Indian Head Research farm closing due to federal cutbacks
Staff receive 6-month notice
January 26, 2026, 11:47 am
Nicole Taylor, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Indian Head Research Farm, which has been in existence since 1887, will be closing due to federal cutbacks.
Last week the World-Spectator learned that staff had been given six month notice.
The government has announced it wants to cut 16,000 positions, or about 4.5 per cent of the public service workforce across Canada, over the next three fiscal years.
“It’s definitely not great news for our community. We are estimating about 40 people work there and have been given some different options on where they go,” said Indian Head Mayor Steven Cole last week.
“The tree nursery we had, the PFRA, we still survived the loss of that, we got through it but it’s going to effect a lot of families and a lot of employees there. I know some of them pretty well and they were born and raised and lived all their life here. Now, are they going to want to go to another community, with a few years left to retirement? It’s going to be tough.”
Cole says the farm is part of the town, and the area’s history.
“My grandfather and my dad and myself, we all worked out there many years ago. I know in my family alone, my dad was saying we had well over 100 years of my family working there. It’s close to 140 years old. It has been there for quite some time. It’s been a big part of our community for many years.
“I’m shocked right now. Government cuts, we all know what happens and how it works, but nobody wants to see that leave your community.
“It has always been there, it has always been part of our history. I remember as a kid going to different functions in the corn rows and different things like that over time. It’s huge part of our community and now it’s going to be closed and gone.
“They were always testing different seeds and coming up with lots of new varieties of seed for growing in our area. And even when they shut the tree nursery down some of that work was moved there.
“So a big part of it is shock right now. Nobody wants to see that happen in their community, especially something that has been there so long.”
Premier Scott Moe said he doesn’t feel the research farm should have been part of the federal cuts.
“I am starting to hear about some agriculture and agri food workforce reductions and number of research farms, not just in Saskatchewan, but across Western Canada,” he said on Friday.
“I have not talked to my ag minister specifically about it yet, but I am going to, and likely talk with the federal ag minister and Prime Minister Carney as well.
“I know there’s been the indication there’s going to be a workforce reduction at the federal level because it has increased so drastically under the previous Prime Minister. But this is not a place where it was increasing under the previous Prime Minister. This is a historical research farm that has been operating in our province for literally decades and doing tremendous work when it comes to some of the developmental research or crop research or in the grasslands and ranching spaces as well.
“So this is bothersome that this is a place where the federal government is trying to reduce their public workforce. I think there’s a number of other places that they could look to save more money than they will here.
“And I would point to one, and that is the gun grab that they’re doing. If they remove that flawed program, that would save you far more money than what is trying or attempted to be saved by closing these research farms or the workforce reduction that is happening there.”
Milton Dyck, the President of the Agriculture Union which is a component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada which represents the employees at the research farm, says there was no need to include Agriculture Canada as part of the federal cuts.
“I think it’s a blow to agriculture research within Canada, within Saskatchewan. It’s also a blow to the town of Indian Head, because in 2012 they lost a tree nursery there for the for the prairie farm rehabilitation administration that had over 70 employees with Ag Canada, and now they’re losing another 30 or so employees from the town,” he says.
“So the town has lost basically its biggest employer over the last 15 years. Indian Head, incidentally, was one of the first research centers. It was one of the first five agriculture research centers in Canada, and it was created in 1887, back when Saskatchewan was the Northwest Territories.
“Research is based on a lot of having different soils, different areas to do crop testing, and as we lose more and more centers to do our crop testing, this lessens our ability to create good genetic varieties, because we’re losing the areas that we normally plant in.
“I do not think the staff are getting a lot of options. When the time comes—they still do not know quite when, but it’s coming—they will just lose their jobs and positions.
“We knew there was going to be cuts because the government had said they were going to be cutting, of course, but when Mark Carney was talking and when the Treasury Board has been talking about the Civil Service increasing by 30 per cent over the last 10 years, Agriculture Canada has actually dropped by 10 per cent of employees.
“So we’re already short staffed. We were already short staffed, and now we’re even shorter because the department has already lost a lot of employees for research, and now we’re losing more.
“So it’s a blanket cut that has been asked of all departments, but when your department has already fallen in numbers, how do you continue to cut it?”
Dyck says the union will be pushing back on the cuts to the research farm.
“As a union we’re going to be pushing back. But this is something that’s just come out. In the last day, we found out where the cuts are and which stations they’ve cut, and they’ve cut five stations across the country, and they’re also trying to cut a lot of corporate staff. You always try and cut, say the administration staff, or the back of the house staff, but yet they’re vital and I just don’t know how, when we’re already short staffed, how we’re going to continue to be viable.
We knew the cuts were coming, but it’s always shocking to people when they’re told out of the blue. They had no idea in these positions that was the meeting they were going to, to then be told that their jobs were going.”
Dyck says he suspects the research farm will be closed by the summer.
“I would suspect that it is six months, but it might be different for different groups, even at the station, because they will have facility staff that might be there longer to shut down everything before the final closure. But I would say there’s not going to be another year of work. They’re not going to be doing anything this summer, is what I would think.”
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