Stewardship doesn’t come free
By Sheri Monk
It’s a weird reason to move, but I migrated to southwest Saskatchewan from Winnipeg for the rattlesnakes. That’s the Coles Notes version but the longer, more truthful version is that I moved because the West felt more like home than home ever had. It wasn’t any one single thing… it was everything.
The rolling hills, the sunsets, the sagebrush, the meadowlarks singing their magical song. It was the thunderstorms and the hot summer nights that you wish could last a lifetime. It was the turkey vultures and the dichotomy between their eternal optimism and what they were hopefully soaring for. The cactus, the smell of the sandy soil when it’s finally being massaged by rain, and it’s how the history never felt far away. Buffalo jumps and tipi rings, echoes of what was but also of travesties that never should have happened. The wildness of it all captured my imagination and my heart and it wasn’t long until the cattle business did too.
There was no denying the connection between agriculture, particularly the cow-calf industry and the health of the land, and I loved how proudly producers would describe themselves as stewards of the land. There was a romance in it that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go and it wasn’t that long before I was using my journalism skills to advocate for the land and the people who lived on it. And it wasn’t just me that was captured by the idea of hardworking men and women nurturing the land and ecosystems that nurtured us – the concept garnered a lot of political and public traction. I could see how effective it was, and I did my part to impart that messaging whenever I could.
We know grasslands are enormous carbon sequesters and that they’re also one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet. They are biodiverse hotspots, and they will be critical to managing extreme weather events such as season flooding as climate change progresses. Some countries in Europe don’t just pay lip service to the stewards of critical habitat – they pay real money. Sadly, Alberta and Saskatchewan haven’t come to the table yet with any offerings, but I bet insurance companies would be happy if they did. The ecosystem services that intact grasslands offer benefit not just the humans and animals in the immediate vicinity, but the urban centres so often downhill from them.
Some countries have begun directly compensating land owners for how they manage their land. There are roughly 25 different ecosystem services that have been identified, but the ones that receive the most attention are climate change mitigation, watershed services and biodiversity conservation. The Saskatchewan Stockgrowers Foundation (www.ssgf.ca) is dedicated to protecting and restoring natural grasslands and currently there’s a reverse auction (with money) available for producers who are willing to take land out of production to seed it to native grass and keep it in grass for 30 years. It’s an ambitious project with $2 million in funding, thanks to Environment and Climate Change Canada. And that’s wonderful – but it’s not enough.
A policy patchwork approach that ebbs and flows with different regimes and ideas may do more harm than good. Inconsistency does not grow trust – it ultimately ends up breeding indifference. We need a consistent, long-term easy-to-access platform of initiatives and incentives with the right support to engage them. But what is “them”? Well, we have to figure that out, which is impossible until policymakers finally concede that a long-term commitment to and investment in ecosystem services is the right thing to do. And let’s face it – politicians seeking four-year terms aren’t interested in campaigning for 30-year programs the general public wouldn’t understand. The pressure will have to come from the agricultural community, and the Saskatchewan Stockgrowers are doing an admirable job of modeling this for us.
But what about the land that is cultivated and producers who don’t raise beef or have a need for hay? That land may never be reclaimed, and that’s ok – crop production is important too, and our beef industry already relies heavily on export markets without significant expansion. Like politicians, crop producers are sometimes forced into short-term thinking but instead of four-year-terms, farming is right now and next year. And how the heck do you plan to pay for a multimillion dollar combine which will take 10 years (or longer) to pay off when you’re living in the long shadow of last year’s drought and this year’s fertilizer prices?
There are tools for Canadian producers, sure. The Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership launches this year, and there’s $3.5 billion in the kitty to back it. But it’s a five-year program. The three branches of focus are growing trade and expanding markets, innovative and sustainable growth in the sector, and supporting diversity and a dynamic, evolving sector.
Ecosystem services is conspicuously absent from the menu. I wander to the sustainability branch, knowing that’s my best shot at finding what I hope might be there. Instead, I find this, “The government will help support the resiliency and sustainability of the sector, helping farmers adapt to climate change, conserve water and soil resources, and grow their businesses sustainably to meet global food demand sustainably.”
Somebody get that writer a thesaurus, please.
I’ve been an agricultural journalist long enough that I remember when sustainability was just the sparkle in some bureaucrat’s eye. As a concept, I love it. But if it remains a cloudy, undefined idea, it’s worthless. This was realized, and then working groups were formed to figure out what it meant. That took about a decade, largely because the concept of “social licence” was born in the middle of it. Like a new, love-struck couple with unprocessed childhood trauma, the two became hopelessly enmeshed.
Social licence, on its own, is also a good concept and it’s frankly impressive that agriculture recognized the threat of cancel culture before Hollywood did. The trouble in marrying the concepts is that you can’t yoke science to culture – they have entirely different foundations. Social licence came at a time when the economy was good enough and food prices were low enough that people had the time and money to care about production. This was the height of the organic sector’s rise to power, right when crunchy, organic moms suddenly had the clout to create a second strawberry shelf at the grocery store that commanded twice the price. Ahhh, the good ole days, before Skip the Dishes and paper straws.
