New Book on Canada’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration

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In June 2024, the Canadian Senate’s Standing Committee on Agriculture and Forestry published Critical Ground: Why Soil is Essential to Canada’s Economic, Environmental, Human, and Social Health. The report was the latest expression by Canadian government experts and decision-makers of longstanding concern about the effects of agriculture on soils. Among the report’s various recommendations is a proposal to resurrect the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration [PFRA]. 

The PFRA was a federal government agency created in 1935 to address perceived environmental crisis in the agricultural portions of the Canadian prairie west. It was active in and beyond the prairie west until 2009, when the agency was absorbed into the newly-created Agri-Environment Services, a new branch within the Department of Agriculture and Agrifood Canada. The effective elimination of the PFRA was as part of what became known in some quarters as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s war on science.1

The June 2024 recommendation to resurrect the PFRA was far from novel. Since the PFRA’s elimination, there have similar calls from political parties, advocacy organizations, activists, and journalists.2 The PFRA has also long been lauded by analysts. Historians and allied scholars have celebrated the agency for its purported role in fixing mistakes that were made in settling the prairie west.3 Other experts have considered the PFRA as an example of how governments might productively intervene in the climate crisis.4

Cover of a book titled "Transforming the Prairies: Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada" authored by Shannon Stunden Bower. The top of the is grey-toned clouds, while the bottom of the image is an aerial photograph showing land use patterns.

After over a decade of studying the PFRA, I’m not convinced we should seek to revive it. My reasoning is detailed in a book recently released with UBC Press. In short, I think it is essential we balance any laudatory assessments of the PFRA by recognizing the agency’s shortcomings and missteps.

Firstly, we should understand that the PFRA has a mixed environmental record. Over its long tenure, the agency contributed to the creation and exacerbation of agricultural and environmental problems as well as to their mitigation. PFRA-promoted strip-farming, intended to help anchor 1930s-era blowing soils, helped set the stage for catastrophic infestations by the wheat stem sawfly. The extensive planting of crested wheat grass, facilitated by the PFRA, contributed to the simplification of prairie grassland ecosystems. A sustained move away from summerfallow, an agricultural practice that can harm soils, is dated not from the agency’s 1930s activities but from new concerns and opportunities emerging in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the advent of conservation tillage ultimately anchoring this shift. In the early 1980s, PFRA leaders recognized that, over previous decades, they had been “neglecting our responsibilities” in relation to prairie soils.5

Secondly, we should recognize that PFRA activities helped entrench racism and colonialism within the prairie west. The agency was created to shore up an agricultural system that was produced through the colonization of the prairie west by non-Indigenous newcomers, a process that relied on the displacement and devastation of the Indigenous nations who had long lived in and tended to regional lands. Additionally, the PFRA undertook various activities that harmed Indigenous communities. The Ste. Madeleine Métis community, located in Manitoba near the Saskatchewan border, was forcibly removed to accommodate a PFRA community pasture. It took persistent advocacy by Métis and allies to bring about a summer 2024 agreement to return some lands to the Métis.6 The realization of the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, a largescale multipurpose infrastructure project conceived by the PFRA that involved the construction of the Gardiner and Qu’Appelle River Dams and the creation of Lake Diefenbaker, resulted in the destruction of Mistasiniy, a Sacred Site of profound importance in nēhiyawak cosmology.7 In various ways and over decades, the PFRA helped further the interests of agricultural economies and prairie farmers, the majority of whom were non-Indigenous, in ways that harmed Indigenous communities.

Finally, we should consider how the PFRA was a vehicle through which Canada participated in so-called international development programs that helped entrench racism and inequality globally. In the mid-1960s, the PFRA became involved in planning and, eventually, building small water development infrastructure in the northern reaches of the African nation of Ghana. Like other western agencies that worked in northern Ghana, the PFRA sought to impose a model of water development without undertaking meaningful efforts to grapple with the region’s distinctive cultural, economic, and environmental circumstances. The result was an exacerbation of health risk for the Ghanaian population, with new water storage infrastructure expanding habitat for snails that spread harmful diseases like schistosomiasis. Small dams and dugouts also promoted greater concentration of human populations, further enhancing risk of disease transmission. John Hunter, in an early 1990s study of health in northern Ghana, went so far as to term lymphatic filariasis, another devastating illness afflicting the region, a “disease of development.”8

Unquestionably, there were valuable aspects to PFRA activity. The agency offered meaningful support to farmers and prairie governments amid the 1930s prairie agricultural crisis and provided services valued by prairie farmers for decades after that. The PFRA came to embrace an environmental orientation in its final decades and served throughout its existence as an important vehicle for public-interest science. This latter became particularly significant around the turn of the 21st century, as political decision-making in tune with neoliberalism eroded the capacity of the state to support agriculture in this manner. The PFRA should not be thoroughly demonized, but neither should it be wholly valorized. Agency officials themselves recognized this. At a 1985 seminar convened to celebrate the agency’s 50th anniversary, for instance, PFRA Director Harry Hill acknowledged the harms resulting from the PFRA’s failure to engage in a sustained way with soil conservation even as he celebrated the agency’s tradition as “a do it, change it, fix it organization.”9 

Considering the varied activities and mixed results that characterize the PFRA’s decades of operation, we should revise how we think of the agency. Rather than a fix for the mistakes of prairie settlement, we should understand the PFRA as engaged in driving change in and beyond the prairie west – the Prairie Farm Transformation Administration. This sort of shift in thinking is needed for historians and allied scholars, those of us who draw on the agency in efforts to construct evidence-based stories about agricultural colonization and environmental change in the prairie west. It is also needed for contemporary decision-makers and analysts who look to the past for examples of what might be possible in the future. In my assessment, people who care about justice and sustainability in and beyond the prairie west should not seek a revival of the PFRA. Instead, we should work for something better.  

