GRAYSVILLE, Man. – It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Fred Dunn knows every square inch of the Rural Municipality of Dufferin.
As Dunn recently drove along a road about 15 kilometres northwest of Carman, Man., he provided a commentary on the history of the landscape.
The cultivated field to the north once had 40 acres of trees, he noted, and the field to the south used to be covered with sloughs.
Dunn has become increasingly concerned in recent years about the changing landscape as producers in the western part of the RM started thinking about getting out of the cattle business. The result was destruction of the natural landscape on marginal land north and west of Graysville.
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“They’re trying to make it (their land) impressive to a grain farmer,” said Dunn, a cattle producer from north of Graysville, who worked as the RM’s construction foreman for 30 years and has served as municipal councillor for 15 years.
“They’re pushing out the little clumps of trees. They’re trying to drain every pothole.”
Dunn eventually decided to use his position as councillor to do something about it.
Earlier this year, he convinced his fellow municipal councillors to pay for wetlands. They budgeted $10,000 per year for the next three years, or $40 per acre, to pay farmers willing to keep their sloughs.
Dunn thinks the initiative makes Dufferin the first municipality in Manitoba to pay producers for ecosystem services.
He signed up enough producers to preserve 250 acres of sloughs, which has exhausted the $10,000 budget for 2010.
The program’s success convinced the LaSalle Redboine Conservation District to contribute $15,000 toward the wetland retention project in March.
“When you get into programs like this where you’re wanting guys to keep their land natural, the long-term conservation agreements kind of turn a lot of people off,” said Justin Reid, manager of the conservation district.
“Something that’s short-term like this is a really good idea because it’s not tied to the land long-term,” Reid said. “It’s really simple.”
The additional money will likely be spent quickly.
“I have more than enough names already.” Dunn said.
While talking recently with a reporter over coffee in his dining room, Dunn received a phone call from a producer who was committing his sloughs to the program
He said his frustration over the loss of wetlands stems partly from childhood memories.
“There was a slough and a half on every quarter section (in the RM),” said Dunn, who grew up on a farm northwest of Carman. “It stayed in water all summer. We played in them as kids.”
However, the vast majority of those sloughs were drained as big agriculture took over in the 1970s and 1980s, especially east of Carman.
“There’s not one left in that area. They’re all drained,” he said.
Since BSE hit in 2003, Dunn has watched a repeat of history. Cattle producers in the western half of the RM began draining their sloughs, converting pastures to cropland.
“This is livestock country, but you can’t blame these people for bailing out and trying to do what they’re doing,” he said.
Dunn admitted a few hundred dollars isn’t going to turn around the bottom line for a struggling cattle producer, but the symbolic gesture is important.
“You can’t expect people in one end of the municipality to have everything drained and the other end to hold water for nothing,” he said.
As well, paying people now is better than paying to fix environmental damage later, he added.
“What’s the cost of doing nothing?” he said. “Once it’s gone, we’ll never get it back.”
