Another One Bites the Dust

Phil Burpee, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice

Phil Burpee

They’re killing the PFRA. The bean-counters in the federal government have been instructed by their political masters to scan around for valuable and successful public services in order to gut them and abandon them to the for-profit sector. This is, of course, standard practice for the current administration under Mr. Harper, but perhaps even the most jaded of us never thought they would actually stoop so low as to murder one of the most respected, useful and esteemed programs ever to have graced the Canadian Prairies – the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, the aforementioned PFRA, along with its stellar Shelterbelt Program. It has now been conflated into a bureaucratic monstrosity with the vaguely Orwellian moniker ‘Agri-Environment Services Branch Agroforestry Development Centre’. With a name like that you can easily imagine that they’re trying to mask a diminishment of service within a bulky and totally non-specific title – because this name could mean anything, or it could mean absolutely nothing at all. What it most emphatically does not mean is that the federal government is any longer in a mood to partner with small farmers – quite the opposite. The small farmer is increasingly abandoned to fend for him/herself out on the dance floor with the 800 pound gorillas – aka Cargill, Monsanto, Viterra, etc.- and woe betide the silly dreamer who imagines that government has a place in the wellbeing of the populace.

Shelterbelt
Phil Burpee photo

The PFRA was established in April of 1935 by an act of Parliament in response to the emergency situation on the Prairies after eight years of falling grain prices, persistent drought, very severe wind erosion, and a great exodus and abandonment of farms throughout the Palliser Triangle and other areas of the southern prairie. Some six million acres were in the grip of drought and unstoppable soil drifting. Tens of thousands of farmers and their families were destitute and requiring aid to survive. The mandate of the PFRA was to rehabilitate land affected by soil drifting and to develop and promote 'systems of farm practice, tree culture, water supply and land utilization' that would rehabilitate eroded fields and ultimately the economic security of farmers in the region. In the course of all this, Experimental Farms were established across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, predominantly on working farms, to research and demonstrate practical erosion control methods, such as seeding cover crops, cultivating to keep trash cover, and deeply ridging loose soil. PFRA engineers began building water reservoirs and stock-watering dams and offering assistance to farmers and communities to create dugouts.

Once the emergency phase of the ‘Dust Bowl’ was over, the PFRA's mandate was redefined for the longer term with a primary focus on water and pasture development. Aside from providing technical and financial assistance to help farmers develop stable water supplies, hundreds of dams were completed, providing drinking and irrigation water. From 1935 into the twenty-first century, PFRA helped to develop more than 285,000 water supply projects - dams, dugouts, wells and water pipelines - to provide rural residents with good quality water supplies. It has also worked closely with farmers promoting ways to reduce soil erosion, establish permanent cover on marginal land use and manage water edge zones. PFRA (or rather now AESBAFDC – pardon?) currently operates 87 community pastures across the Prairies comprising hundreds of thousands of acres. These pastures, one of the largest ranching operations in North America, help to preserve the biodiversity of the prairie region, protect marginal land from erosion, and provide essential wildlife habitat in an otherwise rapidly developing, and increasingly lifeless, agro-industrial landscape. Will they be the next to go?

On our farm here we have had tremendous support from the PFRA office out of Lethbridge. Through various grants, initiatives and partnerships orchestrated by PFRA we have had both material and financial support from agencies as diverse as Ducks Unlimited, Cows and Fish, the Provincial Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Farm Plan, Canada/Alberta Farm Stewardship Plan, Greencover Initiative and the Oldman Watershed Council. These programs and expertise have allowed us to establish a five-row shelterbelt, stabilize at-risk soils, undertake riparian rehabilitation and enhancement, cross-fence for winter grazing management, plant native tress and shrubs to consolidate stream banks, seed former crop land into permanent forage cover and fence off cattle from water sources. All of these things not only improve the health of the land itself and bolster wildlife habitat, but also boost the economic viability of that land through prevention of soil loss, increased diversity of native grasses, and more pounds per land unit of livestock production without reliance on chemical supplements and inputs. In short, it has made it possible for us as small farmers to institute practices which would be otherwise unavailable on the typically small budget of such an operation. Bearing in mind that the average off-farm income in Alberta today is approximately $36,000, just to keep heads above water, the existence of such programs is an enormous boon. Just that little bit of extra help can mean make or break for a family farm.

But now this is being undone. Former federal stewardship grants are being handed over to the province. And sadly, giving federal money to the government of Alberta is about on a par with giving $20.00 to a drunk – he’ll head straight to the beer store with it. The province will similarly abscond – but in this case it will find ways to slip that money somehow over to the energy sector, and tell the farmer that they must have misplaced their wallet somewhere – “Gee – I coulda sworn I had that twenty bucks here somewhere…..” The PFRA Shelterbelt Program, a fabulously successful operation now in its eighth decade of service, is being shut down. The agency that pretty much single-handedly criss-crossed the Prairie with thousands of stately, beautiful and functional rows of wind-defying trees is being dissolved. As of 2013 no more saplings will be offered free of charge to farmers – now everybody will have to go to the nurseries – which means, considering the heavy costs, that shelterbelt creation will functionally cease, and along with it the very mechanism that gave rise to sustainable farm life and a thriving population of native birds whose songs typically fall silent in the barren expanses of mechanized agribusiness. What short-sighted dim-wittedness – slaughtering the Golden Goose which is the multi-generational community of agricultural communities. Every such abandonment of the small producer pounds another nail in the coffin of rural life. Soon enough nothing will remain but the vast, hi-tech mono-cultures of corporate agri-business – prairie creatures driven into extirpation, silence descending upon the land, and prairie folk driven into the consumer-driven rat-race of the cities.

There is sadness and anger at Indian Head, Saskatchewan, the site of one of the finest experimental farms in the world and the home of the PFRA Shelterbelt Program. A proven and invaluable public service, with thoroughly-established long-term cost benefits to both agriculture and society at large, is being sacrificed on the slab of so-called free-market political philosophy. But there is nothing at all free in a marketplace given over entirely to jungle laws of survival of the most ferocious and most rapacious. The methodical removal of societal supports for small, family farming operations is one of the most shameful and counter-productive trends of modern government – an abandonment of prudence and responsibility of the first order. For it is the very diversity of small farming operations that would ultimately allow rural life to thrive and prosper, and for rural species survival and biodiversity to continue in tandem with thoughtful stewardship of the land amidst a prosperous marketplace of healthful, sustainably-produced foods.

A couple of years ago we had the pleasure of a visit from a Deputy Minister of the Federal Department of Agriculture, courtesy of PFRA Lethbridge. Our little farm was being shown as an example of what well-targeted programming might achieve in conjunction with other affiliated agencies. What he told us was stark – “It’s over,” he said. “They’re squeezing us pretty hard. Good luck. You’re on your own.”

At Indian Head they speak rather grimly of ‘our friend Mr. Harper’. What we are seeing is an economic model at play. The perception of our government having an abiding responsibility to maintain a living fabric of interconnectedness between the people and their elected representatives is being junked. The new intermediary is fast becoming the private sector, with all its proclivities towards diminishment of service and elevation of cost. It is shameful. The loss of the Shelterbelt Program is merely a step along the way. What we are seeing is nothing less than the selling-out of our agricultural heritage to profiteers and trans-national thieves who have exactly zero interest in the 10,000 year history of people and soil. And as we so journey, so ultimately does our world. Consider the following thoughts from the estimable Vandana Shiva: -

Phil Burpee

May 5, 2012