In Hogs We Trust. Part 11

The Price We Pay For A$$embly-line Pork

by Larry Powell

Here is an important update to this story.

The dollar cost to Manitobans of a deadly hog disease is being revealed. Yet key details regarding its magnitude remain secret. A Planet in Peril (PinP) exclusive.

Taxpayers in Manitoba had better get ready to dig deeper. Our provincial government has just relaxed the rules so the hog industry can expand. And, given past history, more corporate welfare will, surely, soon be flowing again into the trough for producers.  

I’ve compiled a probably-incomplete history of largesse which has already been bestowed upon factory barn operators in just the past ten years. 

I think you’ll agree, the numbers are impressive. 

I'll begin with HyLife Foods. 

It’s located on the outskirts of the small, central Manitoba town of Neepawa, where I used to live. 

HyLife describes itself as “the largest pork processing company in Canada.” (“Pork processing” is actually a euphemism for a place where thousands of hogs are butchered each day, in this case, right on the edge of town.)

Workers take a break at the HyLife plant. A PinP photo.

According to Town of Neepawa bylaws, the three levels of government agreed in 2007, to help Springhill Farms (HyLife’s forerunner) pay for a wastewater treatment plant, costing more than $8 million. While it would treat the sewage from the town’s 3,000 human residents, it would mainly help Springhill meet the province’s clean water standards, by dealing with the blood, hair, manure and offal from the pigs being slaughtered there at the time. Springhill and Neepawa taxpayers would each chip in $1.5 million. Even churches, which would normally be exempt, had to step up. Taxpayers at the federal and provincial level together put up the rest - over $5 million. 

But two years later, by '09, the cost of that project had almost tripled - to nearly $24 million. According to an informed source, this was to accommodate plans by HyLife (as it had then become) to expand beyond the plant size originally envisioned. (As we speak, it is doing just that.) HyLife had to cough up an additional $10 million. But, while local taxpayers were spared any additional levy this time, the Manitoba and federal governments had to shell out $12 million more. 

All that money was going into an industry which, in the previous three years, had virtually “tanked.” It was being plagued by a series of disasters, including oversupply, low prices, high costs and a global economic crisis. Because of the risk of swine flu, the US and Japan were refusing to buy our pork. Hogs were being sold at a loss. Many producers were almost bankrupt. It’s estimated that Canada lost 28 percent of its pig farms and 20 percent of its pigs during that time.

In Hogs We Trust - Part 111 "Animal diseases devastate herds, worldwide."

Then, the same year as HyLife’s treatment plant costs were skyrocketing, along came the Feds with the “daddy” of all bailouts (for pork producers across the country). At the urging of the Canadian Pork Council (CPC), the industry’s lobby group, Ottawa stepped in with two separate loan programs totalling almost $500 million. One, with a budget of more than $400 million, was designed to make it easier for “viable operators” to get long-term loans. These do not have to be repaid until 2024, another seven years.

The other was aimed at helping producers deal with the "oversupply" problem (too many hogs for the market to handle). It allowed them to borrow more than $82 million dollars, but only if they agreed to get out of the business, altogether, and stay out for at least three years. It is estimated that more than four million pigs were "removed" as a result.

 A government evaluation found the programs were "mostly effective" in achieving their goals. 

But, at what cost? 

Many of the borrowers defaulted on their loan repayments. According to the evaluation, “The percentage of reserve-backed loans that continue in the first 36 months to be repaid without defaulting is at 53%. This suggests just under half of the loan amounts given to producers are impaired or are at risk of being impaired.”And, altho the loans were handled through banks and other financial institutions, it is unclear who is repaying the interest on those loans - bound to be in the tens of millions of dollars - the hog producers or the government.

My attempts to clarify these points with the government have been unsuccessful, so far.

Turns out, '09 was a good year indeed for factory hog producers. Manitoba and Ottawa also announced a joint payment of $37 million to Manitoba producers in that year, many of whom had been losing money for years.

Meanwhile, back in Neepawa, in 2011, not long after helping HyLife out with its wastewater treatment, Ottawa announced it would lend the company $10m.  Since it seemed to be doing well after a multi-million dollar expansion (it’s now processing 1.69 million hogs yearly and selling its products in Canada, the US, China and Japan, I wanted to know how the company was doing with its repayments, six years after the loan was announced. The government wouldn’t tell me. So I launched an Access to Information request. Three months and scores of e-mails later, I received a heavily-redacted document - with entire pages missing.

Turns out, HyLife doesn’t have to pay any interest on the loan. While the deadline for repayment is 2023, it’s also described as a “conditionally repayable contribution.” It allows the Minister of Agriculture to grant  the company more time to repay, or even to release it “from any term, condition or obligation” that may apply. 

