Co-op disillusioned by farm loan board move
The co-operative operating the 231-hectare Cape Mabou community pasture has been forced out of business by the Nova Scotia Farm Loan Board, co-op volunteers say.
“I just think it represents a poor approach from the get-go when they (farm loan board) didn’t give us any chance to look at the lease or talk about the lease before they sent it to us to simply be signed,” said Marilyn Macdonald, president of the Cape Mabou Pasture Co-operative.
In a statement issued to The Chronicle Herald on Friday, the farm loan board confirmed a commitment to the community pasture program that includes about 2,500 hectares at seven separate pastures.
The program is intended “to help farmers lower their cost of production or expand their operations,” the board’s statement read.
“The board’s role is to protect these lands and ensure they remain in agriculture production, accessible to all Nova Scotian farmers and are available into the future.”
In its statement, the farm loan board reiterated information that has recently appeared in the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture newsletter and the weekly newspaper, The Oran, which serves Inverness County, where the Cape Mabou pasture is located.
The board “can confirm that the plan is for Cape Mabou to be open for farmers to use this year,” the ads and statement said.
The board is a “lending agency of government and cannot comment on confidential negotiations between the board and potential land lessees,” the statement read. “The board has active leases for all active community pasture lands across the province except for Mabou pasture and will be contracting out the management of that pasture for this year to ensure its accessibility to farmers.”
While the board used negotiation confidentiality as a no comment, the co-operative was not constrained by such restrictions.
In a summary of the co-operative’s 2022 annual general meeting, Macdonald said the farm loan board, after many years of ignoring the operation of the Cape Mabou pasture, commissioned a consultant’s report in 2020 and in late spring presented the cooperative with a 10-year lease and a one-year operational agreement to sign and return.
Macdonald said the co-operative board was very concerned with parts of the agreement, particularly that upon signing the lease and an operational agreement “all our assets became the property of the farm loan board.”
That included a new farm building, a tractor, gates and a scale.
Macdonald said there was no exit clause for the co-operative to terminate either the lease or the operating agreement but the farm loan board could terminate at any time without restriction.
The Cape Mabou pasture, in operation since 1955, is the only one of seven provincial pastures that is not owned by the farm loan board. The Cape Mabou pasture is owned jointly by the provincial Natural Resources Department and seven private landowners, who own more than 80 of the total 231-hectare pasture.
Still, Macdonald said the lease agreements were the same for all seven pastures.
At a September co-operative board meeting, Macdonald said it was agreed that the co-op board members and their lawyer would draft a more amenable agreement to present to the farm loan board.
In November, the co-operative compiled a historical review of the pasture that showed a total cumulative operating loss over 65 years of $192,054, despite a cumulative income that included $257,000 from grants, subsidies and non-direct income.
The summaries, showing a “dismal and unsustainable financial picture under the existing co-operative model,” were forwarded to Finance Minister Allan Macmaster, the MLA for Inverness, Jen Thompson with the farm loan board, the community pastures action committee and others.
The co-operative had Zoom meetings with Macmaster on Nov. 29, 2021, and Jan. 24, 2022, where they learned that their MLA had not even looked at the financial information forwarded to him, Macdonald said.
The co-operative sent a letter to Agriculture Minister Greg Morrow in late January, outlining its financial predicament but were directed to the community pasture support funding program. The support program is structured primarily for the funding of capital expenses and infrastructure improvements, not for year-to-year operating expenses, Macdonald said.
“Once again, our need for operating capital fell on deaf ears.”
The co-operative board met with Thompson and an Agriculture Department representative in midfebruary and were advised to submit proposed changes to the agreements.
The farm loan board responded to the proposed lease and operating changes by outlining that permanent fixtures must remain at the pasture, meaning fixtures that could be moved but that the farm loan board viewed should be reasonably considered part of pasture infrastructure.
The loan board also maintained that any revenues, aside from pasture fees, generated from the lands in excess of $500 would be held by the board for approved disbursement and that the co-operative would require a bookkeeper to prepare financial statements.
Macdonald referred to the seven parcels of private land that intersect with the pasture lands as “the elephant in the room,” with great potential to interfere with current pasture operations, particularly access to water and uninsured liabilities.
Macdonald said the co-operative was informed on April 27 that the farm loan board would operate the pasture this season and the ensuing advertisement hit the local paper this week.
The provincial Agriculture Department, meanwhile announced Friday, through the farm loan board, the purchase of 125 hectares of land in Cape John, Pictou County, for $1.1 million. That land adds to the Cape John community pasture and brings the total area of active community pastures across the province to more than 2,500 hectares.
In Cape Mabou, mostly volunteer work to fence the property and other preparations, would normally be well underway now to ready the the pasture for the influx of some 450 head of cattle starting in early June.
“It’s definitely a shock, pretty disappointing,” Irwin Jewell, who owns a farm in York, P.E.I., about 10 kilometres northeast of Charlotteown, said of the possibility of the pasture not being open this year.
Jewell had delivered 140 head of cattle to the pasture in past years because “they have great grass up there and they look after them, take care of them.”
“It’s a service that you just can’t find” anywhere else, he said.
Jewell, who along with his son, once owned 350 head of cattle, wouldn’t need the service this year, anyway, as he is in the process of selling his cattle and the farm.
“If I still had my barns full of them (cattle) and was planning to take them there, it would be quite a blow,” Jewell said. “If you’re counting on something and not really knowing …”
Macdonald said the farm loan board is “making plans to open the pasture but how they are going to be able to do it, I don’t know.”
“It’s a very confusing situation to me, I don’t understand it, considering the good faith and all the commitment and the quality of volunteerism that has been put into this facility over the last three or four years, to come to the point where they (farm loan board) just want to walk in, say see you later, leave all your stuff and we’re going to look after it.”
Macdonald said there was not a lot of creative thinking provided by the farm loan board to move away from a volunteer-dependent format in an age when people are no longer willing to donate so much volunteer labour.
“We’re talking about a pretty small shortfall here,” Macdonald said of what the co-operative would require to continue to run the pasture.
“We are talking like $50,000, $60,000.”
Noting the farm loan board's $1.1-million expenditure announcement, Macdonald said, “if they are simply going to operate (Cape Mabou) with their own operating money, what was the difference in giving us some operating money to transition into a model that could work into the future.”