"This Land is Your Land" by Candace Savage

Lark Bunting--one of many species of birds that rely on the native grasses of Canada's federal Community Pastures

The thought of losing the last great publicly protected grasslands in Canada (see previous posts on the Federal divestiture of community pastures) has stimulated one the prairie's greatest and most eloquent defenders to speak out.

In yesterday's Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, Candace Savage (author of many impressive books of natural history, including the unequalled Prairie: a Natural History) published a stirring and passionate appeal for readers to let the provincial government know that we want to continue protecting these few remaining large remnants of mixed-grass prairie.

Candace sent me a copy and is graciously allowing me to reproduce her words here unexpurgated. Her plea, titled "This Land is Your Land," follows:

If you care about the special beauty of the prairie—if you want know that there will be wild, wide open spaces of natural grassland for your children’s children to enjoy—there is something you can do. It will only take a few minutes, but it could affect the health of the prairie ecosystem for generations.

What’s at stake are some of the largest unfragmented expanses of grasslands anywhere in the world. For the last seventy years, these lands, which comprise an astonishing 929,000 ha, or 2.3 million acres, across the Canadian prairies, have been managed by the federal government as PFRA (now AESB) Community Pastures. Of the eighty‐five pastures in the system, sixty are located in Saskatchewan, with a total expanse of 729,000 ha, or 1.8 million acres. Together, they constitute almost 16% of the natural prairie that survives in this province.

Initially instituted to protect fragile, erosion‐prone soils during the Thirties’ drought, the federal Community Pasture program has ending up delivering a bonanza of economic and environmental benefits. Thanks to decades of conscientious management, the pastures currently provide both quality grazing to livestock producers (on a fee‐for‐service basis) and quality habitat for the prairie’s unique‐‐and uniquely imperilled—plants and animals.

Did you know that, in recent decades, prairie birds have suffered the most severe and widespread declines of any habitat group on the continent? In the face of these kinds of losses, the Community Pastures have become a landscape of hope for many of the grassland’s beleaguered species.

The buffalo ecosystem was shaped by grazing, and on the Community Pastures, grazing by cattle is managed to meet the needs of a diverse array of living things, from burrowing owls to yellow‐bellied racers and from swift foxes to ferruginous hawks. In Saskatchewan alone, thirty‐one endangered and threatened species are known to occur on the grasslands of the federal Community Pastures. In addition, several pastures are included in the Important Bird Areas network, a status that highlights their importance as critical habitat for the conservation of prairie species.

Ferruginous Hawk, photo courtesy of Allan MacKeigan

But the Government of Canada giveth and the Government taketh away, and these days, the Community Pastures are themselves in serious jeopardy. According to a press release issued last month by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, the entire Community Pasture program is on a fast track to extinction. Apparently oblivious to the wisdom of a previous generation, who saw with their own eyes the toll a severe drought could take on these sensitive lands, Mr. Ritz has decided that the pastures no longer require coordinated oversight or long‐term protection. Instead, the land is to be off‐loaded piecemeal onto the provinces (since it is mostly provincial Crown Land), with the first ten properties to be transferred by the 2013‐14 grazing season.

Five of the first orphaned pastures will be in Saskatchewan. The Community Pastures are public land, and their resources of life and beauty are part of our heritage. The hard‐won knowledge gained over decades by Community Pasture staff, as they have grappled with the successive challenges of grazing management, endangered‐species conservation, and oil‐and‐gas development, is a collective accomplishment. Yet to Mr. Ritz, poof, it is just so much dust in the wind. Assets that took decades to acquire could be gone in an instant.

And this is where you and I come into the picture. The land and its creatures can’t speak for themselves, so we have to speak for them. Sadly, I don’t have much faith in our ability to communicate with Mr. Ritz or his colleagues in the House of Commons. (If the courts couldn’t stop them from dismantling the Wheat Board, what chance do mere citizens have?) But I am guardedly hopeful that our provincial representatives will listen to our concerns about how these important lands should be managed in the future.

