ted and Olive Perrin. It is hard to be grateful enough for the kind of leadership and example they offer, but one way to do it is to contact them directly or West Bridgeford Meats and order some Castleland steaks, roasts, and hamburger. For availability and pricing, call Olive Perrin at 306-859-4925.

Using native prairie plants for biofuels--a better deal for birds

Two articles about using native grasses for biofuels came my way recently. Both are worth reading. Here is one from an online journal, "Environmental Protection," where they refer to a new study documented in BioScience. The Nature Conservancy was involved with the study, which looked at the prevailing use of corn to make biofuels and its impact on grasslands and birds. The paper mentions the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) lands that are being lost now as producers are urged by corn and biofuel subsidies to grow corn on land that had recently been turned back into grass. Here is a quote from David Flaspohler, a researcher at the Michigan Technological University: "We are looking at trade-offs between producing a commodity for use as bioenergy and maintaining important ecosystem services such as soil fertility, water quality, and wildlife habitat. It was by ignoring unintended consequences that we've now found ourselves highly dependent on a non-renewable fuel source (fossil fuels) that is contributing to climate change. With some foresight and with information on key trade-offs, I think we can make wiser decisions in the future."

The second article is from Scientific American's website and it looks specifically at the potential for switchgrass to be used in biofuel production. As they point out, if the grass is mowed in fall, the breeding birds (switchgrass supports 19 species of native grassland birds)will have raised their young and left.

Grass, Sky, Song shortlisted for Writers' Trust Non-Fiction prize

Swainson's hawk image generously provided by Jared Clarke

Just found out this morning that Grass, Sky, Song has been listed, along with four very fine books by other Canadian writers, for the 2009 Writers' Trust Non-fiction Prize. Here is a news story about the shortlisting announcement in today's Canadian Press. (Scroll down past the fiction story to get the list of non-fiction nominees.)

And here is the official announcement from Writers Trust: http://www.writerstrust.com/pdf/WTA_Finalists_2009.pdf

Proposal: A Grassland Stewardship Council

Not too long ago, I sat down for a visit with a friend who has been working in prairie conservation for most of his career. We talked about the need to help beef producers make decisions that are good both for the health of grassland and for their balance sheets. “It’s not easy,” he said, “people have been discussing these ideas for a long time, getting together with stakeholders and trying to find a way to make it work.”

He used a phrase that is well known in the grassland conservation world, “ecological goods and services.” A rancher who is looking after native grassland and its riparian areas in ways that conserve ecological values and provide habitat for species at risk is said to be providing “ecological goods and services” that we all benefit from as members of the wider community. Some have argued that such producers should be given annual or one-time payments to reward and encourage their sound management choices.

Finding a way to fund such payments is but one of many obstacles that have made ecological goods and services an idea that has never really gotten off the ground. Even if government money could be found, there are other forces that have stalled the process, including the conflicting agendas of stakeholders who are reluctant to budge from their entrenched positions to get a program started. As well, ranchers are notoriously suspicious of anything that may in any way restrict their liberty to do whatever they like with the land they lease or own. Their legendary independence and reluctance to change makes it difficult to get enough producers to commit to a new way of doing things—especially one introduced by a bunch of government biologists and policy-makers.

I wonder if we’ve been focusing too much on the producer: ‘how can we get producers to do this or do that?’ Cattlemen and women are slow to change and for good reason sometimes. They see someone try a new idea or invest in some alternative approach and then it fails and the other guys all watching it fail can feel justified in sticking with the old ways.

Maybe it’s time to switch attention to consumers. Once there are enough consumers demanding products that are healthier for themselves and the prairie, then the producers will be willing to move.

Some of the things I talk about in Grass Notes are almost entirely unknown to consumers--whether it is Omega threes in pasture-fed animals or the role wheat and the feedlot industry (or in the United States, corn and the feedlot industry) play in carbon production and the decline of grassland ecosystems. Given the right information and labelling, many consumers would like to choose food that is healthier for themselves and the environment--witness what is happening with organics and local food.

What I am getting at is, while we wait for policy makers to discover that grass is good for the Great Plains, we should also be working on another parallel path--which would be about setting standards of sustainable meat production and then labelling products accordingly. This could be done with a non-governmental organization and one good example is the Forestry Stewardship Council, which operates around the world now but started in Canada. The FSC certifies everything from huge pulp and paper companies to small woodlot owners, examining their practices from the forest to the retail store. When you see an FSC logo on printer paper or hardwood flooring or lumber or toilet paper you can determine exactly which sustainable forestry practices were used in its production.

What I am proposing then, is a Grassland Stewardship Council modeled after the FSC. Its mission would be to “promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of Canada’s grasslands.”

With a Grassland Stewardship Council, we could help consumers choose products that come from producers who apply sound grazing practices that sequester carbon and maintain habitat for birds and other grassland creatures. It would be especially important to provide consumers with the choice of grass-finished beef. Some products might be labeled to show that the animals were pastured on sustainably-grazed native grass, while others might indicate that the animals were pastured on non-native grass that is managed with ecological health and carbon sequestration as priorities.

Take a look what the building products giant, RONA Inc. did this year with committing to sell nothing but FSC-approved lumber. This took the FSC 15 years of hard work before getting to this achievement, but it has paid off.

Given a GSC and enough time, if consumers were choosing the right products, the shift away from corn and wheat production and toward more pastured beef and dairy would happen. And once the parade is underway, then it would be easier to get industry and governments interested in jumping in front of it with incentive programs and choices of their own.

In an ideal world, with a government that endorsed such a program, you could fund the whole thing with a tiny percentage added onto the supermarket price of all beef, regardless of how it is raised. The dollars gathered from this of course would cover the costs of the certification program and part of it would also go into the pockets of producers who were raising their livestock and grazing their land according to Grassland Stewardship Council standards. In effect it would be something like a carbon offsets program that would over time be an incentive for more producers to switch to the GSC standards. (And of course, part of the environmental benefit would be the carbon sequestration that is achieved in grass-finished beef and in converting cropland to permanent cover.)

Realistically, though, government and the cattle-slaughter and processing industry would not be willing to participate--at least not at first. Without such a way of funding the program and passing it onto certified producers, the initial approach might be much less ambitious. You could start with a certification process that you'd offer to those who are trying to present alternatives to every phase of the industry--from livestock producers to hay producers to small slaughterhouses and meat processors (if there are any left!). Work with organizations that might be interested to see what might work for producers and other elements of the industry to help get their product to consumers who support better stewardship of grassland. In this smaller-scale model, the certification program's costs would have to be passed onto the the consumer, ideally with a small premium that gets back to everyone in the chain that is certified by the GSC--cattlemen, hay producers, and probably other links I am not thinking of.

I am no economist and not much of a businessman either so I am out of my depth here. It would be good to have the assistance of someone who knows more about developing systems that bring the economy and ecology into a healthier interdependance.

You may be wondering why not simply go with the usual organic certification process. The truth is, a producer can be certified as organic and still plough up all of his native grassland, ruin a creekbed with his animals, destroy habitat for species at risk, and fatten his animals entirely on grain before slaughter--as long as no artificial fertilizers and pesticides are used. The point of a Grassland Stewardship Council would be to identify and certify producers who are the good stewards of native grassland and watersheds and give them a market advantage over the producers who are not.