24 ROAD access critical for ranchers
natural resource district, outlined the importance of access. Roads are essential access for cattle to move onto range at the beginning of the grazing season, Dinwoodie said. “They allow the rancher to turn cattle out on to range and then to monitor and move their animals throughout the summer and to bring them off range in the fall,” he explained.
Roads also provide access if the rancher needs to move cattle in the event of wildfire. Range management is also
affected by road access. Dinwoodie says if he can’t access rangeland, he can’t assess its forage potential and provide accurate estimates of the animal units it can support. This will affect a rancher’s range use plan. Access is also critical for the rancher to develop new forage sources and maintain infrastructure such as fences, watering installations and corrals. There are other crown land priorities to consider,
too. Wildlife, invasive plants, community watersheds
and recreation are all interests affected by access, Dinwoodie notes. “If we are going to view range lands through an
integrated lens, we need to get together and discuss this,” he said.
A number of speakers, including Jim McGrath,
natural resource manager with Tk’emlupsemc Forestry Development Corp., and Toby Jefferys, woodlands manager for Gilbert Smith Forest Products Ltd., outlined their stakeholder engagement processes. These are essential both in planning roads and deactivating them and
COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • FEBRUARY 2020 nfrom page 23 Another move that takes ranchers
by surprise is when historic access routes which might have been little more than an old trail through the woods are upgraded by forestry companies and taken away. “My cattle have been going up an
old road that was built 50 or 60 years ago,” the manager of Mountain View Ranch in Kamloops told the seminar. “Forestry built a new road on top of the old one, and now they are pulling it out and I have no access at all.” Boon and other speakers called for
FILE PHOTO
undertaken, they say, as matter of good policy rather than because they’re required to do so. Indeed, as a government information sheet
regarding road deactivation states, “The district encourages industry to notify other road users of deactivation plans, however, there is no legal requirement to do that.” A lack of notification presents a real problem for
ranchers. It is literally a case of “here today, gone tomorrow,” which can leave tenure holders out of luck. Dinwoodie described a common situation in which one of the ranchers in his district saw his travel time to access range go from 20 minutes to four hours. “The question should be, who has the access
right?” Dinwoodie said. “The road should service the range tenure-holder.”
ANGUS BULLS ANGUS BULL SALES
March 10, Dawson Creek - Go Mach Angus Bull Sale March 20, Prince George - Harvest Angus Bull Sale
March 21, Fort Fraser - Northern Alliance Bull Sale: Poplar Meadows, Red Moon Angus, Blast Angus, Marberly Angus March 21, Kamloops - 20th Annual Angus Advantage Bull Sale: Tafika Angus March 24, Kamloops - Still Meadows Bull Sale March 28, Dawson Creek - North Point Angus Bull Sale
bcangus.ca
Jim Moon President 250.567.9762 Carley Henniger Secretary 250.571.3475
March 28, Williams Lake - Bulls From the Heart: Heart of the Valley Angus with Schochaneetqua Angus (Todd Marchant and Pam McGuiness)
April 4, Kamloops - Best Bet Bull Sale: Mitchell Cattle Co. and Guests April 11, Vanderhoof - Vanderhoof All Breeds Bull Sale April 16/17, Williams Lake - Williams Lake Bull Sale April 20, Okanagan Falls - OK Falls All Breeds Bull Sale April 23, Williams Lake - Poplar Meadows Bull Sale (2 year old)
The BC Angus Association wishes to thank our commercial buyers for their continued support.
the kind of collaboration that happens right on the ground at the sites in question. He worries that if a consultation process is mandated through regulation, parties less informed than ranchers or foresters may make the decisions. “I’m not sure that someone sitting in an office can make a decision without knowledge of the actual site,” said Boon.
Still, new amendments to the Forest and Range
Practices Act (FRPA) may be formalizing a consultation process. Bill 21, passed last May, requires the holder of a
forest stewardship plan to prepare a forest operations map that shows cutblocks and proposed roads, make the map available to the public and submit a report to government regarding the public review, including any comments. It’s important for all stakeholders to be heard, and
heard together, says Boon. “If we can have forestry, ranching, First Nations,
recreation and wildlife all together at the same time, then we have the basis to build a solution,” he said. “We are pretty creative and if we can understand what the other guys’ issues are, we can offer some alternatives.”
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