{"id":156,"date":"2018-08-06T18:44:49","date_gmt":"2018-08-06T18:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prairiecommons.ca\/?page_id=156"},"modified":"2018-10-01T21:22:12","modified_gmt":"2018-10-01T21:22:12","slug":"the-lost-gem-of-the-pfra-community-pastures","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.prairiecommons.ca\/?page_id=156","title":{"rendered":"The lost gem of the PFRA Community Pastures"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Article and photos by Katie Doke Sawatzky<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published Oct 1, 2018 3:30 PM<\/p>\n

Spring rains have made the mixed grasses of Saskatchewan\u2019s southwest greener than they\u2019ve been after a year of drought. Sagebrush glows silver-blue against rippling crested wheatgrass. Walking in this country feels strangely like wading on the shore, but instead of an ocean tide drawing you to deeper water, a persistent wind pushes you forward, bends your head and forces your gaze downward, to the grass at your feet.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Conservation cowboy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mert Taylor figures he\u2019s ridden 300,000 miles on horseback over Saskatchewan\u2019s prairie grasslands.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo wonder my arse gets sore,\u201d chuckled the 68-year-old from Maple Creek.<\/p>\n

Taylor, who retired in 2014, spent 43 years working for the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration\u2019s Community Pasture Program, or in short form, the PF pastures. Twelve of those years were spent as a rider before he became manager of Lone Tree pasture from 1983 to 1989 and of Big Stick pasture from 1989 to 2014. Lone Tree is 50 kilometres southwest of Val Marie in the southwest corner of the province. Big Stick is 30 km north of Maple Creek.<\/p>\n

\u201cI rode a horse for a fellow one time and he said the PFRA pastures were where all the real cowboys were, so I figured that that was for me and I guess I never really grew out of it,\u201d Taylor said.<\/p>\n

Responsible for nearly 60,000 acres during his managing years, Taylor spent most of his days outside on horseback and tending cattle, the very definition of a cowboy.<\/p>\n

But the PF pasture mandate was about more than cows, it was about the land.<\/p>\n

Spanning the bottom third of the province, 62 of the PFRA\u2019s 85 pastures, totalling 1.8 million acres, were located in Saskatchewan. All of these pastures contained native cover, ranging from 39 to 100 per cent\u00a0(Phillips, 2015), with an average of 80 per cent. While temperate grasslands are conserved in Grasslands National Park on the province\u2019s southern border, the PF pastures were among few other large continuous tracts of land where the grass was kept in good condition. Seventy per cent of Lone Tree pasture\u2019s grassland 35,000 acres is native, while Big Stick, which is 22,000 acres, comes in at 85 per cent.<\/p>\n

The grassland in the PF pastures was protected through ecological oversight provided by the pasture manager. Serving farmers who didn\u2019t have the land-base to graze cattle in the summer, as well as ranchers, the pastures were a rare breed: federally managed, provincial Crown lands hosting private cattle.<\/p>\n

Rare, but it worked for decades. Managers like Taylor looked after cows belonging to producers in their region. Branded and bred with government bulls, the cows were all mixed together and grazed the pasture in the summer. In the fall, they were sorted and picked up by the patrons.<\/p>\n

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\"I rode a horse for a fellow one time and he said the PFRA pastures were where all the real cowboys were, so I figured that that was for me and I guess I never really grew out of it.\"<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the summer, Taylor treated any sick cows and made sure the herd stuck to his grazing plan so the grass wasn\u2019t overeaten. He submitted an invasive-weed report every fall and monitored the wind-powered water mills that \u201cseemed to be always breaking down.\u201d The goal of the PF pastures wasn\u2019t just to provide grazing services for diversified farmers or young ranchers just starting out, it was a way to sustainably maintain a landscape that requires human management. Taylor said nobody had grazing records like the PFRA and that his boss used them to set up stocking rates in Mongolia.<\/p>\n

In his last years with the system, Taylor experimented with high-intensity, short-duration grazing, which allowed him to increase the carrying capacity of the pastures. Based on the grazing behaviour of buffalo, the idea is to put more cattle on the grass so that they can\u2019t be selective about which plants they eat.<\/p>\n

