For Indigenous peoples, those things are gifts, the audience was told during the Sustainability of Canadian Agriculture Conference in mid-March.

The virtual conference was co-hosted March 12-14 by the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Livestock and the Environment and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

Why it matters: Indigenous perspectives on agriculture view the natural world as a partner and teacher.

Society over the last few centuries has tested the hypothesis of “what if we behaved as if the Earth was nothing more than stuff … and, moreover, that all the stuff belonged to us,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer.

“The results of that experiment are in, and we find ourselves teetering on the edge of a precipice of climate chaos.”

Wall Kimmerer is a professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She’s a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma.

She challenged the audience to a change of worldview; to characterize humans as members of a “democracy of species, governed by laws of interdependence.”

As an example, Indigenous peoples have traditionally viewed plants as teachers. Modern ideas like regenerative agriculture are only starting to realize some of those lessons.

In 2007, business magnate Richard Branson put up a $25 million reward for a demonstrated method of drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it. Wall Kimmerer noted that plants have always done this, using photosynthesis and storing carbon for centuries in forests, peat bogs and the Prairies.

They will even grow faster if there is more carbon in the atmosphere, she said, as long as they have water and nutrients to support the process.

However, too many forests have been cut down and too much carbon has been released into the atmosphere for the plants to do it themselves, she said, so “it’s time to imagine and implement a new green economy for the future.”

For agriculture, that future looks a lot like permaculture.

Rebuilding

Some Indigenous communities are rebuilding their relationships with the land, said Melissa Arcand.

She is a soil biogeochemist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan who teaches in the Kanawayihetaytan Askiy program, which trains students to work in resource and land management in Indigenous communities. Arcand is a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation.

In the inaugural Ted Poyser Lecture in Soil Health, Arcand tied soil science on the Prairies to its historic context.

The first data on Prairie soil nitrogen and organic matter was published in 1882 and 1883, Arcand said. This was within years of the near-extinction of the buffalo, the Metis Red River Resistance, the signing of Treaty 1, Treaty 2 and the Indian Act and the introduction of the Peasant Farm Policy, which put limits on the scope of Indigenous agriculture.

These events allowed settlers to begin farming the Prairies, but relegated Indigenous peoples to small reservations. Much of the subsequent Indigenous land was sub-prime farmland, Arcand said, and some of the better land was later expropriated to be used for settler farming.

Meanwhile, policies restricted the ability of First Nations farmers to sell their own agricultural products.

Today, Arcand said, many First Nations are acquiring land, though much of the agricultural land left to them is leased to non-Indigenous farmers. People within Indiginous communities have, in some cases, lost their relationship with the land and don’t know who’s farming it.

Most land use decisions are then made by the operating farmer, who might not have incentive to use best management practices because of short lease terms, she said.

The Kanawayihetaytan Askiy certificate program (Kanawayihetaytan Askiy translates to “let us take care of the land) covers courses in law, business and economics. Arcand then teaches natural science through a hands-on, land-based learning course. Students are taken to Indigenous communities where they undertake Western science practices like soil classification, while at the same time being guided by local elders and knowledge keepers.

Arcand also spoke about Bridge to Land Water Sky, an AAFC Living Lab project led by communities such as Mistawasis Nehiyawak and Muskeg Lake Cree Nation.

The goal of that program is to reimagine the relationship between Indigenous landowners and farmers while improving land management, food security and sovereignty.

A lot of the work has involved moving away from a strictly transactional relationship with the farmers who rent the land, Arcand said. This allows the farmer to understand the First Nations’s goals, and for the community to understand the constraints that guide farmers’ decision-making on the land.

“It’s a lot of, sort of back-and-forth learning,” Arcand said.

Like Wall Kimmerer, Arcand emphasized respect for the kinship between the natural world and humanity.

“We think of the earth, the birds, the fish, the plants — those are our relatives, and when you start to think of them as your relatives, you’re going to treat them differently,” Arcand said.

