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Massive livestock operations are raising troubling questions about water safety
By Andrew Nikiforuk and Danylo Hawaleshka
Beef Barons
Thirty years ago, thousands of farmers throughout Alberta regarded the care
of 100 cattle as a big deal. Today, 70 beef barons, largely concentrated
north of Lethbridge in an area known as Feedlot Alley, manage more than one
third of the province's beef-cattle production. As a result, just one
feedlot may have as many as 25,000 cattle. As one of Alberta's feedlot kings
puts it: "Unless you get big, you're squeezed out. This whole corporate
thing is just snowballing."
Factory farming has also radicalized the country's multibillion-dollar hog
industry in Ontario, Quebec and the West. In 1976, 18,622 Ontario farmers
raised an average of 103 pigs each. By 1996, 6,777 managed an average of 418
animals each. And just two percent of Ontario's hog factories accounted for
nearly a quarter of the 4.6 million hogs produced in the province that year.
And big just keeps getting bigger. An Asian firm, the Taiwan Sugar
Corporation, for example, is proposing to build an 80,000-hog operation near
Hardisty, Alta. Local citizens are concerned about the amount of untreated
waste it will create -- equivalent to that produced by about 240,000 people.
Into the Danger Zone
The sheer size of these operations has raised questions about water quality
and threats to public health. Manure from factory farms often contains a
variety of heavy metals, lake-choking nutrients and deadly pathogens such as
E. coli 0157. In fact, in certain areas where factory farms have
concentrated industrial piles of manure in small spaces, big trouble has
followed.
No one knows this better than Dr. Paul Hasselback, the medical officer for
Alberta's Chinook Health Region, home to Feedlot Alley and the nation's
largest concentration of livestock -- and a region plagued by chronic health
problems and water-quality concerns. "There is a substantial risk out
there," he notes. "There just isn't a framework to develop these industries
in a sustainable fashion."
The market forces that are erecting animal factories across Canada are
simple. For starters, it is far cheaper to export steak and pork than to
ship grain or corn. Thanks to abundant feed grains, Western Canada can now
produce bacon more profitably than most other regions in the world.
Livestock factories have generated intense opposition in rural Canada.
Living next to one can be unpleasant: In addition to the stench of manure,
neighbours complain about increased traffic, flies, dust and noise. But much
of the resistance focuses on fears about water pollution. And for good
reason. The growth of animal factories, aided by provincial incentives, has
created industrial-scale waste problems. A farm producing 18,000 pigs a year
can create as much effluent as a town of almost 60,000 people without a
waste-treatment system.
Hog waste goes to open-air lagoons before it is sprayed on the land. Beef
factories aren't much better. A 25,000-head feedlot produces in excess of
50,000 tonnes of dung a year. That, too, is just spread on land bases, which
must be sufficiently large to absorb the nutrients. Too small a land base
may be unable to use all the nutrients, causing runoff and saturation.
Les Klapatiuk runs a Calgary firm specializing in water treatment. He says
that not a single government in Canada has adequate legislation to deal with
these volumes of animal waste. "The leakage from lagoons can be incredible,
and when you spread millions of gallons of waste on a field, it can
contaminate the surface water. If a city or an oil company operated this
way," he says, "they would be shut down."
All this manure has already taken a costly toll on waterways. A 1998 federal
study found half of 27 Alberta streams in key agricultural production areas
exceeded water guidelines for nitrogen, phosphorus and disease-carrying
bacteria. According to a 1992 study, about 30 percent of rural wells in
Ontario were susceptible to contamination with pathogens.
David Schindler, a leading expert on water and an ecologist at the
University of Alberta in Edmonton, believes Canada's cavalier attitude
towards water quality will prove calamitous. In a paper published last year,
he predicted that pollution from agriculture and other sources, including
habitat destruction, will end all freshwater fishing in 50 years, while the
nation's drinking-water supply will be in dire straits within a century.
"Country after country has gone down this path," he says. "Why aren't we
learning from other people's mistakes?"
Is our health being compromised? In a study published in 2000, Health Canada
mapped cattle densities and the incidence of E. coli infections in rural
Ontario only to discover that six counties with a high cattle density --
with Walkerton located right in the middle -- routinely registered the
highest rates of E. coli 0157 infection from 1990 to 1995.