The big, bold prairie landscapes of the Community Pastures are perfectly adapted for use as grazing lands. Whatever else happens, they must be protected from cultivation and carefully managed for livestock production.

So please take a few minutes to write to your MLA (you’ll find contact information at http://www.legassembly.sk.ca/mlas/) and tell him or her that you care about the livestock producers and Community Pasture staff who rely on these lands for their livelihood. More than that, tell him or her that you care about the prairie’s wild inhabitants, which rely on the wide open spaces of cattle country for their very existence.

A prudent rancher always reserves grass as “carryover” for the following year. The Community Pastures are our carryover for the future.

Candace Savage is the author of Prairie: a Natural History. She lives in Saskatoon and Eastend.

without the hundreds of thousands of acres protected in Community Pastures, the Chestnut-collared Longspur, already on the threatened list, will slide further toward oblivion (image courtesy of Allan MacKeigan)

Stats Canada shows we are heading the wrong direction with Agriculture

This small farm no longer exists but Stats Canada figures won't tell you why.

Every newspaper in Canada today includes a small and unremarkable article tucked away in the national news section, announcing new figures on the nation's farms and farmers. The data comes from the latest Stats Canada figures, which were released yesterday.

We yawn and turn the page, but, given that this is about the way we feed ourselves and treat our land base in the process, we should be choking on our corn flakes at some of the alarming numbers.

How's this one? Across Canada the number of farms dropped by 10.3% from 2006 to 2011. In the last five crop seasons, we lost 23,643 farms!! In Saskatchewan, where we like to lead the way in agricultural dysfunction, the figures are much worse. The total number of Sask. farms dropped by 16.6% during that five year period. We lost almost eight thousand farms by going from 44,329 farms down to 36,952.

Not to worry, though. That loss of farmers and farms was compensated for by big farmers getting even bigger. The average size of a Canadian farm increased 6.9% from 728 acres to 778 acres. In Saskatchewan, once again leading the nation in the move to big ag, the average farm size increased 15.1% to 1,668 acres, which represents the largest increase in the country.

Sifting through the data for a silver lining, I couldn't find much, other than a modest increase in the percentage of Canadian farms that are organic. That figure rose from 1.5% of all farms in 2006 to 1.8% in 2011.

Saskatchewan, however, did its best to knock that number down a notch by actually losing 14.6 per cent of its organic operations since 2006. In the last five years, we have lost more than 1,100 organic operations, because they shut down, left the province or turned back to conventional farming.

No surprise that the number of beef farms in Canada declined sharply while farms growing oilseed and grains increased.

That shift away from pasture agriculture to cropped agriculture is of course bad news for biodiversity, but what about the rest of land use on Canadian farms? How has that changed since 2006? Stats Canada breaks it down into cropland, pasture land, woodland and wetland, and other. "Pasture land" and "woodland and wetland", the categories that allow wildlife to co-exist, both declined. The amount of woodland and wetland on Canada's farms declined by 8.8% in the five year window.

Still on the subject of land use, no-till practices accounted for more than half of all area prepared for seeding across the country. This shift was the result of a 23.8% increase in the area of land seeded using no-till practices. Overall, 17.1% more farms reported using this practice than in 2006. No-till does conserve soil and soil moisture, but it requires a level of chemical use and a scale of equipment that expunges habitat on and around cropland, turning farms into industrial food factories.

This is the kind of rig that makes it uneconomical to leave sloughs, bush, or scraps of pasture on farmland

There are two sets of figures that are missing from the report, even though they represent two primary forces driving all of the other changes. One is the level of hydrocarbon input on the average Canadian farm and the other figure conspicuously absent is the per-unit price of produce when it leaves Canadian farms.

Since the late 1940's, these two trends--the first rising sharply and the other declining--have been driving farmers out of business, consolidating small family farms into massive agribusiness enterprises, and turning on-farm wildlife habitat into a liability.

