‘Buzzing with biodiversity’: ALUS program coming to Haldimand

Members of the Haldimand Stewardship Council, ALUS and local farmers met last month in Kohler, as the group attempts to get an ALUS Haldimand program started. ~ Luke Edwards photo

By Luke Edwards

A four-year effort to bring the ALUS program to Haldimand may seem like a long time, but for Anna Haupt, it was much longer than a quadrennial.

Haupt, a dairy farmer with 50 milking Holsteins and 360 acres of land in Canfield, was one of a few farmers who have shown some interest in joining the partnership advisory committee (PAC), a key step in implementing the program in Haldimand.

“The idea of the program always appealed to me,” she said, recalling first learning about it when she was a teenager through a cattlemen’s association.

ALUS is a program that works with farmers and ranchers in participating communities to develop nature-based solutions to build climate resilience and biodiversity on their land. The goal is to use marginal farmland that isn’t terribly productive for agricultural purposes to do so, with the landowner receiving technical and financial support through ALUS.

For Haupt, it’s the shared responsibility aspect that attracted her to the program. A lot of the responsibility of enhancing biodiversity or building climate resilience can tend to fall on the landowner’s shoulders, but with ALUS that load is lightened.

The Haldimand Stewardship Council began work on bringing ALUS to the county back in 2022. Several steps are required before the program becomes active in a community, including the creation of a legal entity to manage the program and a PAC to guide which projects are supported and how much payout a farmer receives.

With a meeting held last month at Shelley’s Diner in Kohler, council member Cathy Blott said they’re well on their way to start accepting project applications, likely later this year.

“We’re really pleased with that,” she said.

Farmer buy-in is a key aspect of the program, something that came up a few times at the meeting. Fortunately, Haldimand has a neighbour in Norfolk with a very strong and long running ALUS program. In fact, it’s the oldest continuously running ALUS program in Canada, dating back to 2007 and with more than 190 farm families involved.

For the first three years ALUS Norfolk will act as the legal entity for Haldimand, though Haldimand will maintain its own PAC. That will allow Norfolk to provide the expertise and experience they’ve gained since their inception 20 years ago, but Haldimand farmers will maintain control over local decisions.

Ron Niville is the chair of ALUS Norfolk and grows soybeans and corn on his 100 acres of land. He’s implemented several ALUS projects on his property such as a buffer strip on a drain and planting areas around a pond with tallgrass prairie. The projects have helped reduce invasive species like fleabane, kept nutrients on his fields and out of the drainage and brought plenty of beneficial wildlife back to his property.

“We’ve created a nice little biosphere on my property,” he said.

Niville’s experience with ALUS goes back to 2009.

“When they first approached me, I was a little hesitant,” he admitted.

But as he realized the benefits - not just the financial payments farmers receive but also a boost to yields on the lands he kept as agricultural and overall improvement of biodiversity on his property - he pursued more and more projects. Niville encourages farmers in Haldimand to give it a  try, as well.

“Jump in with both feet,” he said.

ALUS’ senior hub manager for the Great Lakes region Alyssa Cousineau said there are also benefits for those who raise livestock by extending how long pasture land is grazeable. Adding cool weather grasses with warmer weather grasses means farmers can move their animals to a new pasture when that grass is in season.

The local PAC will determine payment structures, but Cousineau said it typically ranges from $100 to $250 per acre for lands that are completely turned over to nature projects. In some situations, such as where tallgrass prairie is planted, the farmer may choose to hay that land or use it for pasture. In that case, they’d receive a smaller payment, perhaps in the $30 to $75 per acre range.

The goal, said Cousineau, is to focus on those smaller parcels of land that’s not productive for agriculture. The rest should stay farmland.

“We want to keep the farmers farming,” she said.

To give local farmers a sense of what projects would look like, several funders helped implement a trial project on Elaine Gosnell’s 30-acre farm. They planted seven acres of tallgrass prairie. By the end of the second year after planting, Gosnell said they already noticed a difference, with the beautiful tallgrass prairie being home to all kinds of birds.

“By year three it was looking fantastic,” she said. “We really enjoy it, we really love it. It’s beautiful.”

A lot of the birds nest in the fields, but when farmers take their crops off, the nesting area disappears. The trial project gives those birds another option.

“It’s like this refuge for grassland birds looking for habitat,” she said.

Cousineau described a similar project and the quick effect it had on biodiversity.

“The tallgrass prairie is just buzzing with biodiversity,” she said.

ALUS Haldimand is still accepting members for the PAC, and Cousineau encouraged anyone interested to come out to a meeting to see if it’s a fit. They have enough members to get started, but don’t have a limit on how many members they can have. However, farmers must make up at least 50 per cent of the committee.

For more information visit alus.ca/alus_community/alus-norfolk