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.

Another voice in this discussion: Doug Booth

Anyone interested in this discussion of possible solutions should look at the work of Doug Booth, who is using his blog to develop ideas for a new book on what he is calling "The Coming Good Boom," as opposed to the usual booms we get, which are not really good in the long run. Doug has a refreshing and optimistic voice, and as a retired professor of economics he brings some much needed analytical skill to the discussion.

Here is a recent posting on how changing the corn belt to grass-based agriculture would help us address a whole suite of environmental and social problems we face in the middle of this continent.

Fostering Consumer Choice : More Searching for Solutions

Last week, I began to describe the industrial model that ultimately determines how grassland is used—controlling the prices and marketing that in turn limit the viable options for farmers and ranchers. (Anyone interested in a more detailed critique of this system would do well to read the National Farmer Union’s document entitled “The Farm Crisis and the Cattle Sector: Toward a New Analysis and New Solutions”) (Cathy Holtslander of Beyond Factory Farming put me onto this report.)

I believe we might be able to help producers choose practices that are good for the ecology of grassland and its native plants and animals by in turn giving consumers more choices. Easy to say; not so easy to do.

As things are, in most of Canada if you want to buy grass-finished beef or beef from cattle that graze on well-maintained native pasture or on tame grass managed with Holistic Management principles you pretty well have to buy it directly from the producer. There are good reasons to buy directly from the farm or ranch and I do it myself all the time, but if you talk to most of these men and women they will tell you that the majority of the animals they raise end up going into the system, which means they are sold to feedlots and corporate slaughter and processing facilities. All the good work they do in raising animals in an ecologically sound manner, in producing beef that is high in Omega-3 fatty acids, in sustaining grassland habitat, is in a sense lost within the system. The health benefits of a grass-fed animal are entirely lost after a few weeks in the feedlot eating grain, growth hormones and anti-biotics. And once the meat gets to the store as steak, roast, or hamburger, there is no way to distinguish it from beef raised by someone who has not made the effort to conserve habitat, and who in fact may be destroying riparian areas, following poor grazing practices, and ploughing native grass to seed it to crested wheatgrass.



Many beef producers are following excellent stewardship practices, but others are not. If there was a way for consumers to distinguish between the two, their choices at the supermarket would benefit those who are following best practices and provide others with an incentive to improve.

In my next posting, I will look at how the forestry industry in Canada has dealt with a similar situation.

What to Keep and What to Change: More Searching for Solutions

a shot of the lake at dawn. There is often mist on August mornings

How do we begin to transform prairie agriculture to foster a healthy relationship between grassland ecosystems and the human economies that depend on them?

Deciding what to keep and what to change as you try to improve any human structure or system is never easy. On the old farm we share with two other families, the keep or change question comes up every time we try to fix something in the cookhouse, plant a tree, or salvage posts from a fence no longer useful.


Last weekend I was prying some weathered pine boards off the old corral to use them in a wood shed I am making to store firewood for our cabin. It was a good corral, probably held cattle for fifty winters or more, and I found myself wondering if it was a mistake to be taking it apart. We don’t keep cattle and work with a neighbour to graze our pasture, but, you never know, some day I might want to have a way to corral animals. Still, I wanted to finish my woodshed so I kept tearing the pine slabs off. Alternately swearing and marvelling at the small nails that seemed to grip the boards better than their larger counterparts, I started to think about the other man who nailed it together a long time ago to shelter his cattle, feeding them with hay from our east fields.

When he wanted to sell his cattle, did they go to a feedlot for several months of fattening before being slaughtered and processed at a meat packer? The facilities might have been smaller and nearer to home back then, and perhaps the cattle received no hormones and fewer antibiotics, but they were likely finished on a diet of grain the way most market cattle are today. Fifty years ago, this model was relatively new but today it is in full control of the grazing economy that to a great degree determines how we treat grassland ecosystems.

When you go to a supermarket for ground beef or buy a burger at a fast food joint, your purchasing power connects you to a massive processing and marketing system that is run by a handful of corporations for the benefit of shareholders. On the other side of that meat industry mountain there are the men and women trying to make a living raising cattle on the pastures that host the remaining populations of North America’s grassland birds. Most of these people are on the land because they love it; they do their best to make a decent income without compromising the natural ecosystems and species at risk on their holdings. But the multi-national corporations that ultimately bring products from their animals to market do not share those interests. They do all they can to make sure that they price they pay to cattlemen is as low as possible, without considering the consequences on farm families, farm communities, and the natural ecosystems they depend upon.

A year after we bought our farm we found out that the previous owners had been forced to sell because of debt that became unserviceable in the face of the BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis)crisis driving cattle prices even lower than usual. As sad and disconcerting as it was to learn that we had in a sense gained from their misfortune, I know too that in a larger sense the system that produced the BSE crisis and then used it as another way to keep beef prices low has had us all—producers and consumers alike—snared in its net for a long time.

a flight of cormorants heading to the lake

Groping for alternatives--more on the search for solutions

Selaginella densa (little club moss) growing on native mixed-grass prairie

Craig Larson, who lives (and writes a couple of fine blogs: Haskap Wine and Native Shores) on a farm in the Swan River Valley, Manitoba, and raises hay, lamas, and haskap berries, sent me an email about the three questions I left at the end of the last post.

