A Christmas gift for Horse

[grassfarmer]

Saw this in my local paper and I thought of you right away Horse. I don't have a dog in this fight myself but thought it was an interesting article and maybe a way a Government might look to pull in some extra revenue to help with their overspending habit?

http://brooksbulletin.com/default.aspx?contentid=1611

[Horse]

Thanks for thinking of me but I dont seem to be able to get in that address, but will try another route. Merry HO HO and a happy new year.

[grassfarmer]

Here you go.

Bob Scammell – Alberta Outdoors
It has been a year of intrigue for Public Land issues.
First, some background…. On Nov. 18, 2011 I was honored to deliver the Martha Kostuch Lecture to the annual general meeting of the Alberta Wilderness Association. I told the AWA it was my last public speech, and, as they had requested, promised it would include everything I had to say on the sad and sorry story of the waste and abuse of Alberta`s Public Land.
Much of the speech dealt with “Cowboy Welfare”: the rock - bottom grazing fees for Alberta Public Land grazing leases, the practice of letting the leaseholder keep the oil and gas surface disturbance payments to the lease land, rather than requiring them to be paid to the owner (the people of Alberta) as is the usual cases with leases, and also permitting leaseholders to sell the lease for big bucks when they are through with it, rather than the lease and the big bucks reverting to the owner.
In the end I challenged all present to help Albertans find out how much Cowboy Welfare has cost them since it got started, whenever that was. The speech was well covered, and frequently televised, but nothing happened. Then, early this year, an anonymous insider informed me that then current and former Environment - Sustainable Resource Development ministers, Robin Campbell and Diana McQueen were “very concerned” about Cowboy Welfare and its cost to the public..
That inspired me finally to request Alberta’s Auditor - General to use his considerable powers to find out just how much money Cowboy Welfare costs Alberta. Then, in mid - summer, CBC advised me that they are working on a documentary on the whole mess and were concerned that people were being intimidated into not going public with what they know.
Fast forward to this past Hallowe’en and Dr. Ted Morton, former Alberta Energy minister, ESRD minister, and Finance minister, hunter and straight shooter, is delivering the Kostuch Lecture at the AWA offices in Calgary. He first established that no press were present, and then launched into an unprecedented and amazing “tricking and treating” masterpiece, including interaction with his audience.
Dr. Morton could not have known that the walls of the historic old AWA building had ears and that at least half the ears in an audience of 50 or so had provided this “press” with many scoops, tips, hints, and help over the years. For decades, AWA founders, Dick and Vivian Pharis, have encouraged this column to keep going whenever it got frustrated at the stupidity, secrecy and skullduggery that stick to Public Land in this province like Public Land, itself, sticks to an ATV.
Vivian reports and interviews in amazed detail. “The part of his talk you would have found most interesting was of a new policy on surface disturbances to grazing leases, which he expects to be released before Christmas. He did not seem aware that this was an old issue for AWA (and Alberta Fish and Game Association)) and he thought we would be thrilled to know that the government has proposed to take surface disturbance funds away from the Welfare Cowboys and put them into a Conservation Trust for land stewardship work.”
“He quite excitedly talked of there being at least $40 million that could be diverted from the elite cowboys into this fund, with more if there could be a full diversion of compensation from disturbances caused by compressor stations and pipelines. I said to him that, back in the early ‘80s we (probably you) calculated that Cowboy Welfare amounted to over $100 million, and he did not blink at that figure.”
“I asked him why, after all these years, the government is looking at going in this direction. He replied that if we looked at an electoral district map, we would see that the Public Land grazing lease country subject to the surface disturbance grabs and giveaways is all Wild Rose. He said there have been folks in government who have long tried to right this wrong and gain funds for a conservation trust, but rural conservatives would not hear of it.”
Deep inside stuff from a man of deep convictions who is not quite as inside as
Dr. Morton once was. Not being in government, why would Dr. Ted Morton make this Halloween announcement? I suspect that, in scrabbling and scraping to find the money to buy out the OH Ranch grazing leases for the Calgary Ring Road, Morton found out exactly how much the wealthy leaseholders received annually in surface disturbance payments,
I suspect, also, that Morton worried that if Wildrose converts to PC, there will be no Christmas announcement, and a policy that has sugar plums dancing in the heads of the few Albertans who know about it would just quietly fade away and we’ll carry on stuffing big bucks instead of lumps of coal into the welfare cowboys’ Christmas socks.
Just as I ended my Kostuch Lecture with a plea three year ago, Dr. Ted Morton seems to be asking for public help to keep a policy alive that partially rights wrongs that have gone on far too long.