“If we’re really in a reciprocal relationship … in turn, our relationship is to protect them just as much because we rely on them.”

The post Natural resources more than just ‘stuff’ in our ecosystem appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The official designation is intended to honour the conservation organization’s long history of restoring and managing wetlands and grasslands and protecting waterfowl and other wildlife in the province.

“On behalf of the Manitoba government, I would like to congratulate everyone at Ducks Unlimited Canada on reaching this incredible milestone,” said Tracy Schmidt, Environment and Climate Change Minister. “Manitoba is proud to be the home of the first Ducks Unlimited wetland restoration project at Big Grass Marsh. Thank you for your ongoing commitment to conserve and enhance natural habitats.”

Big Grass Marsh was a wetland area surrounding a lake in south-central Manitoba. It was drained for agricultural use in 1938, the same year the DUC project was established.

“Ducks Unlimited Canada thanks the Manitoba government and all Manitobans for their support of our organization and wetland conservation,” said Michael Nadler, CEO of Ducks Unlimited Canada. “It is particularly special to be recognized in the place where our conservation journey began 85 years ago.”

Since then, DUC has been involved in wetland or grassland conservation projects covering over 2.3 million acres in the province.

The new designation was the result of a private member bill introduced by PC MLA Rick Wowchuk in 2023. Bill 244 “gives Manitobans an opportunity to recognize and celebrate the role of Ducks Unlimited Canada in conserving, restoring and managing wetlands and grasslands for the benefit of waterfowl and other wildlife and its connection with Manitoba.” 

“We owe a debt of gratitude to our partners, including the Manitoba government, Indigenous Peoples, landowners and conservation-minded organizations, and to our supporters, volunteers, and employees,” said Nadler. “March 17 is a day to celebrate our conservation achievements together and to remember the importance of this ongoing work.” 

To learn more, visit ducks.ca/places/manitoba.

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“It definitely has the potential to be a game-changer for wetland maintenance, drain maintenance and biomass harvesting,” said Redboine Watershed District manager Justin Reid.

Why it matters: New equipment could help overcome logistical issues that have stymied cattail biomass harvest and the fertilizer that can come from it.

The Soft Track 140 Cut and Collect harvester, provided by Altona-based Komb Agricultural Services, was recently demonstrated at the district’s Pelly’s Lake project site near Holland, Man.

The site has drawn significant water management dollars for over a decade, culminating in a large-scale project that included dam infrastructure. That dam, which opened its gates in 2015, was designed to hold back water in spring. It would then be released later in the season, allowing hay harvest by fall.

Slowing water during the spring melt limits local flood risk and allows for later-season recharge downstream. From a conservation point of view, the project enhanced wildlife habitat and provided a sink for phosphorus, allowing time for the nutrient to be taken up by the thick cattails at the water’s edge.

Biomass harvest on the site started in 2012.

Research through the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD) at the time estimated that the cattails could capture 20-60 kilograms of phosphorus per hectare.

Once harvested, the biomass can be burned for heat and the resulting ash, which retains its phosphorus, can be spread on croplands as fertilizer. The biomass could also be used as livestock bedding and, when mixed with manure, can be composted and applied on land.

“Cattails are excellent filters,” said Reid. “Essentially, the phosphorus is taken up by the plants, and then you take the plants out of the system.”

A number of farmers signed agreements for their land to be used in the 630-acre project.

The IISD, along with the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute, continued to investigate ways to harvest and use Pelly’s Lake cattails, although the work previously focused on using equipment farmers already had on hand.

Leading the way

The project, and the wetland harvester demonstrated this year, gained attention south of the U.S.-Canada border.

Earlier this fall, the Redboine Watershed District hosted a site tour for North Dakotan wetland ecologists, who are planning their own biomass harvest site similar to Pelly’s Lake.

