My father bought just shy of 500 acres of land, where Crozier and Roddick Townships collided, the year I was born. Like a lot of land at that time, land that was to become farmland, most of it was still wild, half of it uncleared.
Beavers had claimed the northwest corner of the farm, creating havoc for farmers whose property abutted the woods until Lands and Forest trapped all the beavers. My dad was sorry to see the beavers go, said the beavers knew what they were doing.
He sometimes carried a gun during hunting season, taking it with him on the Caterpillar he used to tame the land, but he could never bring himself to pull the trigger. He only whispered that to me when I asked him why he had a gun as I handed him his lunch of a honey sandwich wrapped in wax paper that had been squashed in my pocket. He left pockets and strips of trees untouched, “for the wildlife,” he said. I didn’t understand exactly what he meant until just a few days ago when it all made perfect sense.
I ran across the story of Lorne Scott, a Saskatchewan farmer near Indian Head, the story published by Be Giant, “a non-partisan, non-profit media outlet created to uncover and amplify our country’s most ambitious ideas” (www.begiant.ca). The Sept. 3, 2026, article explained that what makes Scott special is that more than a quarter of his farm is intentionally left “wild”. The land has “never been broke,” Scott said; it had never been tilled.
He is preserving a native prairie habitat as part of his conservation practices, backed by his public career in environmental stewardship. He calls his farm “an island”, surrounded by farms in southern Saskatchewan that have been “planted to within an inch of their lives”, leaving no trees in sight.
Eighty per cent of Saskatchewan’s grassland has been lost since commercial agriculture moved in. The Harper government dismantled the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation program in 2009 after its 74-year run. The program was established in 1935 to find solutions for drought and soil erosion that took its toll on many farms during the Great Depression. The efforts included soil conservation and water development, all aimed at rehabilitating the devastated farmland in the Prairie provinces. The powers that be decided in 2009 that the land no longer needed to be protected.
Commercial farming has all but wiped out the grasslands and wetlands in Saskatchewan. But on Scott’s Island, aspen, snowberry, starflower, Solomon’s seal, northern bedstraw and other native prairie plants grow. Scott regularly sees moose, mule deer, whitetail deer, owls and all kinds of insects for pollination. He cares for his farm as “a functioning ecosystem” while modern agriculture manages land as “a production system”.
Dozens of native species thrive on Scott’s dedicated land compared to commercial farms seeding one to three crop species per field. His soil is high in organic matter and has an undisturbed structure that retains water with no chemical inputs on those wild acres. Commercial farms are dependent on fertilizer inputs, herbicides and fungicides and rely on rainfall that often runs off before it can infiltrate the soil. His land creates a refuge for a wide range of plants and animals, while the success of commercial farms is measured by production. Native prairie grassland serves as a significant carbon sink.
Scott has been interested in the environment and conservation since he was a child. He started building bluebird houses when he was 15, he told The Western Producer in 2012. Over the next 12 years, he built and situated 2,000 nesting boxes for bluebirds. Scott was credited with rebuilding the bluebird population, but since the mid 1990s those numbers have dropped significantly due to the change in climate and the business of agriculture.
Those large grain farms that cover the prairies have replaced the wetlands and grasslands and their native species. Extreme weather in the bluebirds’ breeding grounds in Texas changed migration patterns. By 2014, only six bluebirds returned to Indian Head, and none the following year. Scott has not seen a bluebird on his property since then.
Scott keeps making a difference on his land. He uses very old equipment that he has been able to nurse along for many years. He says he’ll keep farming until he can no longer fix his equipment. He has worn many hats—a farmer, park naturalist, served as president of the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation and the Saskatchewan Natural History Society, a member of the provincial cabinet as Minister of Environment and Resource Management, and Saskatchewan’s chair for the Nature Conservancy of Canada. All this, and he was named to the Order of Canada in 2008.
The recognition is nice, Scott says, but he’d rather see bluebirds back in his nesting boxes.
