Community pastures: "a vital support for rural communities"

Longhorns near Val Marie

With the Federal government breezily sloughing off responsibility for its community pastures--nearly one million hectares of endangered grassland habitat that Canada has been protecting for more than seventy years--it is easy for conservationists to forget that, if we let this piece of the commons go, a shared cultural, social and economic resource that has been serving rural communities for decades will be lost as well.

Part of what the old PFRA pastures provided was a form of consistent oversight and administration of vulnerable lands that are valuable not only to birdwatchers and naturalists, not only to cattlemen, but to all of us who want to have clean water, carbon sequestration, and wild beautiful landscapes as part of the prairie world of today and the legacy we share and pass forward. Included in that legacy is both the current benefit of affordable grazing for local cattle producers and the heritage of cowboys and ranchers who have for more than a century found what has been the single most sustainable form of agriculture on the northern Great Plains: properly managed grazing of cattle on native rangeland.

I recently received a letter from Barb Campbell, who lived for several years in cattle country near the Val Marie Community Pasture. Barb's letter reminded me of these other many values of the community pastures and how they touch all of us whether we live on a ranch or far away in the city. She tells me that she sent this same letter to MLAs and to the Premier.

One of the astute comments Barb makes early on in her letter is that the Federal government seems to not have a plan in place to ensure that the agricultural and ecological values represented in the 80 community pastures will be protected in perpetuity. A lot of us share that concern.

Here is Barb's letter, just as she forwarded it to me last week:

A City Dweller's Guide to the PFRA

Community pastures, currently run by the federal government, are the very foundation of Saskatchewan's dryland cattle industry, and they are also the perfect habitat for wild creatures. The pastures are currently being threatened by a change from federal government control to an as yet unknown method of administration, without any clear plan in place to protect their vital role. I support their continued existence and recognize their importance. I saw first hand how they help the ranchers and the natural environment when I lived in Val Marie for 7 years. I am writing to urge the provincial government of Saskatchewan to take over administration of the community pastures and to run them for the benefit of the rural communities.

Established by the federal government after the Great Depression and drought, the pastures provide grazing on native grasses for carefully controlled herds of cow-calf pairs. PFRA stands for Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. The PFRA pastures I know most are around Val Marie , Cadillac and the Montana border region. The pastures cover the beautiful hilly uplands of the area, land that could never be cultivated, and provide a huge boost to the local cattle industry. And they are also some of the most glorious places I have ever seen in the province of Saskatchewan.

Ranchers are permitted so many animals per acre, and the cow/calf pairs are let into the pasture in June. Getting them from their home ranch, some miles away, to the pasture gates is a lot of fun. It is a cattle drive, in the old fashioned sense, and riders on horseback and on quads lead the herd. Others follow the herd, and some ride along side. If you are driving in the area in June, you may have to wait on the highway to let a herd cross. It is a thrill to see about 200 animals in motion, hopefully going forward, but sometimes ducking and darting off to the side to try to get away. It should be noted that all the animals going into the pasture are all females with young calves.

Inevitably cows that have been to the PF for many years just know the way and plod along with acceptance. Some of the young heifers (first time mothers) are more spooked, and have to be chased and blocked along the way. When they get to the PF gate, they are kept there outside the gate for a half day or so to let the pairs “mother up” . Usually some calves get separated from their mothers in all the confusion, and the time is needed for them to find each other again. The mothers moo and the calves baah, and by recognizing the right cry, the mothers claim their calves. I love the expression to “mother up”. And it is always so heartwarming to see a pair reunited.

In case you are wondering where the bulls are, they are kept elsewhere for the summer, having already performed their job . Yes, that's right. By the time the cows go to the PFRA, they are (hopefully) already pregnant with next spring's calf. So the nutritious grazing is pre-natal nutrition for the unborn calf, and nutrition for this year's 3 month old calf. As such, the grazing is very important to the health of the herd.