The harvester is “a piece of equipment that we’ve been dreaming about for well over a decade,” said Richard Grosshans, bio-remediation lead for IISD’s water program.

The institute has always hoped to use Pelly’s Lake as proof of concept that wetland harvesting could be done with easily rentable local equipment so that watershed districts, municipalities and farmers could do it themselves. However, standard swathers and balers could only get on the land roughly once every three years.

“At the same time, we had partners in Germany and the Netherlands who were using those tracked harvesters, and they were able to access their areas all the time,” said Grosshans.

“We were always hoping to bring something like that to Manitoba, but we were more interested in proving the concept, hoping someone would take up the torch.”

Marlon Bergen, owner of Komb Agricultural Services, was that someone.

Bergen started his firm as a water management business, doing surface drainage, ditch management, aerial surveying and drain tile. He found a persistent challenge in trying to cut and collect vegetation from difficult-to-access waterways.

“I started to develop my own [machine],” he said. “I started doing some design and started working with drafters instead of looking around the world to find what is out there.”

That effort led to a building phase, when Bergen attended a presentation from Grosshans and first heard of the Soft Track 140, built by U.K.-based Log Logic.

Bergen’s strategy turned around. Rather than shouldering the research and development cost of building a unit, he ordered one of the U.K. company’s machines. That was about four years ago.

“It took nearly two and a half years to get the unit into my hands,” Bergen said. “I went to pick it up last December from Falken Equipment out of Ogden, Illinois.”

This spring, he put the unit to work in demonstrations like the one at Pelly’s Lake.

“This year, I wasn’t looking at really being profitable,” he said. “I’ve had a number of years to build the case with municipalities, watershed districts and private entities but, obviously, having the unit in the field was key.”

The result of the Redboine Watershed District demonstration impressed attendees. The wetland harvester is a “go-anywhere, do-anything type of machinery,” Reid said.

Added Grosshans, “it’s literally game-changing to finally have a piece of equipment like that here in Manitoba.”

He said the IISD has been using this type of equipment for well over a decade in Europe.

“They can customize it with different harvesting heads on it and they use it for all kinds of stuff in Europe. They’ve adapted it to work with a cold, wet agriculture with very rich, soft soils,” he said.

While the equipment is common in Europe for habitat and biodiversity recovery, the phosphorus angle comes from Canada.

“They hadn’t thought about that,” said Grosshans. “They were doing it for the habitat and the biomass, and we were doing it for the phosphorus and the biomass, and we connected our story and narrative together, showing all the benefits that can be had from this type of management.”

The post Tech widens door for cattail-based fertilizer appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“There was always this notion that Prairie wetlands might be emitting a bunch of methane in the spring as they thaw,” said project lead Pascal Badiou, one of the scientists working for DUC’s research arm, the Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research.

Why it matters: The accuracy of emissions measurements can affect government funding for sustainable agriculture.

That old idea was in line with what scientists thought they knew about the relationship between greenhouse gases and wetlands. Wetlands contain bacteria that emit methane and, logically, those bacteria should become more active come spring, releasing a pulse of the gas.

There was limited western Canadian data to back the idea, however. Badiou said emissions in cold-weather temperate wetlands, which can remain frozen for five months of the year, had not been extensively studied. The existing body of work measured emissions from isolated patches of wetland roughly 20 centimetres in diameter.

“Those chambers serve as a very sterile, non-biological way to look at greenhouse gas fluxes, and there are lots of issues with that,” said Badiou.

For one thing, that methodology makes it a challenge to get a representative sample.

It takes a lot of work to collect enough samples to track changing greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the day, so samples would only be collected in the middle of the day, when emissions would be greatest.

More significantly, Badiou noted, samples can’t be obtained in early spring when the land is thawing — the very time when the methane surge was assumed to take place.

New methods and surprising results

DUC’s research took a different tack. The organization deployed high-tech flux towers in wetlands across Canada, the most recent of which was erected in July at central Manitoba’s Oak Hammock Marsh.