Nonetheless, these figures released by Stats Canada should wake us up to what is really happening on the public trust of our nation's farms. If we look at these figures with hearts that care about what happens to farmers and to farm community, about the quality of our food and the wellbeing of the native plants and animals who try to survive on Canadian farmland, we will see that we must start heading the other direction.

We must start paying food growers prices per unit that reflect the costs of growing food in ways that are healthy for people and wildness, and we must help farmers to reduce their dependency on hydrocarbons, whether it is to cultivate the land, handle pests, or deliver the goods to market.

To help that happen, we not only have to start meeting the people who grow our food and doing our best to buy local and support more sustainable farm practices. We must at the same time become vocal activists in the political sphere--voting, running for office, protesting and exposing big ag wherever it damages ecology and human community, and talking to one another about the choices we make both in our families and in our corporations and governments.

Tomorrow is Saturday. If you have a chance, get out to your local farmer's market, and buy something healthy for your family, the farmer who harvested it, and the land that grew it.

Offloading Federal Pastures: Part 2

Native Grassland in the Frenchman River Valley

Now that Stephen Harper has decided that the Federal grasslands (formerly PFRA or Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration pastures) are no longer necessary, there is much speculation about what might happen to the land, which reverts back to the respective provincial governments.

Sask. Ag minister, Bob Bjornerud says in this recent article that Saskatchewan is not really interested in managing more provincial pastures, and he suggests that the best solution may be for cattle producers to band together to purchase the local pasture they depend on.

Here is a recent page from a chat group of people who have an interest in cattle and grazing land. Some of their comments are insightful. One person suggests that the federal pastures were getting too costly. Others express concern over the amount of regulation and red tape making it less attractive for livestock people to put their cattle on the PFRA pastures. Industry pressures driving out the small to medium- sized cow-calf operators is listed as another factor that has played a role in the way the federal pastures are used by local producers.

The conservation NGO community in Saskatchewan is hoping to work with livestock producer groups to develop a solution that could be put forward to the province, one that would serve the interests of grazers while conserving the ecological integrity of these critical pieces of grassland.

One possibility would be to make as many of the old PFRA pastures as possible into "Heritage Rangelands." This term comes from Alberta. Almost ten years ago now, the province of Alberta took steps to preserve "the legacy of both its ranching heritage and its prairie grassland" by establishing

This quote comes from a document released by the Alberta Wilderness Association describing the Heritage Rangelands program at its inception.

The idea would be to offer grazing for local livestock producers at fair rates, but manage the land primarily for ecological sustainability and biodiversity.

I am told there is no rush because it will take years to turn these lands over to the provinces. On the other hand, as we know from our experience with the Wildlife Habitat Protection Act lands in Saskatchewan, our government has a way of suddenly announcing decisions without consulting the conservation community.

Someone should remind the premier's office and the ministries of environment and agriculture that they do not want another situation where they are seen to be not consulting the public on an important conservation issue in Sask, and that the public and its conservation community must be consulted and included in the planning for what will be done with these pastures.


Sprague's pipit--one of the many endangered species for whom the PFRA pastures represent critical habitat.

Earlier this week I received an email from well-known (and now retired) native prairie seed-producer, Nora Stewart. She mentioned that in recent summers her daughter Laura has done field work (plant ID) in two Sask. PFRA pastures: Lomond (near Weyburn) and Tecumseh (north of Forget) pastures for the past two summers.

Nora says that long-term oil activity has badly degraded Lomond and will soon do the same to Tecumseh (a pasture I describe briefly in Grass, Sky, Song, pp. 118-119). All grasslands seem to be under assault from the gas and oil industry. Our declining native prairie ecosystems cannot afford to lose any more habitat--whether to resource development or to privatization or government neglect.

