Persistence is starting to pay off for Ian Wishart, a Manitoba farmer who for years has lobbied to see farmers rewarded for being responsible land stewards.
Last week, Ottawa and the Manitoba government announced the start of a three-year project aimed at supporting farmers who maintain wetlands or who plant permanent cover on fragile lands.
The project could help set the stage for a national program that rewards producers financially for those efforts.
“I think we’ve made a real step forward in terms of policy alternatives, both federally and provincially,” said Wishart, who farms at Portage la Prairie and is a vice-president of Keystone Agricultural Producers.
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“I’m hoping this is the thin edge of a very big wedge.”
Wishart first proposed the idea of paying producers for the environmental benefits they provide on their land six years ago.
The idea won the support of KAP and it then became a matter of winning over the federal and provincial governments.
“Most of the environmental initiatives so far, both federally and provincially, have been fairy regulatory in nature,” Wishart said.
“We know from past experience that that approach to dealing with environmental issues hasn’t yielded very good results.”
Under the Ecological Goods and Services pilot project, farmers in the Rural Municipality of Blanshard will be paid to develop and maintain natural environments on their land, said Manitoba agriculture minister Rosann Wowchuk.
The idea is to motivate farmers to preserve natural and fragile areas that have limited agricultural value but could provide environmental benefits to all Manitobans, she said.
“I believe farmers are very good stewards of the land and all of society benefits if farmers do a good job of managing the land. In this model, we’re testing how all of society can support a farmer when he is improving his practices to protect the land and the soil.”
The pilot project, the first of its kind in Canada, will be funded under the environment pillar of the agricultural policy framework, with some money also coming from the RM of Blanshard and the Delta Waterfowl Foundation.
At the end of the three years, it will be evaluated for the social, economic and environmental benefits that it provides,
Wishart said.
More pilot projects are expected in Manitoba and elsewhere in Canada to help determine the idea’s merits. The RM of Blanshard was chosen largely because of the local commitment to such an endeavour.
Although it is being called the Ecological Goods and Services pilot project, it mirrors what Wishart envisioned under the name Alternate Land Use Services, or ALUS.
Under the APF, there is money available to help producers improve their farms where risks to the environment have been identified through environmental farm plans.
Wishart said the idea now being explored could be complementary to that.
“Environmental farm planning is focussed pretty much on environmental liabilities, so it picks out the negatives. What the whole EFP process tends to forget are all the benefits that farmers are producing beyond the farmgate for all Manitobans and all Canadians.
“ALUS is focussed much more on the benefit side of things.”