He said “No one has so much as given me the time of day when it comes to thinking alternatively to my procedures here - I'm seen as an oddity just being organic. My local extension officer won't even talk to me when we meet.” Craig went on to describe the provincial government’s offers to help him market his haskap berries and said that they assume they have better ways “to access agri-industry so that I can become wealthy (the latest marketing seminary to be put on by Manitoba is entitled 'Show Me The Money' - gag). It's all marketing...smoke and mirrors.” He closed by saying, “Personally I think that an independant system needs to be started by people who will not compromise - but then you get ideological types in there as well and the next thing is that everyone is held hostage to principles again.”

There’s a lot to think about in the experience of any one person trying to grow food in ways that conserve some of the natural values of the farm. Often their troubles begin when they engage with the government and non-government agencies that either try to help farmers grow and sell their produce or minimize environmental degradation caused by intensive land use.

I wonder if the problem, though, is not the agencies and programs, which after all are trying to help reduce the chaos and mop up some of the mess, but something larger at work. Craig’s word “independent” may be important here. Cattle producers depend upon, are at the mercy of, an industrialized beef-fattening, slaughter and processing system that most of them would not choose if they had a choice. The two or three large corporations running that system are not evil; they are just doing what corporations do—maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. We can’t expect them to do otherwise, any more than we’d expect a wolf to give up killing for a living. It is a big system, though, and it holds all the cards—including government approval and support—so any independent alternative would have to grow slowly over a long time frame.


photo by Karen Herriot

Who has the incentive to undertake such a big task? I can think of at least three elements that would have to come together to transform or circumvent the existing system of growing food in grassland ecosystems: farmers and ranchers who to varying degrees would like to make a reasonable profit and produce healthy food without having to draw down the ecological resources of their land; consumers who to varying degrees would like to be able to buy healthy food grown in ways that conserve the ecological resources of the land; and naturalists, scientists, and nature advocates who want to conserve and restore grassland ecosystems.

Together, these three interests are going to have to grope for new and better ways of bringing food to our tables, with some help from more visionary NGOs, but not likely from any institution or agency that is caught up in the mainstream of agriculture and economic growth. Driven by honourable goals, we will likely get impatient and justify less than honourable means to get there and that will take us down some blind alleys. In the end, if any progress is made it will be through patience and ensuring that the means we use are congruent with and worthy of our vision of restoring and conserving the integrity of the prairie and its natural biodiversity.

The model on this journey is Wes Jackson and his Land Institute in Kansas. Wes is in it for the long haul as he searches for permaculture that will work in growing perennial and sustainable grassland crops. Anyone trying to use grazing in ways that will conserve and restore healthy grassland ecosystems has to adopt the same moral, patient, and uncompromising vision.

Ok, we know some of the problems—how about some solutions?

Large, complex environmental issues like the degradation of grassland ecosystems can’t be solved overnight or by tinkering with land use practices and government policy. The forces at play are powerful and entrenched favouring the status quo. Governments don’t seem very interested in passing legislation to stop landowners from ploughing native grass; no one has yet found a practical way to restore large pieces of native grassland; and most economic policy affecting grassland is still aimed at maximizing yields of agricultural produce, driving prices down, and exporting to foreign markets.

Meanwhile, any talk of sustainability or stewardship eventually runs up against two realities: one, grain farmers and cattle producers are already being squeezed between high input costs and low farmgate prices, and two, any stewardship practices adopted by farmers or ranchers, whether they increase costs or not, cannot be compensated for or even recognized within the marketing systems available.

To even begin the discussion of what might help our long-suffering grassland ecosystems, then, we have to look for ways to help producers with that cost-price squeeze and bring stewardship practices into the value of the food they produce and sell.

Over the next few posts, I hope to discuss ideas and possibilities, but I am making this up as I go along and would welcome any thoughts from others. Here are some questions to consider from the beginning (please email me your thoughts at trevor.herriot@sasktel.sk.ca):

1. How do we provide farmers and ranchers with alternatives that compensate them for stewardship practices (fostering habitat, protecting watersheds and species at risk, etc.)

2. Selling direct to consumers at farmers markets or at the farm gate is already being done, but this is a miniscule portion of the agriculture being conducted in grassland regions and many producers who do sell their own produce are still dependant on the dysfunctional “agri-food” industry that gets their products to more consumers. For example, people who sell their own grass-finished beef to a few enlightened city people, still end up selling most of their livestock into the big system that drives prices downwards and depends on unsustainable and unhealthy practices, including intensive grain feeding, hormones and antibiotics. How do we offer an alternative so that they can concentrate on looking after the land and growing healthy animals instead of having to do the marketing themselves?