Two western Manitoba sites are also part of the network, with one installed near Newdale and another between Strathclair and Shoal Lake.

Each tower records changes in greenhouse gas concentrations (the fluxes) of the wetland where they are installed. Concentrations are measured at a rate of 20 to 40 times a second, according to Badiou.

The towers are then paired with an anemometer, a device that gives a three-dimensional reading of wind velocity and movement. The combined result is called a flux footprint.

“Instead of isolating just a small section of wetland to take these measurements, we’re actually getting flux measurements from the wetland as a whole, and that has helped us generate much better estimates of fluxes,” says Badiou.

As the data flowed in, scientists noticed something about that commonly held idea of a spring methane pulse: it never materialized.

“We have not seen any detectable spring pulse of methane,” said Badiou. “The amount of methane coming off these systems is lower than what we see in most published literature for these types of freshwater wetlands in temperate regions.”

National scope

The flux tower project is part of a larger national study co-led by Ducks Unlimited Canada and Irina Creed at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. The hope is to get better data on wetland greenhouse gas emissions across Canada’s different regional conditions.

“Part of our work has been to look at differences with respect to greenhouse gas emissions for wetlands embedded in perennial landscapes relative to wetlands that are embedded in conventional cropland,” said Badiou.

The emerging data has shown significant differences in water quality between those two types of wetlands, and that has significant implications for greenhouse gas emissions, the researcher noted.

“When you have wetlands embedded in perennial systems that are used in livestock operations, typically you have lower nutrients and higher sulphate levels,” said Badiou.

Sulphates inhibit methane production, as do lower nutrient levels.

“What it’s showing is that having intact landscapes around wetlands that are maintained through grazing systems is beneficial in terms of minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and likely increasing carbon sequestration,” said Badiou.

The national project is funded by the Beef Cattle Research Council, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Alliance, the Canadian Agriculture Partnership and Ducks Unlimited Canada and is being run in co-operation with the University of British Columbia and the Manitoba Forage & Grassland Association.

The post Prairie wetlands emissions lower than expected appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The designation is a relatively new conservation standard adopted in Canada in 2021. KBAs are evaluated using international criteria that recognize special areas that support rare and threatened species and ecosystems, and areas of importance within the life cycles of certain species, such as migratory stopover sites and spawning sites. The wildlife conservation society is the lead organization in the KBA Canada Secretariat, a group that also includes Birds Canada and NatureServe Canada.

The KBA designation is based on a rigorous, numerically driven approval process that considers a huge amount of data about ecosystems.

Zack Moore, Manitoba KBA Regional Coordinator for the society, is tasked with wading through the data on these 75 Manitoba sites to identify whether they meet the criteria for KBA designation.

“It’s a long process, but that’s also why it’s valuable,” he says.

While the KBA designation can be based on assessing endangered species or endangered ecosystems (like tall grass prairie), it can also look at aggregations of more common species.

“There are a couple of areas that have huge aggregations of snow geese, and while they’re not particularly endangered, they’re still recognized as being important for the preservation of biodiversity,” says Moore.

Ecological integrity is another assessment aspect.

“We’re still working out the kinks with this, even at the international level, but it’s essentially to identify and prioritize places that have very minimal disturbance to them and are still functioning largely without human interference.”

In Manitoba, that would mainly include areas in the boreal forests, but could also include grasslands that have been used primarily for grazing.

To date, only one of the 75 potential areas identified for KBAs has earned the designation. The Whitewater Lake catchment basin is in the southwestern corner of Manitoba, north of Turtle Mountain Provincial Park.

It is an alkaline lake that may contain no water for two or three years at a time during dry cycles. During normal years, it covers 6,070 hectares, but can be as high as 10,320 hectares (and two metres deep) during years with increased run-off. In 2013, the lake reached record high water levels and probably exceeded 14,000 hectares.

