Sask. deciding what to do with community pastures

The Saskatchewan government is working out what it will do with dozens of federal community pastures that are being transferred to the province.

The federal government is handing over control of 61 community pastures to Saskatchewan by 2018.

The first 10 pastures will come under provincial control in time for the 2014 grazing season.

The province had originally said it wanted to sell all of the pastures, but Agriculture Minister Lyle Stewart said it will probably hold on to most of the land.

"The more we crunch the numbers, the more we realize that some of these pastures won't work well as sales to the patrons, and some will," Stewart said.

"We expect there will be some of both; probably more leases than sales, initially."

Stewart said only ranchers who currently use the pastures will be given the option to buy or lease the land.

"We can see, based on evaluations that we're putting on kind of from the seat of our pants, so to speak, that some may work much better as sales and others won't work at all," he said.

Any land that is sold will be subject to numerous restrictions, Stewart added.

The federal Community Pasture Program was created in the 1930s to reclaim land that was badly eroded during the Prairie drought.

But Ottawa announced earlier this year that it is giving up control of 900,000 hectares of community pastures on the Prairies, mainly in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.