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\u201cInstead of running 1,000 cows we could run 1,500 or 1,200,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cThey clip that one plant and then they\u2019re forced to eat the other ones because that plant that they like hasn\u2019t grown back,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it tends to make a more even graze and a more diverse ecosystem, which is a lot healthier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then Taylor moves them to new grass, so the other patch can recover for next season.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of that information and records is gone by the wayside now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

While Taylor helps out on a friend\u2019s pasture in Alberta and continues his high-intensity, short-duration grazing patterns on his own patch of grass west of Maple Creek, the program he worked for is now one for the history books. The PFRA and its services\u2014the community pasture program, water system and irrigation programming and shelterbelt tree farms\u2014were cut in the 2012 federal budget by the Harper government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Mert Taylor is a retired PF pasture manager, or \"conservation cowboy.\" For 30 years, he looked after cattle and grass at Lone Tree and Big Stick community pastures in southwestern Saskatchewan. Credit: Katie Doke Sawatzky.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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One for the history books<\/strong><\/p>\n

Submarginal prairie had been excessively cultivated in the first 20 years of the twentieth century and began drifting across the Canadian plains in dust storms during the drought of the 1930s. As a result many farmers called it quits. Thousands abandoned their farms in southern Saskatchewan. Those that stayed relied on government relief. To stop the exodus, the blowing soil and people\u2019s dependency on government funds, the federal government created the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act in 1935. Soil scientists set up research centres in the prairies. They studied each region to determine best farming practices. The community pasture program, formed in 1937, relocated farmers to arable land and seeded submarginal lands back to grass\u00a0(Gray, 1967).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt restored an entire region of Saskatchewan to a productive state,\u201d said Rick Ashton, who worked as project manager with the federal community pasture program and then as co-director of the divestment from 2010 to 2015. Prior to that he was the manager of the Saskatchewan Pastures Program, which has 50 community pastures, and director of the lands branch within the provincial Ministry of Agriculture.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt restored an entire region of Saskatchewan to a productive state.\"<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201c(The PFRA) program\u2026was a legacy of good management that served two purposes:\u2026providing reasonable grazing for livestock producers and also providing public benefits by way of biodiversity and conservation and land conservation. It was really a very elegant model that worked quite well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A year after the community pasture program started in 1937, the PFRA converted 700,000 acres of eroded farmland into rangeland. In 1967, journalist James Gray noted that \u201c(u)ltimately there would be 85 pastures in which 160,000 head of cattle would be grazing for 7,000 individual farmers.\u201d That number had decreased to 3,400 patrons by 2006 (as farms and ranches became larger) but the pastures were still well used by those who needed grazing land (Phillips, 2015).<\/p>\n

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Map of the former PFRA community pastures. Source: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.<\/p><\/div>\n

The successful program also didn\u2019t cost very much. In 2013, the annual operating budget was in the range of $22 million. Most of that was covered by the livestock producers themselves, who paid for grazing and breeding privileges, leaving to the public purse just $5 million annually in land management and conservation costs. The lands were also open to Indigenous and recreational hunters, and were common sites for bird surveyors, artists and scientific researchers\u00a0(Ashton, 2016).<\/p>\n

So why cut a program that provided private and public benefits and was of little cost to the Canadian tax-payer?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Fall-round up at a PF pasture, circa 1947. Sask Archives; RB 8296.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Government shift<\/strong><\/p>\n

In an April 2012 CTV report, Gerry Ritz, the federal agricultural minister at the time, said the 80-year-old PFRA vessel steered into port long ago. It had fulfilled its purpose of turning unfarmable land into viable pastures and the water infrastructure in the provinces had remarkably improved. Modern farming methods ushered in a new era of sustainability.<\/p>\n

PFRA employees tell a different story. After working with the Saskatchewan Pasture Program, Ashton was called over to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in 2010 to develop \u201calternative management options\u201d for the PFRA. While roping a 2,400-pound bull on a daily basis may have been par for the course in the 1940s, it didn\u2019t square with what more \u201cmodern\u201d civil servants in Ottawa thought was reasonable for occupational health. Ashton was brainstorming ways of phasing out the government cowboys and creating a new program roll-out for the pastures: a not-for-profit business or Crown corporation were a couple of the possibilities.<\/p>\n

