Community pastures system under review
MABOU — Dan Thompson idled down in the valley, allowing his transmission to cool before ascending the winding dirt path through old hardwoods with cattle trailer in tow.
Up on the plateau, Cate Davis was making a final check on the electric fence with the voltage meter to ensure there was continuity of current over the kilometres of wire waiting for their cattle.
“Of course a moose never goes back out the same way it comes in,” said Davis.
Two nights earlier, a moose charged through the electric fence hauling a half dozen posts with it.
After what must have been a lovely feed on the Cape Mabou Community Pasture’s luscious spring grass, it trotted back into the woods hauling more wire and posts with it.
“That’s why they call them ‘Bull’ moose I guess,” said Davis.
Over the coming days, nearly 400 cows belonging to 20 farmers will be hauled up to the community pasture looking out over St. George’s Bay.
It is a welcome rite of spring colored this year by the uncertainty and opportunity of both COVID-19 and a review of the entire community pasture system commissioned by the Department of Agriculture.
“While each pasture is different, many are operating below capacity (less than ideal livestock stocking densities) and need to be assessed for their value to the agricultural community,” reads a request for proposals issued on behalf of the Farm Loan Board by Perennia, a provincial development agency focused on the food sector, back in March.
Established through the 1950s and '60s to ease the burden on small farms by allowing them to concentrate during the summer months on producing forage crops off their lands while pasturing their cattle elsewhere, all but one of the eight pastures are located in northern Nova Scotia.
Cape Mabou is unique among them.
It was once home to 34 families. Those Scottish highlanders saw at the Cape an environment more suited to cattle than people.
Its height above and proximity to the water meant constant winds to keep flys off cattle and dew to water the grass each morning. They cleared the land, put hooves on its deep soil, built communities and then abandoned them to come down from their hills and dig deep down under Mabou and Inverness for coal during the late 1800s.
Now its nearly 500 acres are home to some 400 cattle. Others are underused.
And that matters because cattle, those who tend them and the pastures they inhabit have what biologists would call a symbiotic relationship.
The farmers maintain the fences and the cows maintain the pasture by grazing and pooping on it. The cows also maintain the farmers who ensure hooves are kept on the ground.
Those who have maintained this province's small cattle industry – we only supply about three per cent of the beef we consume – tend to believe in this relationship with a strength that armours them against the tight economic margins of what is also a business.
They also tend to grumble quietly that the Department of Agriculture does better spending $41,500 on lime for its pastures than on paying it to Horton Agricultural Associations to make recommendations on how to manage them.
Under the direction of its one paid employee, herdsman Frankie Gillis, everyone else at the Cape Mabou pasture was working for free on Tuesday.
Prior to 2001, it and the rest of the province's pastures were directly run by the Department of Agriculture. Over the subsequent years, its infrastructure fell into some disrepair.
In 2018, it got a new board of directors and a fresh injection of life. Last year, volunteers clocked 2,500 hours of work managing Cape Mabou – work that once would have been a large budgetary responsibility for the Department of Agriculture.
Cate Davis and her husband, nicknamed John Deere Daven by Gillis, get credit for a large portion of those hours.
Having started a dairy farm with a couple of cows brought from Truro in the back of a Ford Econoline van four decades ago, the pair sold their animals and quota a bit over a year ago.
“It was traumatic,” said Cate of finding themselves 65 years old and without the 24/7 responsibilities of running a dairy farm anymore.
So they went to work for free for Frankie.
“Oh you don't want to come up in the morning and see cows in the road,” said Frankie Gillis.
Be it volunteer fire departments, school lunch programs, farmers' markets, festivals or community pastures, many rural Nova Scotian institutions only exist because of volunteers.
The job of the paid bureaucrats and politicians based in Halifax is to support or at the very least avoid alienating that base of labour and creativity.
“A review of the tender document details will show that the successful proponent will be required to, among other duties, produce a detailed report of recommendations that will be recognized in the further development of vibrant pastures that are a tool for growing the rural economy,” said Agriculture Minister Keith Colwell in a written statement on Thursday regarding the purpose of the consultant's report.
“We cannot comment on the recommendations until they are received. The department recognizes the value of community pastures to the agriculture community and is working to enhance their long term viability.”