ST. GEORGES, Man. – An hour after shooting down a proposed hog barn for this eastern Manitoba area, the barn’s opponents were elated.
They milled around outside the offices of the Rural Municipality of Alexander, chatting happily, basking in the glow of victory.
They didn’t have polished presentations or much knowledge of the hog industry, but they made up for that with a passionate rejection of modern pig farming.
“I know in my heart and in my mind that this was something that was never meant to be,” said Debbie Hawranik, a local nurse who campaigned against the proposed 6,000-pig feeder barn that the RM rejected.
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“The potential for hazard and risk was just nothing I would ever have been convinced otherwise of.”
Hog barn opponents had gathered signatures on petitions from mostly cottagers and town dwellers opposing the feeder barn. They worried that the barn would spill manure into local ground water, into a nearby irrigation ditch, and eventually downstream into the water that laps at the docks of their cottages and homes.
The hopeful hog barn operator, Beausejour hog producer Hans Muster, also gathered hundreds of names on a petition. Most of his supporters were farmers living near where the barn would have been built.
In the battle of numbers, the cottagers handily outweighed the farmers. The council voted three to one to reject the proposal, saying there were too many environmental worries.
They reached this conclusion even though a technical review of the proposal by three Manitoba government departments, including the environment department, approved the project.
It all left a bad taste in the mouth of Gary Plohman, a manager with Elite Swine Inc. Muster’s barn would have been part of Elite Swine’s network.
“Municipal officials are open to intimidation and threats to their livelihood,” said Plohman.
“That’s what I think happened in (the nearby community of) Powerview …. Agriculture in that area is somewhat at the whim of that cottagers’ association.”
Though the fight here was based mostly on local concerns, the dynamics underlying hog industry development in general were evident.
Anti-barn activists don’t like anything about contemporary hog production.
Apart from threats to the environment, opponents here also claimed modern pig barns create antibiotic-resistant germs, produce carcinogenic meat, and destroy family farms by industrializing agriculture.
Proponents see large-scale barns as the only viable way to maintain and expand the industry and the economy of rural Manitoba.
Marcel Hacault, president of Manitoba Pork, said barns like Muster’s are typical of operations modest producers are building to stay viable.
The furious opposition seen in places like the RM of Alexander may help push some producers out of the industry – the ones the opponents often say they are fighting for.
“It does discourage some small guys,” said Hacault.
“They’re just trying to make a living but they’re scared of getting targeted. It’s the smaller farmers, the family operations, that are hurt.”
Hacault said farmers who don’t raise hogs often support hog barn projects because they don’t want to stand in the way of a producer staying on the land.
It’s others who don’t know farming well that often block proposed barns.
“These groups say they’re fighting for the small guy, but they have the opposite effect,” said Hacault. “They probably don’t even realize what they’re doing.”
Both Hacault and Plohman said they think Manitoba needs a better system for approving hog barns so that environmentally sound operations like this aren’t rejected.
But to John Hawranik, the main organizer of the opponents, everything in his RM operated as it should.
“Fortunately council and the reeve recognized who voted them in,” said Hawranik.