Does this mean HyLife may not be required to repay anything, at all? 

My attempts to clarify this question with some certainty with the government have gone unanswered, so far. 

Then, in 2012, the Puratone Corporation, a major pig producer in Manitoba, went bankrupt. Maple Leaf Foods, also a major player in Canada, with a huge killing plant in Brandon, bought it out. Puratone owed $92 million at the time and was,"in breach of its loan covenants.” But my efforts to find out whether it was Maple Leaf or the taxpayers of Canada who absorbed those costs, have also been unsuccessful. 

Two years later, Ottawa loaned $5 million to Maple Leaf to help upgrade one of its Ontario plants. (It’s worth noting that Maple Leaf’s CEO, Michael McCain, could have made that loan himself out of his yearly salary and still had more than a million dollars left over!)  

And two years later, the federal and Manitoba governments teamed up to "invest" another $500 thousand in Maple Leaf to help it make more bacon at its Winnipeg plant. News reports at the time did not explain whether the “investment” was a grant, a loan with interest, an interest-free loan or, like the one to HyLife, a “conditionally-repayable contribution.”

Just weeks ago, it was revealed in the so-called Paradise Papers that the same Maple Leaf Foods owns an offshore company, the kind often designed to avoid paying taxes at home. (A truly "win-win" for the corporation - a "lose-lose" for the rest of us.)

So, by my count, government assistance of some sort has happened on at least ten occasions over the past ten years, totalling well over half-a-billion dollars.  

If one extrapolates the frequency of such handouts and projects them into the future, it is not unlikely we can expect the next one, in one form or another, in a year or so!

RELATED: "In Hogs We Trust." Part 1: Could the Manitoba government’s return to a deregulated hog industry actually contribute to a world health crisis?"

In Hogs We Trust - Part 111.

by Larry Powell 

(Warning, the words and images in this story are graphic.)

We all know that farm animals can get sick. But how many of us are aware of just how damaging animal epidemics can be - whether on the other side of the world or on our own doorstep? They can and do cause huge economic losses and harm to the health of animals and humans, alike. And, there’s ample evidence that, for generations, the model we’ve been using to raise animals in confined, crowded conditions, only magnifies the problems. So why is the Manitoba government  prepared to risk even more of the same by massively expanding pork production in a province with an already-large industry? I hope this part of my series will move you, the reader, to ask, “How much worse must things get, before we change course?” 

Losses suffered globally due to diseases of livestock, are staggering. As the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) notes, "Some of the most lethal bugs affecting humans originate in our domesticated animals. Thirteen of these (formally called “zoonotics”) are responsible for 2.4 billion cases of human illness and 2.2 million deaths per year. As more pigs and poultry are raised in concentrated spaces, especially in poorer countries, the risk of zoonotic disease rises. 

While the vast majority (of human casualties) are in low-and middle-income countries, the northeastern U.S. has emerged as a ‘hotspot,’ too!” Whatever the case, the authoritative Centers for Disease Contol in the States reminds us, we in developed countries, cannot afford to be complacent. On its website, the CDC proclaims, "We are living in an interconnected world where an outbreak of infectious disease is just a plane ride away." 

UPDATE: May 20, 2018:

It has recently been reported that the rare virus called Nipah has re-emerged in southern India, killing at least 11 people and causing more than 25 others to be hospitalized. Although global health officials consider this to be a relatively small outbreak, they’re worried. And while no cases have been reported in Canada, scientists with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have expressed similar concerns. 

Nipah is on the World Health Organization’s priority list of emerging diseases that could cause a global pandemic, alongside Zika and Ebola.

In 1999, Nipah claimed the lives of more than a hundred people in Malaysia and sickened almost 300 others. While fruit bats had probably been the initial carriers, the victims had all worked closely with pigs, which acted as intermediate hosts. To prevent the spread of the disease, more than a million hogs were euthanized, inflicting tremendous economic losses on the Malaysian economy.

Some of the diseases referred to here, including Nipah, have been known to infect those who take part in the Raaj, the largest annual religious pilgrimages in the world, where animals are sometimes sacrificed. 

While “zoonotics” have not been as common in Canada as elsewhere, the same cannot be said for diseases deadly to hogs - outbreaks which have proven - for much of North America - to be nothing short of rampant. 

In 2004, Canadian hog producers found themselves in the middle of a "major animal-health crisis, worldwide." A new variant of a disease called "Porcine CircoVirus-2 Associated Disease," (PCVAD), had infected Ontario’s swine herds with a vengeance. It seemed to closely resemble a strain that had been first identified in Saskatchewan 20 years earlier. And, not long before the Ontario outbreak, a similar kind disrupted pork production in parts of Asia and Europe, too. 

