If it looks like a pig, squeals like a pig and trots like a pig, it probably is a pig.
But even when there’s not a pink bacon producer in sight, the tens of thousands of gallons of pig manure fermenting in front of you on a hot summer day, with a stiff breeze blowing in your face, makes you certain there are pigs close by.
There’s no mistaking that nostril-searing ammoniac cocktail of porcine produce. And no matter how cloistered the pigs were at the four hog barn complexes visited on a recent manure tour, their existence was profoundly evident.
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It is this anonymity-destroying side-effect of hog production that the government, hog barn promoters and industry people wanted to focus on during the day-long tour.
“I don’t find it so bad,” said Bill Henley, an agriculture department official who reviews new hog barn submissions.
But he acknowledged the smell issue is becoming the single greatest problem for the industry, one that might be lessened by new techniques and research taking place in Saskatchewan.
The tour seemed at moments tense and secretive, and at others scatologically comical. Throughout, it was intensely odiferous.
And entirely pig-free.
While the human tour members may wrinkle their noses at the pigs’ pungent aroma, it is the pigs who have the most to fear from bipeds, said Lee Whittington of the Prairie Swine Centre.
Pig diseases can be easily spread by human feet when people go from one barn to another, so severe biosecurity measures were taken.
The strongest control was stopping anyone from actually ever seeing a pig. The next was to ensure peoples’ feet didn’t bring in wandering microbes.
At the swine centre, the humans wore special white visitors’ rubber boots on a visit to the manure lagoons, and sock feet inside the administration building. The manure tourists had to sign in and out, and swear they had not been in contact with hogs for at least 60 hours.
At the next hog operation, a pair of disposable shoe-shaped plastic bags, which kept pig filth from permanent footwear, gave tourists a vaguely astronautical appearance, and produced an interesting greenhouse effect upon sweltering feet.
Tough to take
At one stop on the tour, hog manure experts demonstrated the difference between old smelly methods of treatment with new less offensive ones by jetting gouts of black, ripe hog manure across the lagoon, producing a mist cloud of such powerful odor that one producer confessed he almost launched lunch.
At the end of the tour, to prove the point hog manure’s smell can be controlled, organizers put on a lagoon-side barbecue for the tourists.
With the stench almost completely controlled by a thick straw cover on the manure pit, the tourists dined on pork and salads, filling their bellies as they had filled their noses all day.