Yes, you could make the connection that the organic movement was a plea for sustainable production practises, and maybe it was in some abstractive, horoscopic way. But the gluten-free craze soon followed, and all of this became entangled in a variety of weird health conspiracies that I see so many lost in today.
It culminated in all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinking. You had the all-chemicals are-bad crowd facing off against the anyone-who-cares-about-pesticide-use-is-a-marijuana-smoking-hippie and in the middle of it, the producers lost interest and so did the mainstream consumers. Meanwhile we had the massive floods in 2010 and 2013 in Saskatchewan and Alberta but the big picture was lost as we tripped over sandbags to make sure our bag of Old Dutch potato chips were, indeed, gluten-free.
A few weeks ago, I was at the grocery store marvelling at the price of butter - $8.99. It was a small enough store that I could hear the murmurings of the woman shopping for eggs. “NINE-NINTY-NINE for a dozen eggs? F*ck those free range chickens,” she exclaimed, grabbing the no-name brand of white-shelled eggs from presumably unhappy hens. This is why social licence cannot be married to sustainability. One is marketing to constantly-changing consumer whims and the other is an evidence-based foundation to literally keep the Earth alive. Can you imagine David Attenborough co-hosting a nature show with the Kardashians? That’s what we tried to do.
So what should we do? We need to retain our native grasslands, what we have left of it. Thankfully, a lot of it is Crown land which seems reassuring until you remember that the Alberta government recently traded some for mere potatoes. Literally, they sold a native grassland parcel to become a potato farm… but at least they were gluten-free. Now, there was an outcry and it doesn’t happen often, but there shouldn’t be a mechanism for it to happen at all. Native grasslands in Crown land should simply have a permanent easement preventing future development, full-stop. (Aside of course, from wildlife-safe fencing, and responsible grazing and watering practices.)
Deeded land is more complicated, and we need programs in place that keep privately-held grasslands in grass. Whenever the cow-calf sector has a downturn, we lose more. Producers, sick of cows and calving and the disparity between their live prices and consumers’ dead prices are always one bad year or decade away from sending Bessie and all her sisters to town. And while I can’t imagine anyone being broke enough to sell their cows also being rich enough to start farming, it apparently happens. But whether the land is sold then broken, or broken for hay instead, that’s a massive loss.
There is no question that having native grasslands reduces flooding, resists drought, stores carbon, maintains a healthy soil profile and is the key to biodiversity. We know this. Science knows this. The government knows this. Producers know this. The public, mostly, does not. And that’s fine. We can do the right thing here without worrying about what vegan Kailey in Toronto thinks as she stalks the grocery shelves for organic ghee. But the bottom line is that if we want to weather the environmental storms we know are coming, we have to help producers weather the economic ones. And that’s going to cost some money. For perspective, the 2013 flood in High River exceeded $5 billion in damages.
Back to the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership website, and its three branches. To get more detail, you have to scroll to the information provided by the provinces. Within the framework, they buy into the ideal of the partnership, but the detailed programming is figured out by each province, to tackle regional challenges. Saskatchewan’s offerings were by far the best, directly mentioning climate change and biodiversity but despite that, the information was complicated, there are hoops and caps and so many ineligible expenses. It was a lot to plough through and I get paid to research and in this case, not enough because I stopped reading.
How could we do this better? Identify some simple priorities, using plain language.
1. Preserve all native grasslands.
2. Increase biodiversity on agricultural land.
3. Reduce environmental contamination.
4. Improve soil health.
And let’s be clear here – these four goals do not mention any economic growth and that’s by design. These goals are overreaching and they benefit everyone from shoes salesmen to organic strawberry growers. They cannot be achieved in five years, and a successful outcome probably couldn’t be determined in 30 years because they support enshrined values and known truths that need to be upheld for the good of society, like clean air and human rights. They can’t be attached to social license or marketing trends or local economic initiatives.
No one producer can do this alone, and we can’t expect them to shoulder the cost. I own a house. I know there are things I could invest in that would make my house greener, but I don’t. And there are a lot of reasons why I don’t. I don’t have the extra cash to turn my roof into a mini solar farm to power my washer and dryer. I’m worrying about the old shingles I have right now that I can’t afford to replace, and if someone from Ottawa told me I was being selfish and I simply had to install a solar roof, there’d be a For Sale sign up faster than you can say, “vote of no confidence.”
Obviously, there’s a lot of deeded land that’s already cultivated and changing practices to increase biodiversity and improve soil health is critical to land health. And some of those measures may ultimately mean less yield, but that loss will have to be absorbed by society, and not by a single individual. We don’t need a carrot and stick approach, we need a carrot and cake approach here folks, with extra icing.
If someone told me I could have a new roof installed for free and that they’d throw in the solar part, I’d be an idiot not to. If we truly want to preserve and increase the ecosystem services we get from deeded land, we’re going to have to make it that easy and that obvious. And once we recognize that, we too will truly share not just the reward, but also the burden of being a true steward of the land.