[per]

December 15, 2014
Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association
Box 340
Stavely, AB T0L 1Z0

Fast Forward Weekly
1204 20 Ave. S.E.
Calgary, Alberta
T2G 1M8

Dear Editor,

RE: Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Set the Record Straight on Compensation and Stewardship – Response to AWA’s Article; Cashing in on ‘cowboy welfare’:

I would like to respond to the December 11, 2014 article written by Lindsey Wallis regarding what she refers to as “Cowboy Welfare”. There are some significant flaws in the article and the conclusions cannot be supported by facts. This looks very similar to the “green lobby” trying to distort the number of grizzly bears in the province. Those of us with experiential knowledge and practical understanding know better.

Firstly, let’s lay the groundwork; there are roughly 5,700 grazing leases (Crown Lands under agricultural disposition) in Alberta. This is about 5.2 million acres, Alberta’s land mass is estimated at 150,000,000 acres…not including water. This would put the grazing lease acreage at less than 5% of the land base. The beef cattle industry generates roughly $3 billion in farm cash receipts. The success of the industry relies on an efficient and productive cowherd with access to an extensive feed supply. Approximately 20% of this feed comes from the use of Crown grazing leases. These Crown lands have a designated priority use for agriculture and most are best suited for cattle grazing. The average lease in Alberta is just over a section (640 acres) and supports about 50 cows. All of these leases form an integral & complementary part of a viable farm or ranch unit in conjunction with a deeded land base.

Yes, grazing leases that have resource activity taking place on them, and generate some compensation for the leaseholder. The government has sold the sub-surface rights to an industrial developer for the purpose of extracting oil, gas, gravel, etc. The developer pays the government a fee for the right and also a royalty on production as well as the taxes generated by the activity. Compensation is due to the agricultural leaseholder under the Surface Rights Act for loss of use, inconvenience & adverse effect caused by the industrial activities. The surface rights compensation is negotiated between the developer and the holder of the grazing lease. If the parties can’t agree, an independent panel of Surface Rights Board members set the compensation rate after holding a public hearing. The principles guiding the division of payments, where and when compensation is due, are sound and have been guiding resource development for years in this province.

The inaccurate and grossly inflated figures that the Alberta Wilderness Association uses were arrived at by extrapolating the activity that has taken place on the Antelope Creek ranch west of Brooks, over all leaseholders across the whole province. Not all leases have industrial activity and very few have that activity to the extent that Antelope Creek has. Therefore, it is not at all accurate and in fact questions the credibility of AWA to use the inflated figures on compensation that they suggest.

Estimates by AWA on costs of grazing on these lands are also far from reality. The conclusions the author has used to suggest that leaseholders have 1/5th of the costs of what private grazing is, lack understanding and reflect an unwillingness to look more thoroughly into what costs actually are on grazing leases. In fact, recent studies have indicated that costs are very similar between private and Crown lands under agricultural disposition. One has to remember the costs on a grazing lease are complex and difficult to comprehend until one has some “skin in the game.” The total costs include: acquisition fees for the right to the lease, lease rental, taxes, building & maintaining fences and handling facilities, providing water and other improvements on the lease. It is true that the rental rates have been frozen since 1993, but government & industry have recently been moving towards a model that resembles how other resource users pay and will share both revenue and risk in a fairer fashion than in the past.

In addressing the Thurber Report, let’s try to understand how it was birthed. A number of town hall meetings as well as write in comments were solicited throughout the province by a naïve Minister and some misguided bureaucrats. The environmental lobby activated the masses and out corresponded the productive segment of society who were home tending the cattle and managing the grasslands and their businesses. Well, you can guess what the results were, to say there was push back from the agricultural sector would be understatement. This flawed piece of legislation was mostly set aside, with only a few recommendations carried forward. Nonetheless, it effectively destroyed the confidence our lending institutions had in the stability of the grazing lease instrument. It has taken many years of hard work to try to recover from that blunder forced upon us by those with little or no knowledge of the industry or the impact on us, or the Alberta economy.