The old PFRA pastures represent a critical opportunity to do something lasting and visionary with some of the most ecologically rich grasslands remaining on the continent. We must not let this moment pass without making every effort to find the kind of common ground between cattle grazers and conservationists that will ensure the health of these important remnants of prairie wildness. To do any less will be to abandon some of Canada's most critical habitat for endangered species, in essence repeating Stephen Harper's own cynical gesture to wash his hands of these vital and historic landscapes.

yellow coneflower growing on native prairie

Federal Pastures to be Offloaded

The Canadian government has announced it will no longer manage this kind of native grassland on the plains.

Some of the best native grassland in North America has for more than half a century been maintained and protected by the Canadian Government through what we used to call the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration or "PFRA".

These large pastures have been critical for cow-calf operators in Saskatchewan, giving them affordable access to grazing land in summer. The PFRA, however, always saw the maintenance of healthy grassland, protecting it from drought and overgrazing, as their number one priority. As this government web page says,

the program uses cattle grazing as the primary tool, supported by the latest range management science, to maintain a healthy, diverse landscape, which is representative of the natural functional prairie ecosystems.

That vision of grazing as a tool for ecological management of grassland stands in opposition to the commonly held view of grassland as a tool for growing grain or livestock. Because of this ecological stance from the PFRA model, the pastures are some of the last strongholds of Canada's many endangered grassland species at risk--from rare wildflowers and butterflies to the Swift Fox, Burrowing Owl, and many other birds.

Over the last decade the ministry of Saskatchewan Environment has designated sites of critical habitat for protecting the province's biodiversity and ecological wellbeing. They call it the Representative Areas Network or RAN. This government document on RAN shows that 64 of the PFRA pastures in Saskatchewan, totalling more than 650,000 hectares, are included in RAN.

Earlier this month, the Federal Government announced that they would be divesting themselves of all of the PFRA pastures, turning the land back to the provinces concerned. An article in the Winnipeg Free Press gave the following figures:

There are 60 federal pastures in Saskatchewan, covering about 1.78 million acres or 720,340 hectares. Most of that pasture would revert back to the control of the province, which says no decision has been made on what would happen to the land.

Apparently 1.6 million acres of that land will revert to the Saskatchewan Government. What will the Brad Wall Government in Saskatchewan do with the land? There is little chance they would keep the pastures and include them in the provincial community pasture program, but if they did that would not be good news either.

Anyone who has compared the ecological condition of a Saskatchewan Provincial Community Pasture with a Federal PFRA pasture knows that the province does not do as good a job balancing the needs of grazers with the carrying capacity of the grass and the imperative to maintain biodiversity. The condition of the rangeland and its capacity to support our beleaguered prairie plants and animals would decline rapidly under provincial management. There are good reasons for this and they are the same ones that explain why National Parks are maintained better than our provincial parks. The Federal Government has deeper pockets and has traditionally used those financial resources to protect Canada's natural heritage on Federally-managed lands.

Our Species at Risk Act (SARA) protecting Canada's endangered species depends on the Federal Government at the very least living up to its legislative committment to protect those species where they occur on land managed by Federal agencies. This fact has not escaped the notice of the Conservative Government now busily dismantling the commons and the legislative imperative for environmental responsibility at the federal level.

They know that if they can offload their responsibility for lands that hold the greatest numbers of endangered species, AND eviscerate the Environmental Impact legislation that is to protect our most vulnerable creatures from industry (see this Winnipeg Free Press article today on the changes being rammed through in an omnibus bill), they will be able to clear the way for oil and gas and other corporate interests to use the land as they see fit.

Giving up 1.78 million acres of the most endangered habitats in the country is a sneaky way for Stephen Harper to wash his hands of its equally endangered species.

Across the continent it has been demonstrated time and again that the best way to protect our declining grassland species is to maintain their critical habitat through public ownership. Private land-owners, no matter how well-intentioned, are pressed by market forces into management and land use modes that leave endangered species far down the priority list. And in cases where a private owner does manage the land well for a few years, that changes once the landowner dies or retires, selling the land to new interests which many not be as enlightened. Once critical habitat is privatized, the public interest of maintaining biodiversity has no leverage, no way to influence how the land will be used in perpetuity.