1 John Dupuis, “The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment,” The Georgia Straight, 28 May 2013, https://www.straight.com/news/385761/canadian-war-science-long-unexaggerated-devastating-chronological-indictment; Chris Turner, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness In Stephen Harper’s Canada (Greystone Books, 2013). The elimination of the former PFRA’s remaining functions was achieved through the 2012 passage of omnibus budget bill C-38. The wrap-up of PFRA activities extended into 2013.

2 Liberal Party of Canada, “Forward. For Everyone.,” 2021, 48; Green Party of Canada, “Platform 2021: Green Future, Life with Dignity, Just Society,” 2021, 23; Darrin Qualman, in collaboration with the National Farmers Union, “Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis: Transformative Strategy for Canadian Farms and Food Systems,” (Saskatoon: National Farmers Union, 2019), 6-7; Richard Florizone, “Help Canada’s Workers Now—but don’t lock us into a high-carbon future,” The Hill Times, 25 March 2020, https://www-hilltimes-com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/2020/03/25/help-canadas-workers-now-but-dont-lock-us-into-a-high-carbon-future/240774; John Morris, “Comment: Bring Back the PFRA,” Manitoba Co-Operator, 26 May 2019, https://www.manitobacooperator.ca/news-opinion/opinion/comment-bring-back-the-prairie-farm-rehabilitation-administration/

3 A. S. Morton and Chester Martin, History of Prairie Settlement and Dominion Land Policy Canadian Frontiers of Settlement, vol. 2, eds. W. A. Mackintosh and W. L. G. Joerg (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited, 1938), 524-534; G. E. Britnell, The Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939), 216; Vernon Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 285-286; James H. Gray, Men Against the Desert (Saskatoon: Western Producer Book Service, 1967); Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 392; David C. Jones, Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry Belt (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1987), 222; Curtis R. McManus, Happyland: A history of the ‘dirty thirties’ in Saskatchewan, 1914-1937 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011), 214-221.

4 Gregory P. Marchildon, “Drought and Public Policy in the Palliser Triangle,” in Vulnerability and Adaptation to Drought: The Canadian Prairies and South America, eds. H. Diaz, M. Hurlbert, and J. Warren (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), 181-197; Gregory P. Marchildon, Suren Kulshreshtha, Elaine Wheaton, and Dave Sauchyn, “Drought and Institutional Adaptation in the Great Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914-1939,” Natural Hazards 45 (2008): 391-411; Robert McLeman, Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Present Challenges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 168-177; R. A. McLeman, J. Dupre, L. Berrang Ford, J. Ford, K. Gajewski, and G. Marchildon, “What We Learned from the Dust Bowl: Lessons in Science, Policy, and Adaptation,” Population and Environment 35 (2013): 417–40; Jim W. Warren and Harry Diaz, Defying Palliser: Stories of Resilience from the Driest Region of the Canadian Prairies (Regina: University of Regina and Canadian Plains Research Centre Press, 2012).

5 Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, “Proposal to Reorganize Components of PFRA to Establish a Soil and Water Conservation Branch An Amalgamated Construction Service” March 1980, page 69, Library and Archives Canada, RG 17, accession 1991-92/086, Box 2, file 170.3C1 vol. 01 (S).

6 Nicole Buffie, “Manitoba Returns 100 Acres to Métis,” Winnipeg Free Press, 19 July 2024, https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2024/07/19/manitoba-returns-100-acres-to-metis; Trevor Herriot, Towards a Prairie Atonement (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2016).

7 Tasha Hubbard, “The Call of the Buffalo: Exploring Kinship with the Buffalo in Indigenous Creative Expression,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Calgary, 2016).

8 John M. Hunter, “Elephantiasis: A Disease of Development in North East Ghana,” Social Sciences and Medicine 35 (1992): 627-649.

9 Harry M. Hill, “PFRA – Future Challenges,” in Agriculture Canada and the University of Manitoba Department of Agricultural Economics and Farm Management, “Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration 50th Anniversary Seminar Proceedings,” (Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, July 1985), 76.

The image at the top of this post is from the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, Accession 1382 (Photo R), R-B8299. It shows a large group of cattle standing along a typical fence during round-up, when cattle in PFRA community pastures were gathered for monitoring and care.
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Shannon Stunden Bower

Shannon Stunden Bower is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on the Canadian Prairies, and addresses questions related to water management (with particular concern for the extremes of flood or drought) and government institutions (whether at national, provincial, or local scales).

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