Residents in Alberta's Feedlot Alley have the highest rates of intestinal
disease in the province. In a three-year period from 1989 to 1991, E. coli
0157 killed almost a dozen children and afflicted scores more in southern
Alberta's cattle country.
The public-health costs of hog factories are equally daunting. A survey
conducted recently in the United States found that people living downwind
from them in North Carolina -- where such operations originated --
experienced more headaches, runny noses, sore throats, excessive coughing
and diarrhea than residents of a community without hog factories. According
to other U.S. studies, as many as 70 percent of all workers employed by hog
barns suffer from bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses due to the
corrosive nature of hog waste.
Ottawa's Inaction
In the United States, where factory farms have polluted parts of the eastern
seaboard and poisoned scores of communities, state and federal governments
have increased their scrutiny of large operations. The EPA has specifically
targeted concentrated animal-feeding operations located in priority
watershed areas for inspection by September.
Some believe that Canada, however, hasn't followed suit. With the exception
of a pending national program for uniform standards for hog operations and
funding on manure research, Ottawa has been largely absent from the debate
over factory farms. Ottawa's involvement is limited to a federal-provincial
subcommittee on drinking water, which regularly updates guidelines for water
safety. But those guidelines are not legally enforceable, and critics say
Ottawa has failed to take responsibility, leaving control of water to the
provinces, where budget cuts and downloading to municipalities have led to a
disturbing lack of uniformity in monitoring, enforcement and public disclosure.
There are stark contrasts in how provinces and territories go about trying
to keep their water safe. Spring floods in the Yukon usually result in "boil
water" warnings being issued without waiting for test results from wells.
But most governments wait for those test results before issuing "boil water"
advisories. Quebec issues an average of 600 a year. Other provinces
generally issue far fewer. In 1999 Alberta was typical, issuing only two
orders. Some provinces, including Ontario and Nova Scotia, do not even keep
a registry of how many times communities are forced to boil water.
Nor is there a standard procedure for sharing test results among different
levels of government. When contaminants are found in water, labs in most
provinces report results directly to the provincial government, while Quebec
relies on its municipalities to inform government officials when something
is wrong.
Sometimes the public is left out of the loop. In November 1999
Newfoundland's then environment minister, Oliver Langdon, held back
information from CBC following its request to obtain levels of
trihalomethanes (THMs) in the province's drinking water, saying he needed
the municipalities' approval to do so. (Carcinogenic THMs are the
by-products of treating water high in organic matter with chlorine.) Two
months later, after a series of news reports, Langdon angered
Newfoundlanders when he held a media conference to say 63 communities tested
between 1995 and 1999 had THM levels above the recommended limit, some as
much as four times higher.
Despite their image as centres of pollution, metropolitan areas may have
safer tap water than their smaller neighbours. Big cities can afford
sophisticated water-treatment plants, which effectively guard against
microbes, says Barry Thomas, a retired Health Canada official who served on
the federal-provincial guidelines subcommittee. "Leaving small towns on
their own in handling water treatment, which is so critical to public
health, is irresponsible," Thomas says.
The last federal budget promised some hope for cleaner water. It contained
provisions for $2 billion in funding for municipal infrastructure over the
next six years, with contributions from territories, provinces, municipal
governments and the private sector. Ultimately some $3 billion will be spent
on green infrastructure with this program. Agreements have been concluded
with every province and territory, while talks are under way with Nunavut
and the Northwest Territories. And it is up to the provinces to ensure
watersheds are kept safe from increasingly intense livestock farming.
Critics agree that provincial governments should cap livestock density in
many regions. And many rural Canadians want to see animal factories
regulated and taxed for what they are: industries.
Canada also needs laws that recognize that E. coli 0157 and other pathogens
have forever changed the nature of manure. Many experts also recommend that
animal waste should always be properly treated before it ever leaves the barn.
Most producers support higher standards simply because disasters like
Walkerton aren't good for business. Last but not least, David Schindler
would also like to see federal funding restored for freshwater research as
well as comprehensive management plans for the nation's watersheds.
"Walkerton," he concludes, "should have been a wake-up call -- for the
entire nation."
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