Lesions “of unprecedented severity” were inflaming the intestines, blood vessels, kidneys and spleen of Ontario herds. In some, fully half the pigs died. PCVAD had become “the dominant strain” infecting barns in both Ontario and Quebec. One study in the journal, “Veterinary Pathology” states, “In the space of less than two decades, this virus has gone from being a provincial oddity to one of the most economically important infectious agents in modern swine production.”

As the outbreak swept on to western Canada, animals were developing rasping coughs, diarrhea, pneumonia, fluid on the lungs, then dying. Within a few years, almost all of Canada’s pig farms had tested positive. As Ottawa put it at the time, “It severely affected the health and livelihood of the Canadian swine industry. Hundreds of producers faced financial ruin and pork processors laid off hundreds of staff. By 2009, the economic impact on the industry in North America had been estimated at more than $500m.” 

When it ended, PCVAD had claimed about 9% of this country’s swine herds. Based on a hog population of about 15 million at the time, we must have lost some 1.35 million animals. By 2007, the federal government had stepped in. At the request of producers, Ottawa gave them more than $62 million to help with the costs of an inoculation program. The government proclaimed, “The hog industry is (now) better prepared to face disease threats.”  

But, is it?

Last spring, another disease deadly to pigs moved into Manitoba, disrupting the industry to a degree perhaps not seen since the crisis 13 years earlier. Ominously dubbed “Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea” (PED), it infected hogs in scores of barns in southeastern Manitoba. Despite frantic efforts by barn owners and workers to control the infection, it had, by summer, found its way onto 90 farms. At this writing, 42 of those are now described as “PED-free,” once again. But these gains have come at a price. Industry sources confirm, during the struggle to contain the disease, it had become so rampant, and stress levels so high among workers trying to contain it, they were developing symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. That’s what our veterans get in combat! There have been no new cases since October. So, is the worst behind us? Or is the epidemic just “in remissionIn another part of the world, the European Union, at this writing, was on high alert. After an absence of decades, a deadly viral disease called African Swine Fever (ASF) “re-invaded” three years ago. It is threatening both EU farm pigs and wild boar, who are believed to carry the disease. Despite heroic attempts by Lithuania, an EU country, to keep it at bay along its border with Belarus, the fever moved in. Then, it swept westward into Poland, the Czech Republic and three Baltic States.

  

A recent study by the University of Manitoba suggests, eradicating the disease won’t be easy. The virus can become airborne and spread on the wind for up to 18 kilometres. It can also withstand cold weather, be spread by livestock trucks, and survive for up to nine months in the earthen storage lagoons which producers use to store the waste. That waste, called slurry, is often spread on farm fields as a fertilizer. (An American expert even says, a single tablespoon may be potent enough to infect tens of millions of animals.) 

No hard numbers are publicly available on just how many pigs the outbreak has claimed. But an official said, at one point during the summer, almost a million were "under surveillance." She did not elaborate.

PED causes the animals to spew vomit from one end and diarrhea from the other. (See above.) While some adults can survive, almost all infected piglets become severely dehydrated and die on about their fifth day.

Infected herds must be culled. 
Photo credit - Science Magazine.

In Estonia, 22 thousand hogs had to be destroyed. Pork prices collapsed and more than a third of Estonia’s hog farms went out of business. The disease is now raising alarm in hog-producing countries like Denmark and Germany. With pork exports there worth billions, the stakes are high. That’s because any country where an infection is confirmed, might lose those markets. 

Below is a video depicting the seriousness of ASF, produced by the European Food Authority.

In a different part of the world, “Public Health England” (PHE), a government agency, has recently estimated that up to 200 thousand residents of England and Wales are being infected each year with Hepatitis E (HepE), mainly from eating undercooked meat, including pork. HepE is often not serious, but can sometimes cause liver failure in pregnant women and others with weakened immune systems. There are conflicting reports on the seriousness of some 60 cases over the summer, traced to imported pork products sold at a major London supermarket. PHE claimed the risk to the public was small, although newspaper accounts at the time, stated there had, indeed, been serious illnesses. The HepE strain responsible has been on the increase in the area since 2010. 

In 2001, a research team in this country concluded, “Hepatitis E is highly prevalent in commercial swine populations in Canada and…may be an important zoonotic agent for humans.” Those findings, however, have since been disputed, or at least played down. 

Officials here in Manitoba have, correctly, been informing the public that the PED virus (responsible for the current outbreak here), “is not a human health or food safety concern.” 

But research by experts at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech did note that PED is also a coronavirus. That’s a family of pathogens, other members of which are “known to infect humans and other animals and cause respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases.” The three PED strains they isolated, likely evolved from bats in China. This, they conclude, “provides further support of the... potential for cross-species transmission.”

