Don’t Tell These Ranchers Climate Change Isn’t Real
The push to make Alberta’s cattle ranges drought resistant.
Mac Blades (middle) fellow ranchers Frances Gardner and Gordon Cartwright recently won a long battle to have their drought-resistant heritage rangelands protected from coal bed methane and other energy developments. Photo by Ed Struzik.
Among the many pictures on the walls of the Rocking P ranch house is one of owner Mac Blades with singer Ian Tyson and other local ranchers riding their horses across a snowy hillside in the Livingstone Mountain range of southwestern Alberta. The photo made the front pages of both national newspapers in the fall of 2002, when Tyson, Blades and the Pekisko group of ranchers went public with their call for a moratorium on oil and gas development in the region.
Their call came on the heels of the worst prairie drought in more than 70 years.
Thirteen years later, Blades and his family are still ranching, running about 800 cows on 10,000 acres of land they own or lease. Drought slammed the region again this summer, but the Rocking P fared quite well this time. Part of it had to do with the relatively good spring moisture that carried them through the dry weeks. Most of it had to do with the grasslands Blades and others have been trying to protect.
“Even in years of drought, we do better than most because our native grasslands capture and filter water, build and protect soil, and protect us from drought,” says Blades. “And because the weather is warming, it’s got to the point where we can let our animals out to graze in winter rather than spend money on fuel and feed to get them through the cold months. We just don’t have the cold winters we used to have.”
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