3. What happens when producers try to develop their own alternatives to the big system and fail? For example Natural Valley Farms at Wolesley and Neudorf? What can be learned from them?

Re-introducing the black-footed ferret to Grasslands National Park

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

On October 2nd, Parks Canada will release around 40 black-footed ferrets into the prairie dog colonies in Grasslands National Park, implementing the recovery strategy for the black-footed ferret devised by the national recovery team and published earlier this year. The last wild ferret seen in Canada was in 1937 near Climax, Saskatchewan, and the species has been listed as extirpated by the federal government.

Everyone seems very excited to hear about the re-introduction of the ferret. Its always good news to hear that an extirpated animal is being given a second chance. And it is especially important in any ecosystem to have healthy populations of predators. I know some of the biologists on the recovery team and trust their judgement, yet can't help wondering if this is not the best way to proceed.

One of my concerns is that the area of appropriate habitat for the ferret is too small and limited for this to be characterized as a re-introduction that restores proper functioning to an ecosystem. Part of the quality of healthy grassland is an expansiveness that allows any species to shift and move as the habitat changes over time in any one place. But grassland today doesn’t always function that way—particularly when you look at something like the ferret. It has to have black-tailed prairie dogs but the area of prairie dogs in Canada is restricted to a very small zone in and around the national park. It’s one thing to re-introduce swift foxes all across Canada’s southern plains or to re-introduce wolves to Yellowstone. In those cases there is ample habitat outside the parks, supporting the prey for those predators. Introducing the predator then can genuinely be said to help make it a fully functioning ecosystem.

I don’t think we can say the same about ferrets introduced into a geographically isolated prairie dog community that is 1000 hectares and not expanding appreciably.
Of course, if it works and the ferrets somehow make the prairie dog colonies more vigorous and their range expands too and the ferrets are able to survive on Richardson’s ground squirrels, and other species at risk are not being harmed by the re-introduction, then it might all be worth the effort. But it is an expensive gamble. What if the ferrets become inbred or die from plague or are eaten by great horned owls and other predators? Are they going to start dusting prairie dog burrows with deltamethrin and culling Great horned owls? And what will deltamethrin do to the burrowing owls who nest in the prairie dog towns? If the numbers of ferrets get too low will they keep supplementing with more captive bred animals? How far do we go with this? And why spend so much effort on something that doesn’t really have a chance to expand beyond this one small area?

There are many other larger and more immediate problems in our grassland ecology that are not getting enough attention. It is a matter of triage: instead of trying to manage critical habitat for an animal that no longer exists in the wild in Canada, why don’t we focus on securing and protecting critical habitat for the animals that are still breeding in the wild but struggling to maintain their populations? No one can tell me how many black-footed ferrets we once had in Canada—but we know that only 20 years ago we had thousands of Greater Sage Grouse and today we have a couple hundred. No, it doesn’t have to be either/or but let’s face it—resources are shrinking, from both government and private agencies, so we have to make wise choices.

I guess I am wondering too if this kind of high profile re-introduction is going to take the place of real grassland restoration and conservation. Is this is the right way to bring our grassland back to health?

Are we turning Grasslands National Park into a kind of living museum of what the grassland used to be, instead of using funds and resources to help the grassland in and around the park attract and support the best possible biodiversity on its own? Wouldn’t it be better to be working on the landscape community and ecosystem level rather than on one species that perhaps was never that common in Canada? We could use that Federal money to secure and protect the last Sage Grouse habitat in Alberta and Saskatchewan, or to keep oil and gas development out of the Sage grouse habitat, or to expand the park boundaries or work with neighbouring landowners to restore land to native grasses.

What it comes down to is this—does re-introducing a single species into a small patch of very limited habitat advance the overall effort to conserve and restore the mixed-grass prairie? Is it a wise use of limited resources?

Or is it about showcasing conservation to say, “here, look, we are making progress, doing good things with endangered species, bringing them back to their native habitat.” While all around the park, we are losing the quality and quantity of grassland habitat in general and many species at risk appear to be on their way out the door. Twenty years from now when those species are gone, will the solution be to do the same thing and bring them back with management-intensive re-introductions in small pieces of protected habitat? In place of wild, self-sustaining populations breeding and migrating as free species will we be happy with captive-bred ferrets, grouse and owls that we show to the tourists as examples of what native grassland creatures once looked like?

Are we managing for healthy and diverse grassland ecosystems or presiding over the degradation of grassland from wild, functioning ecosystem to human-managed living museum?

Advocates of this kind of species-introduction might defend the expense and effort by saying that it will bring a lot of attention to the park, which in turn will help people to see the need for grassland conservation.

This kind of thinking always sounds reasonable, partly because it is the familiar form of rationalization we use everyday to justify the moral compromises we make in our own lives. But whenever we justify less than worthy means by pointing to honourable ends we are participating in the ultimate erosion of the very good we want to uphold. If we care about our native grasslands and the species that depend upon it, we must ensure that the way we act and the choices we make today are in every way worthy of our long-term goals of conservation and restoration.