The lead author of that study, Dr. X.J. Meng, in an interview with me, hotly denied any suggestion that PED might cross over into humans. 

So, while PED is not a “zoonotic,” the same cannot be said for other coronaviruses.

One of them, “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” (MERS), claimed human lives in dozens of countries in and around the Arabian Peninsula after being confirmed in 2012. Humans can get it by drinking unpasteurized camels’ milk.

And another coronavirus, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), took many lives in an epidemic in 2003, including 44 Canadians. Although the literature does not reveal any connection to hogs, much about the disease remains a mystery. These outbreaks (MERS and SARS), add the American researchers, “create further anxiety over the emergence of PED in the United States.” 

Early in 2009, the infamous “Swine flu” (H1N1) was first detected in Mexico.  By June of that year, the World Health Organization stopped counting cases and declared the outbreak a “pandemic.” When it was all over, human fatalities probably stood at about 285 thousand, mostly in Africa and southeast Asia. While the WHO still fears the disease may pose some threats in certain regions, it has declared it is now in a “post-pandemic period.”

Despite protests from hog producers and some politicians over the name, “Swine Flu” is not a misnomer. While it cannot be spread by eating pork, the virus contains five genes that normally circulate in pigs and is now considered a human influenza virus. Hogs infected with it were also found in three other countries, including Canada. And, yet another virus “of swine origin” was isolated in three people in Saskatchewan in 2010. All worked at the same large hog operation. 

So, are we taking livestock diseases seriously enough?

As the CDC cautions, "The more animals are kept in close quarters, the more likely it is that infection or bacteria can spread among them. Concentrated animal feeding operations or large industrial animal farms can cause a myriad of environmental and public health problemsAnd who will compensate for the huge economic losses which are sure to follow? Three guesses....

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June 2nd, 2018,,,AN INDUSTRY UPDATE......

RELATED: "In Hogs We Trust."  

Part 1 - Antibiotic Overuse.

Part 11 - The Price we Pay for Corporate Hog$. 

Part 1V - The price we and our environment will pay for an expanded hog industry in Manitoba.

Part V - So what's behind Manitoba's crusade to rapidly expand industrial hog production. Click here and find out!

POSTSCRIPT: I have gleaned the above information from the most reliable sources I can find - government agencies, world health authorities, scientific research studies published in peer-reviewed journals and, in some cases, industry itself. But please consider this a “sampling,” rather than a complete chronicle. l.p. 

      Unlike "ILOs," animals on this family farm in Manitoba get to bask in the sun,breathe             fresh air and roam in spacious pastures. 
A PinP photo.

In Hogs We Trust - Part V

               

GUARDIAN LINK; 

This is hardly the first body of research pointing to the hazards of red meat consumption. As the respected Worldwatch Institute concluded some years ago, "The amount of meat in people’s diets has an impact on human health. Eaten in moderation, meat is an important source of iron, zinc, and three vitamins. But a diet high in red and processed meats can lead to a host of health problems, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer."

So our ruling politicians can hardly plead ignorant of the downsides. And now, even less so. This newest study in the Journal Science, the most comprehensive of its kind yet, takes a step beyond past findings."Most strikingly, impacts of (even) the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change."

The research concludes that meat and dairy provide only18% of the calories and 37% of the protein we consume. Yet they require 83% of the farmland and produce 60% of all farm greenhouse gases. 

So, what's with this rush to expand, anyway?

*Confidential briefing notes to the Manitoba cabinet last fall, obtained by Planet in Peril, expose just where the push for industry expansion is coming from.

Was it coming from the Chamber of Commerce? Organized labour? Consumers? Grassroots voters?

Not really.

“Construction and expansion of existing pig operations,” the notes reveal, “are necessary to ensure an adequate supply of hogs to the Maple Leaf and HyLife slaughter facilities.”   


In other words, two big and already-prosperous Canadian food companies needed the government to help them find more pigs, so they could meet presumably spiralling global orders for pork (and fatten their bottom lines at the same time).

According to the notes, "Manitoba processors have indicated there's a 1.8 million pig shortage in slaughter capacity...this is equal to 285 new feeder barns and 1.8 million more hogs each year." 

And, either through blissful ignorance or willful blindness of the massive harm mega-livestock operations have long been shown to cause, worldwide (please read my series, “In Hogs We Trust,” see links, below), the Pallister government now appears to be giving Maple Leaf and HyLife pretty much all they want!

So, are these food processing companies really “in need?”


In its latest annual report, Maple Leaf describes 2017 as a “pivotal year.” Its adjusted operating earnings of $263.8 million were "well ahead of 2016." It completed the year with $203 million in cash. Shareholders were rewarded with $57 million in dividend payments, up 17% from the previous year. And its year-over-year share price increased 27%, outstripping the stock market, overall, by a factor of more than four to one.

