Saskatchewan ranchers and farmers who use the province’s PFRA community pastures have united to form an association with the aim of ensuring the pastures remain viable for cattle production and grazing.
More than 200 patrons last Wednesday packed the Sutherland Hall in Saskatoon to learn about and then support a proposal to form the Community Pasture Patron’s Association of Saskatchewan (CPPAS).
Nearly every pasture in the province was represented. The turnout demonstrated that farmers and ranchers, although separated by geography, ideology and even political philosophy, could come together on at least one issue: federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz’s April 2012 announcement that Ottawa would end the management of community pastures by 2018.
The government’s plan to disband the 75-year-old PFRA pasture system and sell or lease the lands has raised widespread concerns from patrons worried about losing the professional grazing management provided by the PFRA pasture managers as well for the ecological well-being of the land.
The patrons at the meeting “overwhelmingly supported the idea,” to form an association said the CPPAS’s president and Bladworth farmer Ian McCreary, who represents the Elbow-Willner community pasture.
Patrons at the meeting gave the association a mandate to represent patrons on issues pertaining to the transition of PFRA pastures and to negotiate with the government on the financial terms on which the pastures are transferred to patrons.
One of its most pressing tasks is to “push for a delay” on the transfer of the first 10 pastures so that no pastures are transferred before the start of the 2015 grazing season.
McCreary said they want to slow down the process to allow due diligence to be done to ensure the long-term viability of the pastures and the environmental protection of those lands.
The transition of the first 10 of Saskatchewan’s 62 pastures is to start in the 2013 grazing season.
The federal government’s decision to get out of the community pastures business came unexpectedly as details of its budget last spring began to trickle out.
“It certainly came as a surprise to us,” Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister Lyle Stewart told the crowd.
To read more please see the January 28 print edition of The Davidson Leader.