Saskatchewan’s farmland is caught between profit and habitat

His relatively small plot of farmland in southeast Saskatchewan is rich with wetlands, scrub and aspen forest in addition to the wheat and oats he cultivates. But all around him are fields that have been smoothed over — cleared and drained of anything that gets in the way of growing a crop. 

The farmer, environmentalist and former Saskatchewan cabinet minister says the mountain bluebirds that used to nest in his bird boxes no longer return. Gone too are the familiar sights of killdeer and McCown’s and chestnut-collared longspur. The meadowlarks have dwindled.

The habitat is still there on his land, but Scott wonders if his 640 acres is too small an island to entice the birds back. 

It’s not just the birds that are disappearing. 

Around Scott’s farm and across Saskatchewan, the farmers are also becoming scarce. Land is increasingly in the hands of fewer people, according to the latest agricultural census — from large investors to farm families that have become significant corporations in their own right.

The dwindling farmers, as well as the homeless birds, are caught up in a contemporary agricultural system that puts enormous pressure on producers to increase the size of their farms, to clear land for the sake of efficiency and to try to pull as much value out of their fields as they can in order to help cover the cost of million-dollar machinery, fuel, herbicides, pesticides, mortgages, rent and more. 

The high costs and increasingly high prices for land provide an opening for large investors to gobble up acres, and then rent them out to farmers — providing flexibility to the farmer but generating concern about the future of farming and the health of the land.