Ashton noted an overall shift in government support for the program. The PFRA was meant to help stabilize provinces that were only a few decades old. Fast-forward 80 years and the question he heard most when a new government took office was, \u201cWhy is it that we\u2019re operating a livestock operation using government staff to look after private cattle on the landscape when only five per cent of producers use this program?\u201d<\/p>\n

Carl Neggers, who was PFRA director from 2003 to 2008, said the Liberal government at the time kept the PFRA going for political reasons. \u201cIt hosted 700 employees and that\u2019s a lot of votes,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I came in, a lot of these legacy programs were in the twilight of their importance. It didn\u2019t mean they weren\u2019t relevant still, but they were less relevant to the federal government than they would have been to local people.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Conservatives gained office in 2006, things changed. Neggers said that, when the Party got their majority mandate in 2011, the PFRA was doomed. Federal employees providing services and maintaining infrastructure on the ground, outside of Ottawa, were of little value to a government that, in Neggers\u2019 opinion, was \u201creally anti-public service.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everyone except federal bureaucrats and administrative employees didn\u2019t see it coming.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey basically said, \u2018That\u2019s it,\u2026the program is done and the province is going to take their land back,\u201d said Neggers.<\/p>\n

The repercussions of that decision would not be felt by the bureaucrats in Ottawa, but 3,000 km away. The PFRA\u2019s administrators who were based in Regina and pasture staff like Taylor were soon to be unemployed and the patrons of the pastures themselves would feel the effects for years to come.<\/p>\n

Responsibility falls to patrons<\/strong><\/p>\n

With its 2012 budget announcement, the federal government announced that it would return all of the reversionary land (land owned by the province but reverted back to the federal government in 1937 so that the PF pastures could be established) to the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The divestment would take five years, ending April 1, 2018.<\/p>\n

The decision upset not only pasture users and employees, but also members of the public who benefitted from use of the PF pastures as accessible Crown land, such as nature conservationists and First Nations hunters. The Saskatchewan government ultimately decided to lease the pastures to patrons through 15-year agreements if they formed grazing businesses and met reporting requirements. They didn\u2019t have to pay for the existing infrastructure but any improvements were their responsibility. Along with the land, 80 years of sustainable land management was now placed on the shoulders of approximately 2,500 farmers and ranchers, many of whom had never met together as a group.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Rural sociologist Michael Gertler, from the University of Saskatchewan's School of Environment and Sustainability, discusses how the PF pasture program created a grazing commons for rural communities and maintained grassland health, and how privatization is threatening the prairie landscape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Uncertainty leads to instability<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before the divestment, 35-year-old Nick Schmidt was the manager for five years at Garry PF pasture, 30 km west of Yorkton. He remembers the day he heard about the divestment. Called into a conference call at the district office in Melville with other managers in the area, he expected something big was happening.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were all sitting around the table listening to this,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all figured maybe they would bump us down to seasonal employment, or maybe even get rid of a few pastures, but to shut down the whole thing was definitely quite a shock to us all.\u201d<\/p>\n

What followed for Schmidt was uncertainty and confusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cNinety to 95 per cent of us guys all lived in government housing on these pastures too, so we were not only losing our jobs but we were potentially losing our homes too. So yeah, it was a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Things at Garry started to go south after the announcement. With meetings leading to nothing but disagreement, Schmidt interviewed down at Lone Tree, which was one of the first pastures scheduled to transition. Fewer patrons meant fewer cooks in the kitchen, and he was impressed with the patrons\u2019 optimism, that they wanted to make a go of it. He moved down south with his young family for the 2014 grazing season, Lone Tree\u2019s first season out of the PF system.<\/p>\n

These days Schmidt takes the pick-up truck onto Lone Tree pasture, where he drops off salt blocks at three different locations for the 1,100 cows owned by his clients, the eight families that make up the 14 clients of Lone Tree Grazing.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe were not only losing our jobs but we were potentially losing our homes too. So yeah, it was a big deal.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So far things have worked well for Schmidt. The pasture committee applied for a grant from the Nature Conservancy of Canada that helps pay half his salary so he can maintain the ecological monitoring he did as a PF manager, which is a condition of the new lease agreements. The pasture also received a grant to help protect the endangered Northern leopard frog. Schmidt keeps the cows away from the dugouts and the organization provides portable water tanks that he sets up elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow I\u2019ve got to look after the cows, the grass and the frogs,\u201d he said, smiling.<\/p>\n

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