The Manitoba Pork Council has responded to the ban on new hog barns in the province with its own “pause.”
The council announced March 27 it would halt all of its research funding to “re-evaluate where (they) spend hog farmer’s money.”
The council had budgeted $583,000 in producer contributions for research funding in 2008.
“Why should producers invest in environmental research when our government doesn’t listen to its own research results?” Bryan Ferriss, vice-chair of Manitoba Pork Council, said in a news release. “The government has its own agenda – and it is based on political science, not research science.”
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In an interview, Ferriss said hog farmers should have put their funding into a different pot.
“We would probably have been better off to spend money in political science research, instead of the environmental science area,” he said.
The council’s halt on funding is another sign that Manitoba hog farmers are angry at the provincial government’s ban on new hog barns.
After receiving the Clean Environment Commission’s report on the sustainability of the province’s hog industry, Manitoba’s NDP government decided March 3 to maintain what it called a pause on the expansion of hog operations in the southeast, the Red River Valley and the Interlake regions.
Ferriss and many others in the hog business consider the continued ban to be excessive.
“It wasn’t a recommendation of the Clean Environment Commission report,” he said. “There’s been nothing offered to date on the government’s part as to what research they’ve based this decision on.”
When announcing the ban, conservation minister Stan Struthers said the commission report indicated that the hog industry was not sustainable in certain regions of the province.
Hog farmers have said repeatedly that they are being unfairly blamed for nutrient buildup in Lake Winnipeg. They say the hog industry is responsible for only 1.5 percent of the phosphorus and nitrogen entering the lake.
“They ignored all of the information available to everyone … as far as environmental research,” said Ferriss, who farms near Swan River.
Until the government is prepared to come to the table, the research dollars will be withheld, he said.