And, with taxpayers' help, HyLife has just completed a $176 million expansion of its killing plant in Neepawa. In an industry newsletter, the company says it is now “processing about 6,800 hogs per day on a 5-day week, and with the new expansion, the goal is to get to 7,500 per day or just under 2 million pigs a year.” HyLife grossed $80 million in sales to China since breaking into that market in 2008. It also boasts of being Canada’s largest pork processing plant and now, “the number one exporter of ‘fresh chilled pork’ to Japan, returning $ 200 million worth of sales from the Japanese market annually.” 

The Japanese corporation, Itochu owns almost half of the HyLife operation. It's described as "a general trading company," second only in size to the giant, Mitsubishi. 

Since the vast majority of products from Maple Leaf and HyLife are being exported, could we ordinary Manitobans be forgiven for asking, to what degree should we be expected to place the quality of our air, water and soil at risk here at home, just to guarantee corporate success “over there?”

Are all sectors of the hog industry doing this well?

Figures from the Manitoba Pork Council itself, show the answer to that is “no.” The Council’s “cost of production summary” from 2009 to 2018 (l.), shows producers who’ve been finishing animals for slaughter, actually suffered net losses in seven of those ten years! They ranged from almost $10 per pig in 2012 to almost $20 in ’09. Even during the three money-making years, profits-per-pig ranged from just over $5 so far this year, to a razor-thin .41 cents last year!

As Ruth Pryzner, a small-scale hog producer, member of Hogwatch Manitoba and long-time critic of industrial pork production puts it, “Why would any intelligent farmer want to invest in an industry where hog finisher/producers lose that kind of money?”

Is further environmental degradation already on the horizon?


Last fall, the ruling Conservatives did away with the requirement that new hog barns include anaerobic digesters, or "ADs" (considered the "Cadillac" of devices to clean up livestock waste). They use microbes in the absence of oxygen to sanitize the waste and transform its vast methane emissions into usable power. 

A joint study by Manitoba Hydro and Manitoba Agriculture, found that ADs (rumoured to cost about $1 million each) were “not economically feasible” here. Yet, south of the border, the story is different. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, by the end of 2014, almost 250 such digesters were operating there. While most were on dairy farms, about 38 were being used on hog operations.

And the Agency's assessment of their benefits, seems to paint a “win-win” picture.

•                ADs reduce odours by 95%;

•                turn slurry (animal waste mixed with water) into an almost pathogen-free product;

•                lower pesticide expenses because of reduced fly hatching;

•                and capture methane to generate green renewable energy that the farm can use as an energy source:

Somehow, all these positive outcomes have fallen on deaf ears in Manitoba. In this province, the "Johnny One-Notes" in the government and the industry see the world through one lens only - dollars.

In the confidential cabinet documents obtained by Planet in Peril,  anaerobic digesters or even other pollution control devices that might work as well, are considered "excessive, expensive and unfavourable economiic impacts for the pig industry."

While ADs are no long required in Manitoba, they’re not forbidden, either. Yet not one new hog barn proponent - apparently with lots of money to throw around otherwise - seems to have stepped up to volunteer to build one! 

Does this match the corporate rhetoric?

Here is what the CEO of Maple Leaf, Michael McCain, says in his latest annual report.

“We pursue a Better Planet by dramatically reducing our environmental footprint, recognizing that this is an area of high impact across our supply chain and core to our vision. We have publicly committed to cutting our emissions and energy use, our water usage and our waste by at least 50% by 2025 – and we are tracking well ahead of that goal.”

While Maple Leaf gets most of its hogs from independent producers, 40% are raised in its own barns. None of the existing ones are equipped with digesters. And, if any new Maple Leaf barns on the drawing board are set to include them, it's been a well-kept secret, so far.

Recently, the sole owner of the Canmark hog operation near Roblin, announced a 14 million dollar expansion. While promising it would continue to be “environmentally friendly,” there was not a whisper of an AD there, either.

HyLife will build more than a dozen new barns on four sites near Killarney, alone. Any ADs planned there? It doesn't seem so.

So, where does this leave us? Without a single working anaerobic digester on any farm in all of the province. Nor is there likely to be one for some time to come - if ever.  Instead, Manitoba seems willing to settle for cheap, old-fashioned earthen manure lagoons prone to leakage, the kind that already litter the province.  

This is a legacy the Pallister regime needs to to “wear” - and not with distinction.

And now, Bill 19!

Just when critics were thinking the government couldn’t be more Draconian, along comes ”Bill 19 - the Planning Amendment Act (Improving efficiency in planning),”

Despite an online petition by Hogwatch Manitoba, signed by almost 18 thousand people demanding it be withdrawn, Bill 19 has just been passed into law by the majority Conservative government.