Over the past 100 years, there have been several decades, such as the 1930s and 1980s, in which the lake was dry most of the time. Several small creeks drain into Whitewater Lake, but there is no major natural outlet. The flat terrain surrounding the lake is used for agricultural production.

The fact that only one area has made the cut in the year since Moore started his work in Manitoba is a testament to the thoroughness of the process.

“Because we have so many people involved in providing the information, it can take a little bit longer,” he says.

But Moore says he’s closing in on some areas.

“I’m very excited about what we’re calling Whitemouth-Birch,” where two endangered fish species have been identified.

“Almost the entirety of their occurrence in Canada is within the reaches of the Whitemouth and Birch Rivers,” he says.

The area is not protected, not even by a watershed district, but Moore says some protections are needed to preserve those species.

While discoveries like the endangered fish species in the Whitemouth-Birch Rivers are important, a KBA designation doesn’t guarantee the species will be protected.

“[A KBA] doesn’t have any jurisdictional bounds on it,” says Moore. “It doesn’t have any management prescriptions. It’s simply an area that has passed the quantitative tests that identify it as critically important to biodiversity preservation.”

Drawing attention to these critically endangered areas is an important first step, he adds.

“The KBAs are an information layer. It’s a tool that we can use, along with other tools, to identify areas that are important. There’s already been some explicit interest from the federal government and the provincial government in terms of using this for identifying future conservation goals.”

The post Many key biodiversity areas identified in Manitoba appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The volatile weather has made plain why it’s needed.

“We’re seeing an increase in variability,” said Dimple Roy, director of water management with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

“Climate experts have been saying this for a really long time, and we’re very clearly seeing that the changing climate means more flooding and more drought,” she added.

Roy was one of several experts to advise the province on what should go into the new strategy in early 2021. The province then asked for public input on a framework of the strategy in summer 2021, with stakeholder engagement going on into March 2022.

A provincial spokesperson told the Co-operator they hope to begin consultation with Indigenous leaders “shortly.”

Roy told the Co-operator she understood the process had run into some delays, but that she expected at least some of the strategy to be released by the end of the year.

Building resilience to a changing climate and variable weather was among the focus areas pitched in the draft strategy last year.

IISD pushed for work to increase the land’s ability to hold water — whether through restoring natural wetlands and recreating ‘potholes’ that used to exist, or through water retention projects. These can mitigate flood and drought, Roy said.

The province’s Conservation Trust fund has been funding projects in this vein already. Another proposed focus area was water infrastructure.

“I’ve been making the case that we should rethink the way we’re considering infrastructure,” said Roy, “so not just focus on the built systems that we’ve always thought about when we think infrastructure, but also rely on our natural systems.”

For example, IISD has launched floating wetlands onto municipal lagoons and storm water ponds. The floating wetland plants can absorb excess nutrients in the water to prevent damage downstream.

Last year the province gave EMILI (the Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative) up to $1 million to start a Water Strategy Fund to boost projects to support climate adaptation and sustainability.

EMILI and partner groups launched four pro­jects last fall, including a software tool to forecast water supply and demand; an online hub for water-related data; and a study into increasing irrigation in the province.

They’ll report their findings later this month, EMILI told the Co-operator.

-With files from Alexis Stockford.

The post Water management: What’s the plan? appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

A new study published May 6 in Science by a team of Dutch, American and German scientists shows that it’s not too late to reverse the losses.

• DOWN THE DRAIN: Manitoba’s wetlands a shadow of their former selves

The key to success, the paper’s authors say, is using innovative restoration practices — identified in the new paper — that replicate natural landscape-building processes and enhance the restored wetlands’ carbon-storing potential.

And doing it on a large scale.

“About one per cent of the world’s wetlands are being lost each year to pollution or marsh draining for agriculture, development and other human activities,” said Brian R. Silliman, Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at Duke University, who co-authored the study.

