Rangelands need to be managed with care. Alberta’s government is investing $1.3 million to strengthen the health, biodiversity and resilience of the province’s rangelands through the Rangeland Sustainability Program.
Liisa Jeffrey, executive director of Peace Country Beef and Forage Association (PCBFA), said the funding offered by the RSP is a good fit for her organization.
“We’re a forage-based research association and all of the research and everything that we are doing very much ties in with the goals of that program,” said Jeffrey.
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This year, grant recipients for the 2024-2025 the program include academic institutions, Indigenous organizations, non-profits and grazing associations. The RSP is funded by a portion of rental fees collected from grazing disposition holders on Crown land. The money is then reinvested into projects supporting responsible stewardship across Alberta’s rangelands.
“That’s money coming from ranchers set aside to benefit ranchers. It’s a good concept that the government has come up with,” said Lindsye Murfin, general manager of the Western Stock Growers Association.
The projects for this year include education and community outreach, adaptive grazing practices, conservation strategies, grassland bird conservation and bee biodiversity surveys.
Murfin said they submitted their application for the program in fall 2024, and funding was approved in March 2025.
The WSGA’s project is looking to develop a market for ecosystem services that would work best for ranchers.
“We have an index that we developed that measures ecosystem health, and you could take that, apply it to a parcel of land, get the score and then use the score in the marketplace,” she said.
“You could contract your management of that parcel to either keep your high score or improve it,” she said.
“Our project is fine tuning that index. We’re doing a market analysis and a cross jurisdictional scan of what metrics and measurables are already being used,” she said.
Next summer, the WSGA will be field testing the new index on ranches of stock grower members to make sure it works. WSGA is working with Solstice Environmental Management, and Green Analytics, both of which are based in Edmonton. These companies have started doing a scan of all market analysis in North America and Australia.
Field testing for the project will take place on 50,000 acres in Alberta
Jeffrey said PCBFA has three projects funded by the RSP.
The projects include a silvopasture project, a liming project, and a perennials project.
“All three of them are three-year projects that started in 2024, so they’re in their second field season right now,” said Jeffrey.
The silvopasture project is a producer-led study that evaluates the potential benefits of grazing forest systems versus open pasture.
“That kind of intentional combination of trees, forage and livestock managed as a single integrated practice is what’s called a silvopastural system, and they have potential to provide a number of benefits to livestock and to the plant community,” she said.
Some of the benefits include increasing soil fertility and conservation, improving wildlife habitat and the quality of forage, and diversifying income. There are also some ecosystems benefits like atmospheric carbon sequestration and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.
“On top of that, trees and shrubs in these systems provide shade for animals, so that’s going to improve thermal comfort, which then improves the ability of animals to consume and digest adequate forage biomass, especially in hot weather conditions,” said Jeffrey. This research is being conducted on a ranch in High Prairie, in Big Lakes County.
The second project is a liming project, which is being run as a field study on a producer’s farm in Sexsmith. Adding lime to forages can increase soil PH, which is the primary outcome of the project.
For that project, agricultural lime, pelletized lime and wood ash (an industry by-product from a mill), are being tested to measure the impacts of PH on farm income and profitability.
“It’s assessing the economic feasibility and measuring the impact of liming over the three-year period, and the goals to design liming guidelines and management strategies, particularly for forage systems,” said Jeffrey. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to provide clear recommendations for producers. We’re seeing that soil acidity is a growing concern,” she said.
“When soils are strongly acidic, so 5.5 and under, the availability of many macronutrients for forages decreases and some elements will increase to toxic levels as well. So that’s a concern,” she said.
The Peace Country, which contains the boreal forest, has a low PH and more acidic soils, so lime can increase the PH.
The third project is called the Longevity and Ecosystem services of Perennial Forage Mixes.
Small plots were seeded in 2020, but the project will be monitored again between 2024 and 2026.
“We’re continuing to monitor the biomass production and feed quality of the forage itself, as well as water use efficiency and some soil health parameters,” she said.
A former PhD student who is now a staff member started this project to test water use efficiency, said Jeffrey.
“It’s been interesting because we have had some severe drought years in the time we’ve had these plots. We had our field day last week, and they had harvested these plots about two weeks before the field day and took their cut off them,” shesaid.
The project has highlighted the value of legumes in drought conditions.
“In the two very dry weeks since the plots were harvested, the only thing that has come back is legumes. None of the grasses have and the legumes look great, like they’re green, they’re up, they look fantastic,” she said.
The plots have been seeded with monoculture grasses, and everything in between, all the way up to monoculture legumes.
“We saw how strong of an impact those legumes had on the water use efficiency of the forage, and their ability to continue producing decent quality and decent quantity of forage in drought conditions,” said Jeffrey.
The project is now in its fifth year.
“We’re at the point where we are looking at how long can these plots continue producing a forage stand that’s worthwhile,” she said.
Jeffrey said there were other benefits to participating in the RSP.
“On the silvopasture project, we were able to get the rangeland specialists to come out to the site and do some of the data collection analysis with us. They looked at identifying all the species that were present and determined the proportion of the species that were there,” she said. “That was really cool.”
Jeffrey said the RSP is a great program, and she would encourage people to consider applying for it.
Applications for the program are now open for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Applicants will be considered based on their knowledge and understanding of rangeland management. Applications are open until Sept. 17, 2025.
For more information or to apply, go to https://www.alberta.ca/rangeland-sustainability-program