As Ruth Pryzner warns, unless all rural municipalities are vigilant, and choose within a year to retain local control, Bill 19 will actually weaken the ability of their own ratepayers to appeal zoning by-laws. And there will be no process through which to object to new barn or expansion proposals in their neighbourhoods. 

The Bill will accomplish this by scrapping what used to be a mandatory public hearing process called Conditional Use. Once it is gone, RMs could be seduced into giving away the power to decide if a particular site is acceptable. They would no longer be able to make owners cover manure storage lagoons and plant shelter belts for odour control, or require hog factories to pay for road-building and maintenance!

Pryzner says all of this threatens to “open municipalities up to uncontrolled and unlimited livestock growth. It changes the rules so that 25 people have to make formal objections to zoning by-laws to get a Municipal Board review. Immigrants and permanent residents are disqualified from participating. Imagine not being able to say anything about decisions that could harm your investment in a home, farm and community?

“If the hog industry and government get their way,” she predicts, “Rural people could wake up one morning to find a factory hog barn next door and there will be nothing they can say or do about it.”

In a classic display of political double-speak, the government claims its Bill will “enhance fair say for municipalities.”

Some 16 years ago, I personally protested when Canmark Family Farms and the local council tried - through a sadly secretive process - to set up a network of factory barns near Roblin, where I lived. It was partly because of that “conditional use process,” our citizens’ group was able to be heard. And the proposed project moved to another location.

The legacy of factory farming everywhere, is fraught with community discord and division. The actions of the Pallister government now seem about to inflict more of the same. Even in the past several months, since it began relaxing provincial rules, a project in the RM of Woodlands was abandoned due to “public conflict.” And the municipal council in Oakview denied a 6,000 feeder pig project due to “public pressure.” 

Sadly, the torrent of applications for new barns now pouring in, and being approved, promises to be nothing less than a recipe for even more unrest here in rural Manitoba in the years ahead.

Is “hidebound” political ideology playing a role here?

                                                                                                                                                           Since Brian Pallister and his government came to office in 2016, one could, with some justification,  describe their policies as “ultra-conservative.” Despite the tragedy concerning the rail line to Churchill, washed out by extreme flooding and still not fixed, they've resisted a carbon tax (widely viewed as the most effective way of battling climate change). They've also taken a hard line on labour negotiations and health care costs, sold off crown assets and pretty much given up the very concept of "conservation," replacing it with a department formally called "Sustainable Development." 

And, on hog barn expansion, Pallister could well be playing from the songbook of Donald Trump himself. Both men seem to view any kind of regulation, (from the red tape variety to the enlightened kinds that can and do protect you and me from the excesses of corporations) with a knee-jerk hostility. Trump is convinced climate change is a Chinese plot. Pallister treats it as some sort of abstract threat and has come up with a lame "made-in-Manitoba" solution that gives the agriculture sector, a major player in greenhouse gas production, pretty much a free pass.

Trump even issued an executive order some time ago, requiring that, for every new regulation issued, at least two old ones be identified for elimination! (Not much room for the merit system here!) And, if any regulation is deemed to be doing something other than greasing the wheels of corporate friends, it's future looks grave, indeed! 

Are there similar trends here at home? Consider Pallister's Bills 19 and 21 and decide for yourself!

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Footnote: I'm neither vegan nor vegetarian. But I do believe it's important to listen to the voices of science, even when they may be telling us what we don't want to hear. I'm a strong believer in compromise. So I try not to eat meat in excess. Neither do I believe it is helpful to flaunt being a carnivore as if it were a badge of honour or proof of one's masculinity. It's not. 

And my faith in humanity is restored when I see small-scale, family owned livestock operations which are operating as part of the solution, not part of the problem. The world needs more of them. l.p. 

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In Hogs We Trust?

An in-depth series, critiquing Manitoba’s ambitious plans to expand industrial hog production.

by Larry Powell

Part 1

Could the Manitoba government’s return to a deregulated hog industry actually contribute to a world health crisis?

Part 11

The Price Taxpayers Pay For Corporate Hog$

Part 111

The devastating consequences of livestock diseases, worldwide.

Part 1V

The environmental price of intensive livestock operations.

Part V

What’s behind the push by the Manitoba government to dramatically expand the hog industry?

A rebuttal to the findings in "Science" from the International Livestock Research Institute in Africa. 

Related: "New Research Confirms the Common Fly Spreads Serious Hog Diseases. Is Manitoba's Industry Doing Enough to Prevent Them?"

*

"In Hogs We Trust." Part IV The environmental costs of intensive livestock operations.