“Once disturbed, these wetlands release enormous amounts of CO2 from their soils, accounting for about five per cent of global CO2 emissions annually,” Silliman said. “Hundreds, even thousands of years of stored carbon are exposed to air and start to rapidly decompose and release greenhouse gases. The result is an invisible reverse waterfall of CO2 draining into the atmosphere. The wetlands switch from being carbon sinks to sources.

“The good news is, we now know how to restore these wetlands at a scale that was never before possible and in a way that both stops this release of carbon and re-establishes the wetland’s carbon-storing capacity,” he said.

What makes most wetlands so effective at carbon storage is that they are formed and held together by plants that grow close to each other, Silliman explained. Their dense above- and below-ground mats of stems and roots trap nutrient-rich debris and defend the soil against erosion or drying out — all of which helps the plants to grow better and the soil layer to build up, locking in a lot more CO2 in the process.

Successful restorations must replicate these processes, he said.

“More than half of all wetland restorations fail because the landscape-forming properties of the plants are insufficiently taken into account,” said study co-author Tjisse van der Heide of the Royal Institute for Sea Research and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Planting seedlings and plugs in orderly rows equidistant from each other may seem logical, but it’s counterproductive, he said.

“Restoration is much more successful when the plants are placed in large, dense clumps, when their landscape-forming properties are mimicked, or simply when very large areas are restored in one go,” van der Heide said.

“Following this guidance will allow us to restore lost wetlands at a much larger scale and increase the odds that they will thrive and continue to store carbon and perform other vital ecosystem services for years to come,” Silliman said. “The plants win, the planet wins, we all win.”

The post Land-building marsh plants are champions of carbon capture appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Riley, best known today as one of the founders of the Great West Life Assurance company (now Canada Life), was the son of a prominent British businessman who landed in Manitoba in 1881 to resuscitate the underperforming Manitoba Drainage Company.

It’s hard to imagine today what the landscape here would have looked like back when the European settlers first arrived; it’s equally difficult for modern-day farmers to envisage restoring some of its historical assets.

Some of the most prominent features of that landscape were vast wetlands, stretching for mile upon mile and the first order of business was to drain them. Some did it in a small way. Others undertook megaprojects.

University of Manitoba wetland ecologist and history buff Gordon Goldsborough (a frequent contributor to these pages) told the Co-operator that the company’s major project was to drain the Big Grass Marsh, on the western shore of Lake Manitoba, north of Gladstone.

“Riley came to Manitoba to drain wetlands,” Goldsborough said.

That massive wetland covered more than 100,000 acres. By the early 1900s it had been all but emptied and made into farms. There was a central core that resisted drainage, especially in wet cycles, but the marsh that had stood there since the end of the last ice age was almost eradicated.

Why it matters: Reimagining our culture of drainage will be pivotal to capitalizing on the sustainability benefits of wetlands.

By the 1930s, that drainage was being reconsidered, in the height of the Depression as much of the North American plains suffered through drought and dust bowl, including the Big Grass Marsh area. Local groups and wildlife organizations undertook to replenish and revitalize the wetland, culminating in what became Ducks Unlimited’s first Canadian project, begun in 1938.

The resulting wetland never regained its pre-1900 level, but it did result in an area of roughly 12,000 acres being returned to its natural state.

• Land-building marsh plants are champions of carbon capture

Sign of the times

The draining of those vast wetlands wasn’t unique to the Big Grassy Marsh. St. Andrews Bog suffered a similar fate.

That wetland covered the area from what’s present-day north Winnipeg up to Teulon. In total it covered more than 116,000 acres, or 181 square miles. Today its remnant is the present-day Oak Hammock Marsh, which was similarly restored during the 1970s with 22 kilometres of earthen dikes and covers roughly 9,000 acres (or 14 square miles).

And early Manitoba’s penchant for draining didn’t stop there. Thousands of drainage projects, large and small, vastly altered the natural landscape. Why that happened is down to the desires of the early farmers to carve out productive farms and prosperous futures.

