| | Local action on the ground is key to achieving regional land use goals. In the case of the Strawberry Plains Grazing Association, a shared commitment to watershed health has helped the association integrate its own activities with various broad land use objectives in the region. And these activities have been so successful that the association was nominated for a prestigious Emerald Award for environmental excellence.
The association is currently composed of 15 livestock producers who graze their cattle along the Battle River on the lands of the Canadian Forces’ Western Area Training Centre near Wainwright. The producers are using the placement of stock watering systems on these lands as a way to help maintain riparian health, protect water quality and improve range management.
Placing watering systems away from the river helps to keep cattle out of the water and away from sensitive riparian zones. Riparian zones are the areas of water-loving plants on the edges of rivers and other water bodies. Healthy riparian zones perform such functions as filtering out contaminants, providing flood protection, recharging groundwater and providing habitat.
Judy Fenton, a member of the association, says using fences to control cattle access to the river is not an option at the training centre because fences could interfere with the military exercises there. So the locations of the watering systems are the main tool for managing cattle distribution.
New watering sites are strategically located to mesh the requirements of the producers and other stakeholders in the region. These requirements include:
- protecting water quality in the Battle River, which is the source of drinking water for the training centre and the Town of Wainwright,
- maintaining other riparian functions,
- minimizing impacts on environmentally sensitive areas of the training centre,
- improving cattle health and weight gain, and
- improving pasture health and rejuvenation
“The producers felt that if they could place the watering systems away from the river in areas that had been underutilized for grazing, that would balance the system. So they scouted the area and identified sites where the forage resources were overused and underused,” explains Somerlee Bennett. She is Assistant Agricultural Fieldman with the Municipal District of Wainwright as well as a Conservation Technologist funded under the AESA program.
“Then the producers worked with one of the biologists at the training centre. He has various overlay maps like sharp-tailed grouse breeding grounds, leopard frog habitat, and habitat for some larger animal species. And they ensured that the new grazing locations wouldn’t affect any of those sensitive areas,” says Bennett. She adds, “The producers also worked with [Alberta] Public Lands to ensure that cattle would come to those new grazing areas and that the plant species would be palatable.”
The association’s watershed management activities were also a good fit with the landscape objectives of the M.D. of Wainwright Sustainable Land Initiative. This initiative, which ended in 2004, was a partnership of the M.D., the training centre, Alliance Pipeline, Ducks Unlimited Canada, Reduced Tillage LINKAGES and PFRA/Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Bennett says the initiative’s goal was to enhance “the long-term sustainability of the M.D. as well as the producers who live in it. …We wanted to offer programs and services to producers without recreating the wheel, so we looked for gaps [that needed to be filled].”
The initiative began by mapping such features as ecologically sensitive areas, riparian zones and manure sources in the M.D. Then it targeted specific areas for action and provided technical and financial help to producer groups, like the Strawberry Plains Grazing Association, who wanted to adopt practices that fit with the initiative’s objectives.
The grazing association is still going strong after its Emerald Award nomination in 2004. So far, the producers have developed nine off-site watering systems. They are currently working with another grazing association on five more projects.
And now another regional plan is in the works that will need local action: the Battle River Watershed Management Plan (see “From Managing Water to Managing Watersheds”). While waiting for development of the draft plan, the M.D. is holding meetings to let producers know about this latest plan and how to provide input to it, and also to help producers better understand how practices on their farm and in their watershed are reflected in the river’s health. |
|