From windrows surrounding home quarters to Saskatchewan’s numerous dams to Lake Diefenbaker itself — they’re all signs that the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was here.
The federally administered PFRA has continued to evolve since its inception, but once its most recent makeover is complete, it will look drastically different than it did when it was founded during the Great Depression.
A fixture on the Prairies, the PFRA grew to offer a variety of services to producers, everything from water development and conservation to community pastures and the shelterbelt program in Indian Head.
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“That’s something tangible. It’s something you can connect to, to say, ‘the federal government does exist,’ ” said Carl Neggers, who served as PFRA director general for five years, beginning in 2003.
Under cuts to Agriculture Canada, the PFRA’s longstanding shelterbelt and community pasture programs will be divested and eventually turned over to the provinces or the private sector.
The federal government formed the PFRA at a time when it was trying to mitigate the effects of a lengthy drought and soil erosion and assist producers, many of whom were new to the area from Europe.
“They brought their notion of farming with them, which wasn’t a bad thing,” said Neggers.
“But when you’re tilling land in the Ukraine and you’ve got 12 inches of topsoil, it’s a lot different than when you’re tilling in the Prairies, where the topsoil could be at certain points less than an inch thick.”
The organization also played an important role in the settlement of the Prairies. Its community pastures — numbering 85 today, 60 of which are in Saskatchewan — marked a drastic shift in federal policy in the 1930s, said Daniel Balkwill, who studied the early days of the program as part of his graduate work at the University of Saskatchewan.
“The whole thing was a big example of really the failure of the whole settlement process in the drier areas of Western Canada,” he said.
Producers had been offered small farms of 160 acres, often in areas not suited for cultivation. Balkwill said the community pasture program was designed to stop drifting soil and offer producers diversity with pasture land.
“They reversed, essentially, 50 years of settlement policy by regrassing that stuff,” he said.
When Neggers took over the reins at the PFRA, he helped it make the transition into Agriculture Canada’s agri-environment services branch in 2009.
He said the move was intended to take the PFRA out of infrastructure development and into a role where it could help share research and new technologies.
“I was charged with looking at it and coming up with alternative and creative and robust solutions that would keep PFRA relevant into the future and not keep it so immersed in its past without losing its potency,” he said.
The agri-environment services branch continued to manage legacy programs such as community pastures and the shelterbelt program, which distributed millions of trees across the Prairies.
“I’m not saying they didn’t get it, but it was a lot of arguments and discussions to get them to appreciate what we had done in the past and get them to understand that we were not going to stay in the past, but we were going to reflect on what we did in the past and not throw the baby out with the bath water,” said Neggers.
Last month’s federal budget unveiled plans to amalgamate the agri-environment services branch into a science and technology centre.
