The Editor,
The PFRA Shelterbelt Centre at Indian head will be disposed of by the Government of Canada in 2015. Having grown to an annual capacity to supply seven million soil conservation and habitat tree seedling to farmers, it has provided nearly 600 million trees in its 114 years of operation.
As a division of the PFRA, the centre has supplied 30 species of these trees free-of-charge to farmers. It is now being forced to transition to a private business and is tasked with convincing farmers who used to plant 5,000 trees as field shelterbelt, why they outght to pay $7,500 cash and then wait 10 years for any cash return.
If the shelterbelt centre is to not simply become like the 325,000 square foot Weyburn psychiatric Hospital building, which were bulldozed and are now being remembered only through pictures and stories in Saskatchewan history books, this phenomenal agro-forestry asset must be reborn as the key manager and focal driver of some new profitable enterprise.
One party help-shelterbelts.com relies on foreign university interns who work for free and rented the shelterbelt centre land in 2014. They bought cuttings from Alberta and subdivided and rooted them to add to what they got from subdividing trees from Indian Head so as to have $1 million dollars of inventory at $1.50 each for 2015.
Agriculture Canada research station researchers continue to publish and present research based on their work at the shelterbelt centre and have lobbied other government departments such as Supply and Services to buy the assets and continue operating a research program at the centre.
The current situation raises an important question for the public and policy-makers. Why have the taxpayers invested millions in the Saskatchewan biotech industry if it can’t develop a made-in-Saskatchewan solution for the Indian Head centre?
We have world-class researchers at the University of Saskatchewan, but apparently the shelterbelt centre has been ignored, and what’s worse, it’s now seen as a problem, not an opportunity.
There are potential solutions, a local First Nations has first right of refusal to any sale by the government and has shown interest in acquiring the centre.
There are other strategic players in Saskatchewan who would work with one or several First Nations to bring immediate added value by training people to create employment in all aspects of a diverse scaleable enterprise. This would employ Aboriginals and others to process bio-products from existing Saskatchewan shelterbelts into products at the centre and contract to continue to supply trees and buy back bio-products over a long term.
The burgeoning health and wellness longevity-promoting marketplace presents an opportunity for a wide range of bio-products to emerge from a horizontally and vertically integrated enterprise with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue distributed through several supply chains.
So what others see as a time of gloom and doom and struggle, I see as a time of incredible opportunity.
It is my wish that during this year, some combination of these parties each with something to gain, move forward and turn the former PFRA Indian Head Shelterbelt Centre into a successful commercial venture and do indeed gather their courage and conviction in a timely fashion to create a made-in-Saskatchewan agro-forestry success story.
Sincerely,
Morris Johnson
Saskatoon, Sk.