When are we going to wake up to the truth that laws protecting endangered species are useless without legislation to stop governments from giving up the management of the land critical to their survival?

It's time to declare endangered landscapes and begin working with governments, NGOs, industry, farmers and ranchers to find ways to protect those landscapes in perpetuity.

More on this topic next week.

A last photo album from the Haig-Brown House

crocuses coming up at the front step of the Haig-Brown house

Karen and I are driving back to the prairie this week after my five month term here in Campbell River as Writer-in-Residence at the Roderick Haig-Brown House. We will miss the many generous and good people we have met here this winter, the rivers, seascapes, mountains and forests we have gotten to know as well, and the birds, but we are missing home too and our older children and friends in Saskatchewan.

Here is a series of recent photos I've taken here of birds and plants as the spring advances on the Haig-Brown property and its seventeen acres of flower beds, Kingfisher Creek, the riverside paths, and of course the many trees planted by Roderick and Ann Haig-Brown.

The marsh and creek have been lit up with Marsh Lantern or Skunk Cabbage for the last couple of weeks:



Sometimes you have to show a really bad bird photo just to give a more realistic idea of the poor backlit views you get when you are out birding. This is a Bewick's Wren and he was singing like the marsh was his personal sound chamber:



I never realized how dull the head markings of the Golden-crowned Sparrows look in winter until I arrived here. Still a lovely bird.



This Great Blue Heron sat still for dozens of shots at close range:



Here is the Fawn Lily, a bright and beautiful creature that covers the riverside, fed by the dying salmon left on shore by eagles, gulls and bears:


This last shot shows the daffodils coming up beneath the trees where I am told Ann and Roderick's ashes were spread.

Spring Birds at Haig-Brown House

Fox Sparrow

This week has brought some of the nastiest winds Campbell River has seen in a while. A south-easter ripped across Discovery Passage and into town, uprooting 130 foot high firs and tearing large limbs off countless trees.

When the weather abated this week I got out to take some shots of the birds that are singing in the garden here. The Fox Sparrows here on the West Coast are so much darker than ours on the prairie, and they have an almost uniform brown tone on the back, reminiscent of a Hermit thrush, which also has the russet tail. Here is another shot of a Fox sparrow taken right in front of the house:



Of course some Fox sparrows have been here all winter, but now the odd one sings (listen to a sample here from the Cornell Laboratory page on the Fox Sparrow). The Song Sparrows are much more vocal (listen to a sample here on the Cornell Laboratory page on Song Sparrow).





The Spotted Towhees have also been singing this week (listen to a sample here from the Cornell Laboratory page on Spotted Towhee). Here is a male, with what looks to me like very light spotting compared to our interior Spotted Towhees in Saskatchewan.



Finally, though they do not sing, these two twitterpated bald eagles were making a racket in one of the big firs, high above the Haig-Brown world, where Roderick once estimated he had seen hundreds, even thousands of eagles roosting atop his favourite fir over the years.

Writer in Residence Experience--on video

Crocuses have been up for two weeks here. . . .

The local cable company here in Campbell River (I still have five weeks of my winter Writer-in-Residence time here remaining before we return home to Saskatchewan) has produced a couple of segments I thought I would post here.

This first one is a short piece on the Writer-in-Residence program and my time here this winter. Some shots of the property and the river, and I get to talk a bit about the Haig-Brown legacy--which will also be the topic of a lecture I am presenting for Earth Hour on March 31 (here is some information on that event.)



The second video is a half hour show on the community channel talking about the Words on the Water Writers Festival here in Campbell River on March 23 and 24. Co-founder Trevor McMonagle and I talk about the festival, the writers who are coming, and about books and the rapidly changing landscape of publishing.



Here is a shot of the rainforest above Elk Falls, in the provincial park just west of Campbell River.