Last October, just before the provincial government relaxed regulations to allow for many more hogs to be produced in this province, George Matheson, Chair of the industry group, “Manitoba Pork,” testified before a legislative committee. 

In an astonishing display of corporate hype, Matheson seemed to think he could, with a single statement, obliterate years of solid scientific research, conducted in his own province.

“Hog manure is not getting into our rivers and lakes,” he declared. “The vast majority…about 85 per cent, is injected into the soil of farmland or immediately incorporated into the soil. This method of application essentially stops manure from running off the land. I cannot overemphasize this point. This means manure does not get into rivers and lakes. In fact, it is illegal for manure to leave a field.”  

In her long career with the University of Winnipeg’s biology department, Dr. Eva Pip (below) has come to a dramatically different conclusion. After visiting more than 400 sites in Manitoba and publishing a series of meticulous, detailed studies, the veteran water quality expert has found, “The two land use categories with the highest nitrate concentrations bleeding into adjacent surface waters were urban sewage and livestock/poultry operations.”

Dr. Eva Pip taught biology at the U of W for more than 
50 years before retiring in 2016. She has published almost 
100 peer-reviewed articles in her career. More than 800 scientists in 
serious academic circles around the world have cited her work, 
as a building block for their own.

Nitrates act as nutrients which promote the rapid growth of harmful and often poisonous algae. As Dr. Pip explains, “These mar beaches, overgrow submerged surfaces, clog filters and fishing nets, and foul drinking water with objectionable tastes, odours and toxins. 

Local fish and invertebrate kills have occurred both in summer and under winter ice.” 

Many big livestock operations, including hog “mega-barns,” have been operating in southern Manitoba for years. This doesn’t make sense to Dr. Pip. “Our provincial government was irresponsibly allowing barns where periodic flooding was very likely, even certain. Since floodwaters flow into Lake Winnipeg, and also to Lake Manitoba via the Portage Diversion, this means that waste affects a very large area, not just the immediately adjacent waters.” Epic flooding in the Red River Valley in 1997 washed a host of human-related contaminants into those lakes, including waste from hog lagoons. 

A study Dr. Pip supervised in 2006, confirmed that three substances harmful to water quality “increased significantly during flooding.” They were, dissolved solids and different forms of the two main nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous. And human and animal waste were also “major factors” directly affecting water quality near the shore at 90 sites she surveyed along the southern half of Lake Winnipeg. Communities of mollusks (snails and native freshwater mussels), considered important indicators of environmental health, were dwindling, and many are endangered. She recommended another look be taken at management policies affecting the lake, in order to “reduce further habitat decline.” 

In 2012, she published another study showing even more clearly, just how baseless Matheson’s testimony was. For an entire ice-free season, she and one of her students took water samples both upstream and downstream of a small hog and poultry operation in southeastern Manitoba. The farm, complete with waste lagoons and fields where the waste was sprayed, was located between the Brokenhead River and one of its tributaries, Hazel Creek. The study detected significantly higher levels of several substances harmful to water quality in the downstream samples, compared to upstream. These included phosphorous, some nitrogen, solids and fecal coliform bacteria, which increased when it rained. “ The study suggested that environmental loading of livestock waste adversely altered natural stream water quality.” And it called for producers to spread manure “during drier weather conditions, to minimize the large-scale escape events.”  

“Our study demonstrated unequivocally," explains Dr. Pip, "that manure was getting into those waterways from the spread fields after the manure had been spread, and not just small amounts either.” 

The late David Schindler was a Rhodes scholar and internationally celebrated scientist, 

with a Ph.D in ecology. He co-authored the book, “The Algal Bowl: Overfertilization 

of the World’s Freshwaters and Estuaries.”

The Brokenhead River flows into Lake Winnipeg, the subject of 

another study published in 2012. Entitled, “The rapid eutrophication of Lake Winnipeg,” it was conducted by a team of researchers headed by another water quality expert, Dr. David Schindler of the University of Alberta (above). It concluded that toxic blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) “have nearly doubled in size in that lake since the mid 1990s,” thanks to rapid increases in phosphorous levels." (See graph.)

               

What is eutrophication? Harmful algal blooms, dead zones and fish kills are the results of a process called eutrophication, which begins with increased load of nutrients to estuaries and coastal waters. (A NOAA video.)

In 2007, Manitoba's Clean Environment Commission found that hog wastes spread on fields as a nutrient, “constitute the most serious environmental sustainability issues facing the industry.” 

But, could human health be at risk here, too? 

Further research by Dr. Pip less than four years ago, shows that indeed, it could be. It found a dangerous neurotoxin called BMAA at three places near the shore of Lake Winnipeg’s south basin. Levels of it were found to increase significantly after heavy “blooms” of the blue-green algae and when solids were suspended in the water. BMAA is found worldwide, wherever the algae are found. It has been linked to human ailments including Parkinson’s and ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). It has been found in the hair and brain tissue of Canadian Alzheimer’s patients.