“Those early settlers, when they saw a wetland, they saw a net loss,” Goldsborough said. “To them, a wetland was a potential farm, covered by water.”

Tim Sopuck, the former CEO of Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation (MHHC) echoed that sentiment, saying Manitoba’s pioneer farm families were doing everything they could to succeed in a challenging new environment.

“Why they chose to drain, back then, is perfectly understandable,” Sopuck told the Co-operator.

But the part of the equation that was missing was failing to understand, as a society, what wetlands do for us all.

Sometimes that value is economic — retaining water and preventing drought and providing irrigation opportunities when drought does hit, for example. Sometimes that value is economic but hard to quantify — slowing and holding enough water that the province doesn’t have to deepen the floodway yet again around Winnipeg, for example.

And other times the value is real, if not immediately economically measurable. Greater biodiversity, for example. And over time, those benefits can generate other economic activity, Goldsborough said.

“What’s the economic value of a duck?” he asked. “It can be hard to quantify that. But what about when someone comes to hunt that duck? Presumably they’re putting gas in their vehicle, buying supplies, maybe staying in a motel. Those are very real and measurable economic benefits.”

Rebuilding and regenerating

Bringing wetlands back to life isn’t simple, and it can, at times, be controversial.

Big Grass Marsh provides yet another example of this. Periodically that area has been the scene of some conflict over managing water levels, most recently in 2015.

That’s when someone, likely a frustrated local landowner, dug an illicit drainage trench to lower the water level in the wetland. Then Westlake-Gladstone mayor Dave Single told media at the time he was hearing complaints the water level was too high, it was flooding nearby farmland, and that DU seemingly wasn’t willing to lower the water level when approached.

“The agreement we have with them prescribes an area that should be flooded by their structure. What’s being flooded now is way outside that prescribed area. The agreement also says that if it goes outside the prescribed area, they’re supposed to do something about it, and they refuse to do that,” Single was quoted as saying.

DUC, however, said it had found no evidence of this, noting in an article on its website from the time that the control structure was designed to let excess water spill into Big Grass River, rather than onto surrounding land. It also said a wet cycle at the time was the more likely cause of overland flooding.

“Decades of wetland drainage in the watershed is also compounding the problem: water drained from one property simply moves to the next, and then the next, eventually ending up on low-lying property and areas like Big Grass Marsh,” the article reads.

Sopuck says the importance of building good relationships with local landowners is key to preventing problems from arising. However, he noted, the local flooding issues can become intense, and views get hardened.

“To the extent possible, it’s about building trust,” Sopuck said. “You don’t want to come in and start telling people what they should be doing. You want to work with them.”

It’s only by building that relationship, and showing the value of the wetlands, and that they can be restored in a way that works for the landowner, that progress will be made, he said.

Goldsborough agreed and noted that he’s seen a lot more interest in wetlands, and greater understanding of their value, from landowners in recent years. He also said that it’s important for society as a whole to be willing to pay for what it wants landowners to deliver, citing a growing recognition of the value of ‘environmental goods and services.’

“We can’t just say to farmers and landowners, ‘here’s what we want you to do for us,’” Goldsborough said. “We need to be willing, as citizens and taxpayers, to pay them for those things that benefit us all.”

Paying the bill

When it comes to having a viable model for funding these pro­jects, so farmers and landowners aren’t out of pocket, Manitoba is in an enviable position.

There are three funding streams — the Conservation Trust, the Manitoba Grow Trust and the Wetlands Grow Trust — that were established between 2018 and 2020. It gives conservation work, like wetlands restoration, a financial foundation that isn’t found in other provinces, Sopuck said.

MHHC, the organization he until recently headed, administers the grants for projects funded by the $202-million endowments, which are held and invested by The Winnipeg Foundation. This year the trusts generated $10.36 million for projects.

Sopuck says many organizations throughout the province have benefited from grants from the trusts, especially Manitoba Watershed Districts (the former conservation districts, reorganized under watershed lines).

