Last week, a southern Alberta municipality rejected plans for a major hog barn development. It was the latest knot in a long string of conflict and worry about the burgeoning hog industry in Western Canada.
While each proposed development is unique in some ways, opposition tends to focus on the same things: water quality and groundwater integrity, odor and manure disposal.
Try as they might to emphasize the benefits of rural economic development, job creation and markets for feed grains, the developers of intensive hog operations run into the same tangles, time after time.
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They are hindered by the red tape inherent when every municipality has its own set of bylaws and rules. Add to that various regulations imposed by each province, and the result is one big snarly ball of string.
Public concern about any new intensive livestock proposal is a given. And two levels of government – municipal and provincial – will never harmonize their environmental rules. Many will never agree on the permit process for new barns or operations.
Nor are any two provinces likely to adopt the same legislation governing intensive livestock development.
Who’s left to untangle the knots? Perhaps it’s hog producers themselves.
Perhaps the answer is an industry wide, industry driven and enforced set of requirements for new operations that will instil some measure of confidence in the public consciousness.
The hog industry already has an example of a working national program. It’s called Canadian Quality Assurance, and its essence is the application of certain mandatory minimum quality standards for pork producers.
It isn’t too far-fetched, then, to suggest that the industry establish national standards for other aspects of hog operations; lagoons, for example. National standards could apply to new operations, large and small, and could be inspected just as the national building code is inspected and enforced.
The Manitoba Pork Council has already put forward a sustainability strategy that could form the foundation for a national program.
Besides suggesting lagoon inspections, it proposes mandatory Agriculture in the Classroom courses as part of the school curriculum. This would ensure the producer’s perspective reaches the urban populace.
The council further suggests governments provide interest-free loans to producers for improving manure storage and money for manure research.
Standards developed and enforced by the hog industry will not magically instil public confidence. Some would see this as foxes guarding the henhouse.
Nevertheless, a national industry-driven code would provide direction for producers, and rules to which the public can hold producers accountable.
That could loosen two knots that are binding the industry.
Terry Fries, Barb Glen, Allan Laughland, D’Arce McMillan and Elaine Shein collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