There are several troubling pathways humans could be exposed to this toxin. These include consuming the milk or meat of livestock or waterfowl who’ve drunk tainted water in dugouts or wetlands, or even bathing in it! Of the three locations studied, the highest levels were found at Patricia Beach, a popular spot for bathers.

As bad as they sound, BMAA toxins are not the end of the story, as Dr. Pip explains. “We found other more important algal toxins in Lake Winnipeg (microcystins, anatoxins) that are much more immediate and potent, and these should be mentioned. We found that microcystins were related to phosphorus and nitrogen in the water. They can be inhaled, absorbed through skin, or ingested.  

A dog swims in a poison 

soup of blue-green algae.

        soup of blue-green algae.

They've been known to sicken people and kill animals. Many communities as well as cottagers draw their drinking water from the lake.” Coliform bacteria (such as E coli) were also associated with phosphorus levels.

Despite all this, Premier Brian Pallister, like the industry, seems more than willing to simply write off all those years of collective scientific wisdom. When announcing last spring his government would relax important environmental regulations so thousands more hogs could be produced in Manitoba, he told reporters, “There’s no compelling evidence that any of these changes will put water at risk."

Meanwhile, Lake Winnipeg (above), the world's 10th largest freshwater lake, gets increasingly polluted with algal blooms that can be seen from space.

 

And, a report commissioned by the Government of Manitoba in 2011 concluded that phosphorous levels in the lake were “three times higher than they were in Lake Erie when that lake was described as dead!”

What about water quantity?

Quite apart from the role big hog operations play in harming the quality of our water, is the question of the volumes needed to water the livestock and clean the barns. The amounts are staggering. Figures on volumes already being consumed are hard to come by. But we are already getting a taste of what an expanded industry will look like. Applications are now pouring in for new barns and permission to expanded existing ones. The big pork processing company, HyLife alone, has applied to build no less than 16 big barns, housing some 50,000 hogs in the RM of Killarney, in the southwest. The company estimates all those barns, together, will require something like 48,000,000 imperial gallons per year! (218,212,320  litres!) The hogs will produce well over 31 million gallons of slurry, to be stored in several new earthen lagoons the company proposes to dig. The water will come from new wells. The barns are to be located in the Pembina River watershed and built on land which is currently in crop production. 

While Canada is not at the top of the list of the many countries now threatened by water shortages, can we afford to ignore the warning signs? As the Guardian newspaper  reports, “Across the globe, huge areas are in crisis today as reservoirs and aquifers dry up.”

And almost everywhere, animal agriculture plays a role. As the Dutch-based “Water Footprint Network”puts it, “Animal products generally have a larger water footprint than crop products.” While cattle require the most water of all livestock, pigs still need almost six thousand (5,988) litres to produce a single kilogram of pork!

What about the stink?

But are the threats being posed by the Pallister government's crusade to expand the hog industry, confined to our waterways only? What about the stench produced by massive quantities of hog manure? The industry claims, expansion will do little to worsen that problem.

Yet odours from intensive livestock operations nationwide, have been recognized as a problem in Canada for well over 20 years. In its “Handbook on Health Impacts,” (2004), Health Canada notes, “Among all the animal production sectors, hog farming, given its constant growth since the 1970s and its expansion in many rural and even near-urban areas, is often publicly perceived as one of the most polluting agricultural activities. The number of complaints about odours from animal production operations has increased sharply since the 1970s, mainly because of the transition from solid (manure) to liquid (slurry) waste management. As a result, in 1995, odours from buildings and slurry storage facilities were 5.2 times stronger than they were in 1961; and odours from spreading activities were 8.2 times stronger.”

But hog barn odours can be more than just a nuisance. The Handbook warns that gases including ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and methane can not only irritate the eyes and upper respiratory tract, they can, in high enough concentrations, be lethal. “Half of all cases of severe manure gas poisoning are fatal,” it states. “And a few farm workers in Canada die from such poisoning each year,” usually while cleaning out confined spaces such as manure gutters below the barns.

        

Hard figures are not available. But it's believed in Manitoba, more slurry is now injected directly into the ground, rather than being spread above-ground, as is being done here on farmland near Lake Erie, US in 2014.

Related: 
"In Hogs We Trust."  

A critique of Manitoba’s “runaway” hog industry.

Part 1 - Antibiotic Overuse.

Part 11 - The price we pay for corporate pig$. 

Part 111 - From Malaysia to Manitoba - the global magnitude of livestock diseases.

Part V - What’s behind Manitoba’s drive to expand?