PASTURES AXED
Program to phase out
It didn’t come as a shock to many producers on Wednesday when the provincial government announced the end to the Saskatchewan Pastures Program. Talk had been swirling since 2012, when the federal government announced the end of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act (PFRA) pastures.
The plan, announced in the provincial budget, is to phase the provincial pasture program out over three years, with 2017 being the last year it fully operates. The program includes 51 pastures operating on 780,000 acres of land.
There will be consultations made for the future management of the land with the public, stakeholders, First Nations and Metis communities. An online survey will be available online at www.saskatchewan.ca/pastures from March 27 to May 8.
“We don’t believe that managing private cattle is a core function of government. We think that probably we should have got around to this earlier but we are going to ensure that the land is available for grazing in the province,” said Lyle Stewart, provincial agriculture minister.
This year the provincial government will see no savings from the program as it is still fully operating.
Stewart said the land will be ecologically assessed with land rated as having high ecological value not being sold. The government expects for one third of the land to be rated at high.
Trevor Herriot, co-chair of the Public Pasture — Public Interest group, is concerned about how the government will ecologically rate the land.
“What we’d like to see I think is a more rigorous independent scientific external view on these lands because they do have all these public values and once you privatize crown land you lose some efficiencies,” he said.
The pasture program was founded in 1922 to diversify and strengthen the province’s agriculture industry by providing assistance to small cattle producers. Currently approximately five per cent of the provincial cattle herd and 12 per cent of cattle producers use the pastures.
The government has said it will be respectful of the current pasture users and wants to work with them. A possible long-term solution with the pastures is to follow the PFRA model.
When the federal government ended its pasture program the land was transferred to provincial government control with the government then deciding to enter in long-term leases with the current pasture users.
The users took on 15-year leases and formed their own grazing companies or corporations to take over management of the pastures. As of Mar. 31, 43 pastures will have been successfully transitioned with the remaining 19 to be transitioned by March 31 next year.
Aaron Ivey, a cattle producer from Ituna, Sask. was one of the producers using a PFRA pasture when the transition happened.
“I think the template is out there that we can do co-operative type pastures quite effectively and (our pasture was) one of the first ones that transitioned,” he said. “There was probably a lot more growing pains and hiccups in that just because there wasn’t a template or there wasn’t any examples to go around. We were kind of breaking ground on it. But I don’t think its going to be an issue at all.”
Other options the government is looking into include selling the pastures or dividing the land up into smaller more manageable units, with the government saying it may not be a one-size-fits all approach.