“Many of them have told me this funding really lets them increase their activities,” Sopuck said. “They know that there’s a steady stream of funding available for their projects, and that’s really let them do more.”

Goldsborough echoed the importance of the Manitoba funding model, saying it’s already resulting in more wetland restoration projects. He says he expects the effect of these projects to be cumulative over time, and to revolve around the model of local organizations like watersheds partnering with local groups to make incremental improvements over time.

“Certainly nobody is saying we should go back to how it was in 1870,” Goldsborough said. “But there is a lot of room here to fund projects that can make a real difference and benefit the local landowners too.”

Sopuck noted that draining wetlands took place over generations, so nobody should expect quick fixes.

“We will make a difference, but it’s not going to happen tomorrow,” he said. “It’ll happen over decades too.”

The post DOWN THE DRAIN: Manitoba’s wetlands a shadow of their former selves appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The study has deployed sensor-equipped towers (flux towers) to measure carbon dioxide and methane emissions from wetlands on both cattle and annual crop farms.

The project is funded by the Canadian Agriculture Partnership, Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) and its project partner Manitoba Forage & Grassland Association (MFGA).

“Agriculture uses a significant amount of land in Western Canada and our study will help inform how different agricultural practices can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Pascal Badiou, lead project scientist from DUC’s Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research, said.

The study expects results next year. Among those findings, organizers say, the study will help include wetland management in national carbon and greenhouse gas reporting.

Other take-aways will include data to inform offset protocols for wetland restoration, which DUC and the MFGA hope will spark financial incentive for farmers, as well as groundwork for a long-term Prairie monitoring program.

“Accounting for the ecosystem services from these systems will be important for developing effective communications to increase public knowledge of the role the beef and forage industry play in maintaining natural landscapes and the services they provide society,” Lawrence Knockaert, MFGA chair, said.

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“When you’re in the field every day, you see how much habitat is being lost. That always pushed me to work even harder to save the natural landscape,” said Babee, who worked for Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) for 36 years.

In September, DUC unveiled a plaque at the site, south of Riding Mountain National Park, to commemorate Babee’s retirement, DUC said in a Sept. 24 news release.

Babee worked out of Dauphin, Minnedosa and Brandon and contributed to conservation projects across Manitoba.

He grew up on a farm near Dauphin and worked with DUC as a summer student in the 1980s, DUC said in an article on its website.

“I was always in awe of the fall migration,” Babee said in the article. “The sight of all those ducks and geese flying over. And the sounds!”

He joined DUC full time in 1985 and helped landowners conserve, restore and manage wetlands and grasslands to benefit waterfowl, wildlife and people.

“I love working outdoors,” Babee said. “It’s not just about the ducks but about the upland critters, too. You don’t get to see those kinds of results when you’re working at a desk job.”

Babee said his favourite pro­ject is the carp exclusion at Delta Marsh near Portage la Prairie.

In partnership with the Manitoba government, DUC created dikes and screens to prevent invasive carp from entering Delta Marsh from Lake Manitoba, where they disrupt aquatic vegetation vital to waterfowl and marsh biodiversity, DUC said.

“To see all those carp in the channels… so many you could almost walk across the water,” Babee recalled. “To keep them out has made a big impact on the health of Delta Marsh.”

In the mid-1990s, Babee began work on a quarter section of land southwest of Riding Mountain National Park, near Erickson. The land, which DUC obtained through a dispersal sale, had been drained and overfarmed but Babee cultivated 120 acres of prairie grasses and restored 40 acres of wetlands.

“We knew the waterfowl would come back,” he said.

Twenty-five years later, ducks and pelicans have made the marsh home, DUC wrote on its website. Prairie grasses are waist-high in some spots.

The commemorative plaque on the land reads, in part, “This wetland project reflects the integrity, innovation and commitment Glenn showed during a career devoted to conserving and enhancing our precious wetlands.”

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