Larry Powell Powell is a veteran, award-winning journalist based in Shoal Lake, Manitoba, Canada. He specialize in stories about agriculture and the environment. For decades, he worked for broadcast outlets in all four provinces in western Canada. This included a 5 years stint as Senior Editor for CBC Radio News in Saskatchewan. He is authorized to receive embargoed news releases on important, global stories, through the Science Media Centre of Canada, the Royal Society, Nature Research and the World Weather Attribution Network. He's a member of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists and a past member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2020, Powell joined an international team of writers providing articles for the Swiss-based online journal, Focusing on Wildlife - celebrating the biodiversity of Planet Earth. In June, 2014, he was a panelist at a world conference in Winnipeg entitled Holding
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The bigger manure lagoons now being planned for Manitoba could become our disasters to further plague Manitobans and pollute our water sources, like what has already happened in North Carolina. Each year, North Carolina's Pig factory farms produce nearly 10 billion gallons of feces and urine. That's enough to fill 15,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. Is this what Manitobans have to look forward to?
This raises more questions.
Too few hogs, too many processing plants, or just bad planning?
In 2009, there were too many hogs! Sows were culled and enormous numbers of piglets killed, barns were shut down, and producers were paid by government, with our tax dollars, to go out of business.
The Manitoba Pork Council (MPC) now claims there is a shortage of hogs to supply both Maple Leaf and the Hylife plants.
The new Pallister Conservative government has sided with the MPC to compromise the Environmental protection requirements in the "Save Lake Winnipeg Act" so production can expand without incurring costs to upgrade existing operations and by lowering standards for new manure storage and treatment facilities. The pork industry says it is not economically feasible to adapt to current requirements and lower standards are sufficient to protect the Lake and Manitoba’s water.
Where is the personal accountability of this industry, who have been sustained with government handouts and environmental subsidies, and lobby to weaken laws to protect the public and our water sources.?
It very much seems that Manitoba is on its way to end up like North Carolina where industry financial considerations Trump environmental and water protection.