Sheep and Softwood Lumber

What have sheep farming and softwood lumber got to do with each other? Dennis Loxton is a Canadian Sheep farmer. Born in Australia, he learned the sheep business there, from the ground up. At its peak, Australia had 180 million sheep. Because of a sustained drought the number has declined considerably, to 120 million. In comparison, Canada has one million sheep.

But part of that one million sheep was a once thriving business in BC called sheep vegetation management. For seventeen years Loxton hired tree planters in his silviculture business, then he saw the advantages of sheep vegetation management and for the next seventeen years he hired tree planters and shepherds to plant trees and feed sheep in Northern BC clearcuts. Here's the beauty of it – sheep don't like conifers. Sheep won't eat pine or spruce, or fir, but they'll eat the fireweed that grows in the clearcut and competes for sunlight with the conifers. It turns out that fireweed is 23 % protein, the perfect well balanced diet for fattening up sheep. Not only that, they leave behind a valuable manure that provides much needed nutrients to the depleted soil, accelerating the growth of the confer seedlings.

You might think that predators – wolves and grizzlies – would be a real problem with sheep herds in clear cuts. But the solution, according to Loxton, is livestock guardian dogs. In seventeen years of sheep herding and tree planting, averaging about six thousand sheep per year, Loxton says he lost only eight sheep to predators, thanks to the dogs.

Started in Oregon in the seventies, the sheep vegetation management business spread north to BC where it grew to 50 thousand sheep by the mid nineties. But the softwood lumber dispute and the corresponding fall-out of mill closings and mass layoffs hurt both silviculture and vegetation management. When it came to the bottom line, forestry companies could save money by using herbicides to kill competing broad leaf vegetation. Herbicides are really much more expensive then they seem. The risk that introducing such toxins to our environment does to our health and to the health of other creatures is not included in their price. But it's up to governments to solve that market failure by encouraging healthy alternatives like sheep farming.

Loxton tells me that BC's Sheep vegetation system is down to less than five thousand sheep now. There have been job losses and business closings all over the BC interior as a result of the mill bankruptcies. . He used to hire two hundred tree planters and twelve shepherds every summer and he had a herd that totalled an average of six thousand sheep per year. In the recent economic downturn his 1000 acre sheep farm in Prince George was repossessed. "I lost me shirt. I lost me farm, in spite of thirty-four years of perfect silviculture production", he said.

Dennis Loxton is an articulate man. When I met him in Kispiox, it took less than a minute for him to get me fascinated in the idea of sheep farming and silviculture. For me he exemplifies the saying: “Think globally, act locally”, because he is describing the kind of sustainable local economy that we should be aiming for. When he looks at the pine beetle disaster he sees both an opportunity for silviculture - 20 billion seedlings to be planted - and ten million hectares of potential sheep pasture. It's an inspiring vision of sustainability.

By combining sheep herding with tree planting forest companies can avoid using carcinogenic herbicides; Sheep aren't in the farmer's fields in the summer eating hay that would otherwise go to feeding them in the winter; and wool, mutton, and sheep dairy are the byproducts. This kind of local enterprise adds value and diversity to our economy.

A key factor in giving a place it's distinctiveness is what the people there produce. Extracting resources and shipping them overseas to be finished, without producing some form of finished goods locally just impoverishes and depletes an area and drives employment overseas.

Value-added enterprises create jobs, build human capital, by increasing the level of know-how and help to diversify the local economy, multiplying the income that circulates through local communities.

Resource extraction by itself, can permanently degrade the environment. The classic example is mountaintop removal – strip-mining mountains for coal and filling up valleys with tailings. Tailings smother and poison watersheds, killing wildlife and contaminating the water supply.

Unfortunately Premier Campbell and his liberal government have been fast-tracking resource extraction without any thought to developing and diversifying local economies. More and more jobs have been lost while we've watched raw unprocessed logs shipped to China and the United States.

Signing trade deals like NAFTA and TILMA have taken away our rights to environmental protection and made us more vulnerable to economic downturns. For most of us, our standard of living is falling or is just barely being maintained. With the prospect of higher fuel prices and global warming, the Provincial and the Federal governments should be making it their policy to encourage local value-added enterprises like sheep vegetation management and locally milled lumber. The path to a sustainable future is through developing and diversifying local resource economies.