The growing rift between rural and urban Manitobans over Lake Winnipeg has widened a few more metres.
On April 15, Winnipeg city councillor Mike O’Shaughnessy blamed farmers for the oxygen loss in Lake Winnipeg, saying Manitoba’s farmers are doing nothing to solve the problem while the City of Winnipeg is spending millions of dollars to reduce its output of nutrients.
“We’re removing nitrogen while farmers are spreading it on fields all over Manitoba,” news reports quoted O’Shaughnessy as saying during a committee meeting.
“The province isn’t stopping farmers from using nitrogen, but we have to remove it.”
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The councillor’s comments provoked a quick reaction from Keystone Agricultural Producers.
“What you heard from the councillor was a complete lack of understanding as to why producers use nutrients,” said KAP president Ian Wishart.
Since the summer of 2006, when algae blooms appeared in Lake Winnipeg’s south basin, finger pointing has dominated political rhetoric and people are blaming one another for the excess nutrients flowing into the lake.
Nonetheless, the name-calling and insults have produced concrete results: a moratorium on new hog barns in three regions of the province; Winnipeg spending $1.8 billion on waste water treatment and the province banning manure spreading in the winter.
The new restrictions on farmers and the costs imposed on Winnipeg residents have intensified the debate and expanded the gap between rural and urban residents.
Wishart said bridging that gap is a priority for KAP.
“I don’t mean to make urban families sound like they don’t know what’s going on,” Wishart said.
“But they have seemed to have lost that connection to what we do and why we do it.”
Consequently, KAP spends substantial energy and time spreading the message that farmers are stewards of the environment.
In early April KAP launched a recycling program for agricultural tires. It requires that farmers pay an environmental levy on new tires for tractors, combines and other machinery, which will help support recycling the rubber.
Rural residents know that farmers are taking this kind of action, Wishart said, but urban residents are not getting the information.
Michael Trevan, dean of the University of Manitoba’s agriculture faculty, said public education is the primary way to close the urban-rural gap.
The U of M’s farm education centre, he said, now under construction at Glenlea Farms south of Winnipeg, will be one tool to explain how fertilizer works and why it is needed.
However, he added, farmers must realize that they are in the business of selling food to urban customers, and the business motto, “the customer is always right” applies to them.
“The main reason why Smithfield’s has gone over to straw bed barns for hog production is because that’s what the consumer wants,” said Trevan, referring to Smithfield Foods’ decision to phase out gestation stalls for hogs.
If there’s no effort to educate the public and if producers refuse to alter practices, Trevan said, their relationship will get “seriously out of kilter.”
The bottom line, however, is that consumers must know that choices bring consequences.
“If you want free-range pork … you’re going to have to pay more for it,” he said.
