CARSTAIRS, Alta. – When farmers in this area of central Alberta got word that a 4,000-sow operation was planned for their county, they were apprehensive about the repercussions for their community.
They questioned how the developer planned to get rid of the abundant waste that 4,000 sows and their litters produce. They also worried about odors and the amount of water the farm might require.
As a result of these questions, a farmer based committee called the County of Mountain View Agriculture Planning Group formed to investigate future developments like the Pig Improvement Canada application to build a 4,000-sow and weanling farm in the county. The company ultimately moved to Fish Lake near Drumheller after the application was rejected by the county development appeal board, partly because of community protests.
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“We don’t want to put up roadblocks but do we want them in business at any cost?” said Connie Osterman, who farms east of Carstairs.
The farmers accept manure as a fact of life on livestock operations, but on mega-farms they said there’s more to waste management than building a lagoon to accept wastes or spreading waste on fields.
“We haven’t got the technology here (in Alberta) to handle these large setups,” said Louis Shultz, who sits on the committee. He and others are checking every resource they can find to learn how to handle manure in an environmentally friendly manner.
Gather information
To answer their questions they organized a seminar for April 1 at Olds College in Olds, Alta.
Waste management specialists have been invited to talk about waste technology, how to avoid mistakes experienced in other places and how to gather information so ratepayers know what questions to ask when a development is proposed in their municipality.
The group said its investigations reveal there isn’t much data.
Lack of information creates a dilemma for many municipalities because most local governments lack the expertise or budgets to properly investigate the after affects of a large industrial farm, said Osterman.
In Alberta, approval for these developments rests with the local municipality. There is a provincial manure management code of practice as a guideline but Osterman argues all regulations were intended for much smaller farms.
“It’s like taking the regulations that you use to govern a country abattoir and using them to govern a Cargill. It just can’t work.”
The committee knows the PIC development won’t be the last to come to their community. The Alberta government is promoting massive expansion of the hog industry in 10 years to eight to 10 million hogs a year from the current 2.8 million.
If that happens, the committee said environmental assessments should be conducted for each farm.
They also questioned the reality of the market for those additional hogs. If political disruptions occur in China or other parts of Asia there is no guarantee those nations will continue to buy Canadian pork.
They also want guarantees that owners are liable for cleaning up abandoned operations when a farm goes bankrupt if markets fail to materialize, said Henry Kaulker of Didsbury.
