The Dirty Truth About Hog Farms
Private government documents belie public reassurances
from Winnipeg Vegetarian, Spring/Summer 2002

By Syd Baumel

While governments publicly paint a happy face on Canada’s expanding hog industry, 590 pages of federal documents dating from 1997 to 2000 paint a picture of private bureaucratic concern about pollution and adverse health effects – and how to keep the Canadian public from catching on.

Released under an Access to Information request, the documents were outed by reporter Tom Spears in the Ottawa Citizen this March. Among other things, they reveal that:

• Across Canada, massive hog farms “have saturated soils and streams with chemicals from manure.” The phosphorous alone is more than farm lands can handle, even when proper manure storage and application procedures are followed. The runoff deoxygenates river water, killing fish and causing overgrowth of algae.
• Chemicals from pig manure (as many as 150) collect and concentrate on barn dust which can spread “over long distances. . . .[and] affect human health, causing nausea, headaches, sleep disturbances, upset stomach, loss of appetite and depression.” Pig farmers can also contract chronic bronchitis and asthma. “Where farmland lies close to cities,” writes Spears, “ammonia fumes from pig urine and manure combine with industrial air pollutants and car exhaust to make industrial air pollutants and car exhaust to make dangerous  acidic compounds.” According to a government document, “These microscopic particles are thought to pose a significant human health risk because they can bypass the normal defences of the respiratory system.”
• David Schindler of the University of Alberta (“Canada’s best-known water pollution expert”) notes that pigs carry several of the same bacteria and parasites that afflict humans. “If these were humans that were crapping all over the landscape, the whole population would be up in arms,” he says.
• Agriculture Canada “says its role is to promote factory farms and to do research supporting them, but not to regulate them.” Environmental protection measures are still “too expensive,” it claims, for hog farm owners. The government department has adopted a PR strategy of releasing “good news stories” instead of “negative news stories” about the industry. “For instance,” Spears writes, “here’s one quoted from a newspaper in Red Deer: ‘Pig poop smells. It smells like money. Lots of money. And a good future.’”

Locally, Hogwatch Manitoba (204-926-1914, www.hogwatchmanitoba.org) is keeping an eye on our own skyrocketting hog industry. The latest inititiative – vigorously opposed by local residents – would plant a large hog farm in the R.M. of Wallace on the Saskatchewan border. It would be just across from  the “Welcome to Manitoba” booth.