Pigs and pollution
Re: Farmers welcome move to reduce red tape, WP — June 9.
It’s time that the factory hog industry begins to take responsibility for what it is doing and how it is doing it.
This is a meat exporting business. They have to be aware of the markets and all the commodities that affect them and their operations.
We know from the past and the Auditor General’s conclusion that enforcement of regulations was lacking. In other words, regulations do not meet the intent if enforcement is being ignored. So, in spite of all the regulations they complain about, they just kept growing.
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This kind of intensive hog production causes air pollution, noxious odours, toxic gases and drug pollution. As well, antibiotics, growth-promoting chemicals and other veterinary drugs end up in the animals themselves and enter the environment through their manure and urine, contaminating the water, the soil and our food.
A hog complex will produce feces equivalent to the population of a small city; all untreated and incorporated onto the land, and eventually finding its way to water sources and Lake Winnipeg as the final destination.
The hog industry needs to be regulated because it is an industry. It was deliberately not designated as such by the previous Progressive Conservative government of Manitoba to avoid the need for any potentially negative health and environmental studies, implying that is was an extension of the family farm. Which in reality, is not true.
And once more, the PED virus has struck in Manitoba.
As long as producers continue to raise animals in the confines of being factory assembled,as so many hogs are in our modern society today, there will continue to be such diseases and viruses.
The responsibility of how animals will be raised rests entirely with those in charge, for they have been given the option of making choices. The consequences of those choices are theirs alone to bear.
The Red Tape Reduction Task Force being conceived needs to be reminded that the enactment of Save Lake Winnipeg Act was totally supported in the Manitoba legislature in June of 2011. The NDP government passed the Act to keep phosphorus out of Lake Winnipeg, cracking down on hog manure entering our waterways and protecting wetlands.
John Fefchak
Virden, Man.