With regards to the comment that the government doesn’t seem to be interested in managing the leases at all, I believe that to be a misguided and purely subjective view. Rangeland agrologists under ESRD, have the oversight and regulatory power over these lands while leaseholders are tasked with the day-to-day management. AWA has had a very long history of desiring to manage and influence “public lands” as they like to refer to them as. Crown Lands under agricultural disposition, (grazing leases), are best managed by those who are there on a daily basis and under their guidance, many of these leases have over a 100 years of stewardship that has enabled wildlife populations to be abundant, this is part of the environmental goods and services leaseholders provide. They are still in business because they have an economically viable ranch or farm when you couple the lease with their private holdings. To be economically viable, one has to be environmentally sustainable as well; otherwise the business would have disappeared long ago.


Yours truly,

Larry Sears
Chair, Albert Grazing Leaseholders Association

[grassfarmer]

Thanks per, it's an interesting discussion for sure. I certainly am wary of anything Ted Morton has his hand in given his track record.

[ag-boy]

cattle man,s gift leaseland !!!
why not put these leases up for bids , so every cattleman have a change to get in at cowboy welfare benefit
and would bring mutch more money in to all of us tax payers .
happy new year to all

[ag-boy]

cattle man,s gift leaseland !!!
why not put these leases up for bids , so every cattleman have a change to get in at cowboy welfare benefit
and would bring mutch more money in to all of us tax payers .
happy new year to all

[ag-boy]

cattle man,s gift leaseland !!!
why not put these leases up for bids , so every cattleman have a change to get in at cowboy welfare benefit
and would bring mutch more money in to all of us tax payers .
happy new year to all

[ag-boy]

cattle man,s gift leaseland !!!
why not put these leases up for bids , so every cattleman have a change to get in at cowboy welfare benefit
and would bring mutch more money in to all of us tax payers .
happy new year to all

[Horse]

Thanks again Grassfarmer. If one was to see how many dollars benefit(welfare) these cowboys get its no wonder they are ECONOMICALY viable, The OH is an prime example, private hunting reserve,slush fund and a few cows to be able to say they are RANCHERS. 5700 leases about 3600 with oil revenue in excess of 100mil / yr plus $1.39/aum and able to sell dam wish I was born and raised in welfare land, instead of trying to compete with them..

[Horse]

Grass you do have a dog in the fight, you have to compete against those that are paid to graze cows as to those of us that have to pay to graze cows.

[ag-boy]

yes horse I like your comment!
wonder if larry sears could tells his real cost per unit per year so we could see how mutch welfare towards leaseholders and hidden benefits?????

[grassfarmer]

I don't see how I have a dog in this fight Horse. Lease land comes up for sale on occasion and I haven't been tempted to buy any. By the time you have to keep it fenced, take the possible predator loss, truck cattle to it and back again for a short grazing season, check cattle at a distance, round up cattle off big areas of bush it didn't look that attractive to me.

Also we are not all in the same boat, what about the homesteaders that got land for free? or the guys that got here early enough to get the mineral rights versus the ones that came 2 years too late? or the guys like me that moved here from Europe recently versus the guys that did it in 1946. We all have different backgrounds, ambitions, financial positions, buy-in prices I don't see this one group of landowners being so different that we should all hate them or envy them. We all have our circumstances to deal with.

[Horse]

I dont hate anyone or envey But I do not like the gov to pick winners and loosers if there was a fair AUM charged then the price of leases would not be so much. And what does oil revenue have to do with grazing. There are 2 leases that I know of where they run 300 plus cows and when the AUM and taxes are paid they are still in the black, so my point is why does the gov not charge higher rate or no oil revenue that resource revenue belongs to Albertans no some con donor. A fellow in the redclif area told me if he turned out 300 cows and not one came back he was still making money.

[ag-boy]

we all know our cost of grasing cattle per /day /month for the season !
but none of leaseholders want to tell us the final cost, fanny he !
they all come up with stories of trucking, fencing,maintaining roads etc ! we all have same cost works out to be a $ 1 head a day,
again put the leases for bids, or sell them , not private of course!
what happened at BOW ILAND in south alberta.? we all are interested for that change to come .
our minister of agr has mention that many atimes .freedom of wheatboard and get rid off the milkquota and chicken quota !