A plan to buy 16,000 acres of Crown grazing land and convert some of it to irrigated farmland has been abandoned by the prospective buyer after environmental groups and cattle producers took their objections to the media.
“We never expected the proposal to receive the negative attention it has,” Keith Ypma of SLM Spud Farms told theLethbridge Herald after his family withdrew their offer.
Ypma said his family had followed government regulations and spent four years developing their proposal but was withdrawing its purchase offer “because of the public misinformation used against us.”
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The furore over the proposed sale and irrigation project went all the way to the provincial legislature with one MLA suggesting the land price was to be as low as $75 an acre and another raising allegations of patronage because SLM Spud Farms has made donations to the Conservative party.
Environmentists and cattle producers who had grazing rights on some of the range had other objections.
The Alberta Wilderness Association wanted the Crown land preserved to protect rare and endangered wildlife, while others objected to the sale because they didn’t have the opportunity to bid for the land and the sale was set to proceed without public hearings.
The Bow Island Grazing Association has now been told by Alberta Sustainable Resource Development that they will be able to negotiate a new contract for their present land when their current lease expires at the end of the year. The ranchers feared they would be forced to accept a land swap they thought unfair.
“Now, we’d like to know how we can recoup our costs,” said James Babe, president of the grazing association. “We’ve had a lot of expenses over this, several tens of thousands of dollars.”
The Ypma family say they expected to pay market price for the land and their expansion plan included a substantial investment in irrigation pipelines and other infrastructure.