Once in the PFRA pasture, the herd is the responsibility of the pasture manager and the riders (employees on horseback aka. cowboys) and they are well supervised for the summer season. If you ever wondered why rodeos have competitions in roping and cutting out calves, it is because these skills are used everyday by the riders. Rodeos were a chance to see who could do the job the best. The riders know where the herd is, whether any calves or cows have died, how much weight they seem to be gaining. The pasture is up on the uplands; beautiful hills covered in native grass, with water provided by either springs or wells. In a wet year, the grass is lush. In a dry year, it is shorter and dry looking. But remarkably, it provides good nutrition just the same. This mat of prairie grass is called 'prairie wool', and it adapted to survive the extremes of temperature and the near desert conditions of the southwest.

In the fall, the process is reversed, with the riders bringing the herd to the gate, the rancher and helpers waiting on horseback or on quads to drive them home. By now the calves are quite grown up and less likely to get separated from their mother. The mothers are more nonchalant about the calves too. It is kind of like the difference between the first day of kindergarten and the last day of Grade 6. Three months on the community pasture is not free, and there is a per day charge to the rancher. But it is far cheaper than renting pasture land privately or buying the hay to feed the herd.

The jobs created are important to the local economy of the small towns in the area. There is the pasture manager and usually a group of 4-5 riders, all of whom are the government payroll. This injects much needed money into the local economy. I am unaware of any PFRA employees who are female, but many pasture managers and riders have wives and children, who bolster numbers in the local schools, and work for the local health centers, banks, restaurants and stores. In other words, the PFRA staff are a vital part of the community. There are also contract jobs fencing the pastures. This is well paid work that demands physical skill and the toughness to work outdoors doing heavy work under all weather conditions. The PFRA- built fences are the envy of the local ranchers, who can rarely afford the premium posts and extra strands of wire used by the government.

As far as the role of the pastures in protecting the environment, it also is essential. The national parks and provincial or regional parks can only cover so much territory. The pastures extend the area by many times over. The other living creatures that live in this protected pasture environment are the wild grasses, plants, creatures and birds. Native grasses. Crocuses and buffalo beans. Essential ground cover like ground moss. Whitetail deer, mule deer, burrowing owls, the Swift fox, rattlesnakes. Birds like Sprague's pipit, meadowlarks and night hawks. Grazing cattle do not seem to bother them at all, as the density of the cattle is so low. In fact the PFRA pastures are just as important as the national park in providing good habitat. The whole area looks like one big national park, and it almost is.

If the community pastures are to be transferred from federal control to provincial control, it must be done in a planned and orderly way, to allow ranchers enough time to adapt. There are a lot of questions? Will the current PFRA quotas be kept? Will the pasture managers and the riders still be on staff? Will their wages be the same? Will the animals/acre be the same? Will the cost per animal be the same? Will all the current land be kept in pasture? Will any of it be converted to farmland? Or sold? Which government department will be in charge? Will the provincial government recognize the important conservation role of the community pastures? Will the provincial government work well with the local communities?

It is all up in the air, and is causing a lot of anxiety and speculation. I call on the the provincial government to take over and preserve the community pastures as a vital support for the livestock industry and for the rural communities. And the provincial government must take the initiative in leading an orderly transition to their new administration. Rural jobs, a rural way of life, the livestock industry and the untouched prairie habitat are all at stake.

Sincerely,

Barbara Campbell

retired small business owner

an image Barb sent along with her letter

The Failure of Environmental Regulation [part one]

Cedar Waxwing nest in lilac .

It is a Friday in June. All over this northern land, in its temperate, coastal, alpine, boreal, and arctic wilds, there are birds attempting to conjure life from eggs hidden in the spires of spruce, hummocks of cliff-face, hollows of tundra, snags of maple, tussocks of fescue, mats of tule, and a hundred other secret places. They know these places with a protective and fruitful intimacy, a bond that grants them a chance of rearing viable young before the snows come. Three days from now, on Monday, their capacity to manage that parental task in summers to come will be undermined, some say. This dark happening will occur in a place unfamiliar to the birds, likewise to the salmon, the polar bears, the caribou, and the orcas. None of them, strange to tell, even think to look for their life and health in a 425 page piece of legislation, or in the chambers of government in which it was devised. None of them know anything of older, nobler documents, laws securing a degree of human forbearance and protection for those most vulnerable of natal places, or that on Monday they are going to be changed.

