A program called Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) might be our best hope for restoring duck production across prairie Canada
By Rob Olson,
President Delta Waterfowl
Wetland in Alberta
Prairie Canada is no longer King of Continental Duck Production. As Editor Dan Nelson has described, that title has been temporarily swiped by the Dakotas, an area currently enjoying the fruits of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the form of higher duck hatch rates and better protection of the United States’ prairie wetland base.
From a Canadian duck guy’s perspective, that stings me more than a little. We are a proud and competitive people, so don’t think for a moment we are collectively taking this momentary setback lying down up here in the land of snow, ice and 40-pound raccoons.
However, if prairie Canada is to regain its former spot atop the podium of duck production, there must new approaches to stopping the losses of habitat. The potential for a Canadian comeback is tremendous because in spite of the stunning losses of wetlands and shockingly low hatch rates due to unnaturally high levels of predation, Canada still possesses most of the continental breeding grounds for ducks and the majority of the remaining breeding wetlands that North America has to offer.
This story is about a new program that may represent one of Delta’s best ideas ever. It is called Alternative Land Use Services, or ALUS for short, and it represents a new way of working with the people—farmers—who own and control the land where most of our threatened ducks breed.
At its core, ALUS is about paying farmers incentives to restore habitat on their land and to protect existing habitat as well. The ALUS idea is revolutionary in many ways, but one of the biggest differences with ALUS is that it involves the entire local and regional community in the planning and delivery of the program.
This is a huge departure from past approaches which either focused on government or other groups regulating (forcing) change or delivering conservation “to” farmers. As duck hunters, ALUS represents the potential to create the “mother of all conservation delivery models” to secure and restore the severely depleted Canadian breeding habitat.
Although ALUS was originally proposed as a western prairie program, it has caught on the strongest and quickest in eastern Canada. Read on to find out about some phenomenal people doing great things to promote ALUS as a policy solution to “fix” big environmental challenges in Canada, like low duck production.
For ALUS, the sun is rising in the east, and particularly in Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island. PEI is a place everyone should visit once. It is an island on the east coast of Canada with unmistakable red earth that grows some of the best potatoes this side of Idaho. I’ve been there several times, and although I’m sure they exist, I’ve yet to meet a nasty resident of this charming little island of rolling hills, babbling brooks and of course, potato fields.
ALUS has caught on like a prairie wildfire since PEI became first to adopt it as a province-wide program in 2008. Although PEI produces only a modest amount of waterfowl, mostly black ducks, its adoption of ALUS is huge news for duck hunters. This has set a precedent and created tremendous buzz among government agricultural departments in other provinces across Canada, like Saskatchewan and Alberta.
If it’s true that good things happen because of good people, John MacQuarrie is clearly one of the good guys. An avid waterfowler, the current Deputy Minister of PEI’s Environment, Energy, and Forestry has been the driving force that triggered the province’s adoption of ALUS (see Q & A).
Although John has spent his career trying to solve environmental problems, he remembers being taken aback by the ALUS idea when he first heard about it, “Delta staff came to PEI for a conference and spoke about this new idea called ALUS,” he recalls. “We were looking at new regulations as a solution to some large environmental problems we had on farmland, and along come Bob Bailey and Bob Sopuck from Delta. As I listened I thought, now why didn’t we think of that?”
ALUS PAC chairman and rancher, Bryan Gilvesy leading a tour of his farm during the summer of 2009.
In the world of duck conservation, there has been a long-standing debate regarding using regulations versus incentives to create landscape change. An entire career spent working on agricultural and environmental issues have made MacQuarrie’s position on this issue clear: “You can’t legislate positive environmental outcomes on farmland. It’s inefficient economically and sets up a tough dynamic with rural communities. There’s nothing worse than dragging a farmer into court.”
Shawn Hill is the provincial coordinator for ALUS in PEI. Although he is the man in charge of putting ALUS on the ground, he didn’t always understand the need for ALUS. “I was a non-believer four years ago. I wondered why farmers don’t do this on their own,” says Shawn.
A diehard fly-fishing fanatic, Shawn spends 125 days a year chasing trout and salmon throughout eastern Canada. “I used to fly fish and hunt deer and waterfowl,” he says. “Life got busy so my wife made me choose one, and I chose fly fishing.”
Since the 1990s there have been several, high-profile fish kills in the many streams of PEI. Shawn was one of the people involved in cleaning up thousands of dead fish, which was a particularly bitter experience given his passion for trout. Now, Shawn understands more about how to fix the problems, “I’ve seen rivers run white due to nutrient overloading, I’ve seen rivers run red with soil runoff and I’ve seen duck breeding marshes disappear.
“To me ALUS is a symbol of hope. For a long time, farmers bore the cost of environmental benefits of the landscape at a loss for them, and the environment. Now with ALUS, the positive outcomes are unprecedented in PEI. It is clearly the way to go forward if we want to avoid negative outcomes like fish kills.”
In my own travels speaking about ALUS, I have often been asked why ALUS creates better outcomes on private farmland – like creating more duck habitat – than other approaches. It comes down to how you work with the folks who own and control most of the land where ducks nest. ALUS brings the farmer to the table to lead the planning and delivery of the concept, arguably more than other program in Canadian history.
Hill agrees: “ALUS directly involves the farmer, which is ultimately the best thing for conservation. The likelihood of farmers doing the right thing environmentally on their land increases when they are really involved, like through ALUS. Trust and respect are huge factors in successfully working with farmers. ALUS gets me through the farm gate.”
And nowhere have farmers taken the proverbial bull by the horns in promoting ALUS than in Ontario.
Dave Reid - Coordinator, Norfolk Land Stewardship
Council, standing in restored tall grass prairie.
Dave Reid is a serious turkey hunter who was heavily involved in bringing the turkey back to southern Ontario. Luckily for ALUS, Dave was so smitten with chasing gobblers that in 1985 he started making the trek down to Missouri to pursue his passion.
As fate would have it, that was the same year CRP was launched in the U.S. “On the way down to Missouri to hunt turkeys, I drove through the Corn Belt and saw the incredible, positive landscape changes that occurred as part of CRP, and I thought, we need to bring this to Canada.”
When Dave isn’t chasing turkeys, he works as a stewardship coordinator for the Norfolk Stewardship Council, a local partnership including many local farmers working on conservation. Norfolk County lies on the north shore of Lake Erie, in the heart of Southern Ontario farm country.
Inspired by articles on the ALUS concept written by Delta staff, Dave and members of his stewardship group arranged to attend a presentation by Bailey and one of Delta’s farm organization partners, the Keystone Agricultural Producers (KAP). That was in 2002, and as Dave puts it, “the farmers on my council simply said we should do an ALUS demonstration here, and that’s how the Norfolk ALUS demonstration project was born.”
The low point of the rollercoaster ride that followed was being turned down for federal funding in 2007. “We hadn’t raised enough money and I was really down in the dumps,” Dave says, “but the farmers and other partners around the table simply would not give up. They all said that ALUS was too good an idea to let go.”
Since then they have charged forward and grown the ALUS partnership to include some 78 groups that are supporting the project with a diverse array of entities providing enough funding to continue. Although the size of this coalition is impressive, it is the makeup of the group that is unprecedented.
MacQuarrie agrees: “The first thing I noticed when I attended a meeting in Norfolk prior to PEI’s adoption of ALUS was that everyone was at the table – urban environmental groups, farmers, government, mainstream conservation organizations. For the first time in my experience, all the stakeholders were working on a landscape conservation solution together. That is powerful.”
The project has won high profile environmental awards (see sidebar) and significantly raised the awareness of the ALUS concept across Ontario and Canada. This is fantastic news for duck hunters because Ontario is a key duck producer for parts of North America but most importantly, as goes Ontario land-use policy, so goes Canada. Much of Canada’s political and economic clout is centered on southern Ontario so ALUS’ success there is essential to the concept being adopted in other regions of the country.
ALUS PAC chairman and rancher, Bryan Gilvesy leading a tour of his farm.
One of the big breakthroughs with the Norfolk ALUS project was learning to use demonstration farms effectively to create support for the concept. Bryan and Cathy Gilvesey are farmers and cattle producers who live in Norfolk County, Ontario and actively demonstrate the ALUS concept these days. They have hosted hundreds of visitors and tours to their farm to promote ALUS, and to sell their locally famous grass-fed beef.
Before ALUS, the Gilveseys didn’t support conservation publicly. “Because my wife and I were good stewards in the past, we knew and appreciated that we had numerous endangered species on our property, but we were careful not to let anyone know, in case someone would regulate our farm operation,” says Bryan.
“When ALUS came along, it was suddenly safe to ‘come out’ and disclose about the endangered species on our farm because they were no longer a liability, they were an asset. That’s ALUS from a farmer’s perspective, moving from fear to value and making lemons from lemonade.”
ALUS’ approach of employing farmers to deliver conservation on their own land makes good sense from Dave Reid’s perspective. “ALUS is unique because it takes full advantage of the people who know the land best,” he says.
Gilvesey agrees. “What conservation had forgotten is that farmers have tremendous land-management skills. Everyone understands that plumbers have skills, that electricians have skills. Farmers have skills to manipulate land for desired outcomes that are massive and do not exist anywhere else in society. That is huge local value that ALUS taps into.”
Today, southern Ontario sends fewer ducks south because of habitat loss and increased predation. The same is true for most of the Canadian prairie. To have a real, noticeable impact on the fall flight for duck hunters, the only hope is to significantly change the landscape for the better, through an agricultural policy solution.
That’s Delta’s goal with ALUS, and it’s Reid’s goal too. “I have spent 35 years working in conservation. I’ve done the little green spots on the map and put up signs and those were good things to do. But ALUS has the potential to create a real landscape level impact.”
The future of agricultural policy in Canada is being shaped as I write this article. There is much debate and discussion about how to increase the environmental outputs from farmland. The outputs are called environmental goods and services up here, EG&S for short. Ducks are the environmental good we duck hunters care about. The power of ALUS is that we can learn about how to work on farmland effectively by doing it now, not waiting.
As Dave Reid puts it, “I think people up here are fed up with talking about EG&S, they want action, people want to see something significant happen. That’s ALUS.”
Rob Olson is president of Delta Waterfowl. Reach him at rolson@deltawaterfowl.org.