Those who do know--environmentalists, eco-defence lawyers, biologists--are worried. More than one hundred pages of Bill C-38 address environmental regulations. These are the laws Canadian legislators have enacted in recent decades to shield us and our wilder coinhabitants from the depredations of agriculture, mining, resource extraction, fisheries, and urban development.

The bill our legally and democratically elected government will pass on Monday eviscerates the Fisheries Act so that it will only apply to major waterways and fisheries, leaving lesser bodies of water unregulated, presumably because fish are always born and reared in the very places we “harvest” them and not in smaller streams and lakes.

The Species At Risk Act meanwhile will be changed to give the Minister of Environment new powers to grant industry players exemptions and extensions of their permits whenever he sees fit. As well, any oil or gas projects being examined by the National Energy Board will be exempted from species at risk legislation.

As for the Environmental Assessment Act, considered by many to be the cornerstone of government regulation and oversight of industry, it will in effect be repealed and replaced by a “streamlined” process that places the wellbeing of our lands and waterways firmly in the hands of industry self-regulation and ministerial discretion. Trust us, the oil companies say, we have ten environmentalists on staff. Federal cabinet, with fewer environmentalists on staff, will now have final say over all oil and gas pipelines. Large development projects will only be reviewed at the discretion of the minister and his staff. Smaller development projects, from now on, will not be assessed at all. The public review process, allowing conservationists to voice concerns on a development, will be truncated and the list of who is allowed to participate will be limited.

The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a body that was given the task of finding ways to bring ecological and economic concerns into greater harmony, will be discharged. Finally, to tidy up another loose end, the bill repeals the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act doing away with any pretense of Canada ever implementing the promises it signed onto in a moment of weakness when less visionary men were running the government.

Nature Canada posts story on the community pastures

map showing Canada's federal Community Pastures soon to be turned over to the prairie provinces(Courtesy of Agriculture and Agri-food Canada)

Nature Canada invited me to write a guest post on the community pasture divestment process, the legislation for which is, if I am not mistaken, buried in the omnibus bill that Elizabeth May and others are attempting to disable with a flurry of amendments this week in parliament.

The piece I wrote was posted this morning on the Nature Canada Blog.


upland sandpiper, one of many species that rely on our community pastures

A walk in pasture

Last Friday afternoon I found myself driving through farmland south of Highway 39 near Lang, Saskatchewan. In the middle of miles of cropped land and tame hay I stumbled on a native prairie remnant perhaps 640 acres or so (a section).

There were no cattle in the pasture so I stepped over the fence and walked through the spear grass, sagebrush, and bluegrasses. The singing meadowlark at the head of this post was the first bird I saw.

Right away I began hearing the flight song of the Chestnut-collared longspur, a recent addition to the Threatened species list for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). They have a pleasant song and a dry rattle that they give in flight. (This page from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology includes a sample of their song.) I spent a half hour or so wandering through the pasture and stopping to watch the longspurs circle in their rollicking flight, pausing now and then to let out their song. I never did manage to get a decent shot of one in flight, but here is the best I could do.






Finally one settled onto a sagebrush and I got a couple of shots at it. Too far away and badly lit, but it gives a sense of what the longspurs look like in the binoculars.



This blurry shot does show the extensive white on the tail and some of the chestnut nape.



The pasture had a nice variety of birds, including Savannah sparrow and at least one Baird's sparrow, which was just uplisted by COSEWIC from Not at Risk to Special Concern owing to population declines and threats to grassland habitat.

At the edge of the native grass where some taller tame grasses were growing, there was a small colony of bobolink. Here is one in flight song--you can see its bill open (this page includes a sample of bobolink song.)



An upland sandpiper (it was singing too)landed on two different posts. First, far away and then closer.





Perhaps more numerous than any other species was the Eastern Kingbird. People don't generally think of it as a grassland bird, but I certainly find more of them along the fencelines on pasture land than I do elsewhere. I found several pairs on the periphery of this pasture.

"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