Battle On The Beach
Henry Vander Burgt and fellow pork producers are embroiled in a battle with neighbouring cottagers who accuse them of polluting Lake Huron.
By ROBERT IRWIN
Environmental duels between farmers and non-farming neighbours are being fought all over the province. And the fight's particularly nasty in Huron County.
Take Henry Vander Burgt, whose farm sits on the east side of Highway 21,
where it travels along a 25-meter-high cliff overlooking Lake Huron near
St. Joseph, just north of Grand Bend. His newly expanded 550-sow
farrowing unit is among area pork farms that have been cited as major
lake polluter by Huron's Edge,
an environmental group formed last summer by Joe Gleason, who owns a
lakeside estate near St. Joseph.
Gleason, an amiable, 32-year-old Michigan native who recently sold his multi-million-dollar computer software company, began targetting the area hog industry after reading Internet reports about environmental hot spots like North Carolina. He says he's received harassing telephone calls and insults and been asked to leave a local restaurant because of his stance.
Vander Burgt's long-time friend, Jody Durand, a 90-sow, farrow-to-finish operator from nearby Zurich, says Gleason is performing a valuable service in getting concerns about the lake, festering for decades, out in the open. But Durand, who's studied area farms with Gleason in the latter's ultralight plane, says his finger-pointing at agriculture and attacks on local councils are counter-productive-"not bridge-building kinds of things."
The prize for hottest dispute arising over a single livestock site has to go to residents of Howard township in Kent county. There, Great Lakes Pig Company neighbour Doug Desmond, a lawyer, led a charge to get township council to enact his model bylaw aimed at farms with more than 100 animal units.
The campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, but not uncolourful. There was plenty of rhetoric and claims by both sides that they were victims of harassment by the other. Great Lakes' neighbour Bev Minnis and a friend dressed in gorilla suits for television cameras to protest earlier claims of guerrilla tactics in the dispute.
Steve Uher, one of Great Lakes' owners, says things have been relatively peaceful lately. "We're not lulling ourselves into a false sense of complacency," he adds.
That's just as well, because in recent weeks several neighbours have been collecting well and ground water samples in anticipation of a possible nuisance lawsuit against Great Lakes. Desmond says it's a costly option, but the only one available if the government, as he sees it, doesn't curb farmers' right to pollute.
Under a nuisance law, which he says originated some 800 years ago, Desmond believes he can obtain an injunction against manure spreading in some circumstances: "I have an absolute right to prohibit toxic substances flowing through my property."
At the other end of the province, along the Quebec border midway between Ottawa and Montreal, East Hawkesbury township in Prescott county recently lifted the province's first temporary ban on new pig buildings. This cleared the way for the target of the bylaw,, cheese maker John Skotidakis, to proceed with a 1,200-head hog barn that had been opposed by nearby homeowners and others troubled by the Skotidakis family's previous environmental infractions.
Restrictive legislation is also sought by a group of non-farmers in Grey Bruce, where compulsory nutrient-management plans are imminent.
Oxford county residents are demanding an environmental assessment for a proposed hog operation, an unprecedented event if it should occur, according to Mike Toombs, manager-land use planning, OMAFRA.
There is unrest in unlikely tourist areas such as Picton, east of Toronto. But the major "stink" this year is in Huron county, which, with 590,000 hogs marketed in 1996, ranks second to Perth for pork volume.
According to data published by the Livestock Manure Pollution Prevention Pilot Project, which was established by government, agriculture and research interests earlier this year, the county has an unenviable manure spill record. See Fig. One. This year, Lake Huron beaches in prime tourist areas closed down for much of August as coliform counts climbed to the thousands. (Provincial standards require closure when levels reach 100.)
While Gleason's latest newsletter includes septic systems and municipal treatment plants in the environmental offender category, his goal is a ban on large hog operations and spreading of any "untreated livestock manure." Although he is sketchy on details, Gleason insists manure should be aerated, composted, and filtered through organic media before ending up on land. His web site, www.manual.com/edge (scheduled to be launched in late October), is supposed to outline these and other concepts.
Toombs and OMAFRA manure expert Don Hillborn say Gleason's demands aren't practical and aren't mandated anywhere else in the world. They insist farmers who follow recommended practices, which include timely incorporation of correct volumes on unsaturated soil, won't endanger the environment.
Indeed Gleason's efforts have led to Save Our Lake, Value Environment (SOLVE), a broad alliance that includes Huron's Edge and other activists, along with a coalition of agricultural groups, Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Energy, OMAFRA, Ausable Bayfield and Maitland Valley conservation authorities, local businesses and local municipalities. Last month, the group began an ambitious eightweek water-sampling program (see related story) to determine whether pollution at seven area beaches originates from animals or humans.
Vander Burgt's 800-member Huron County Pork Producers Association contributed $200. Sampling is overseen by Tom Prout, manager of the Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority.
Prout sees municipal sewage treatment plants as major culprits. He tracks towns like Goderich, further north on the lake, that discharge raw sewage when facilities reach capacity. "On Sept. 19, they just pulled the plug," he says.
Western wheat growers cast eyes eastward
Interprovincial trade barriers are a hot topic in political debate these days but it is clear there is no barrier to the influence of political controversies seeping across provincial barriers.
The political wrangling over the future of Canada's wheat boards - Prairie and Ontario - is a prime example.
Despite different jurisdictions and a vastly different history, the debates from afar have become political factors in both jurisdictions.
When the future of the Winnipeg-based Canadian Wheat Board was under challenge last winter in a farmer vote on barley marketing, Ontario farmers worried that a vote against orderly marketing on the Prairies would influence the future debate in Ontario.
Within the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, Ontario farm leaders pushed a policy of support for the CWB, arguing it was an issue of marketing boards and farmers' ability to organize their own marketing choices.
Lately, the political shoe has been on the other foot. It is Ontario marketing board politics that are influencing the Prairie debate.
As Ontario's wheat farmers and farm leaders agonized this summer and autumn over the Farm Products Marketing Commission rules for the vote on the future of the Chatham-based Ontario Wheat Producers' Marketing Board, Prairie partisans in the wheat board wars watched with interest, drawing inspiration for their own cause.
CWB supporters worried that the two-thirds support level needed to save the board might become a benchmark for future votes on the board, which won less than two-thirds support in last winter's barley vote. They were elated by the decision to cancel the vote.
Wheat board critics who argue for an end to the monopoly and creation of a voluntary board have taken comfort from the Ontario two-thirds rule. Western Canadian Wheat Growers' Association president Larry Maguire from Manitoba argues that the precedent has been set.
"There cannot be a lower threshold for support on the Prairies than there is in Ontario," he says. "The new threshold for the Canadian Wheat Board is that two-thirds of farmers must support it if it is to survive."
The Ontario debate was one of the reasons for the recent split in the anti- CWB Canadian Farmers for Justice, who for years have organized illegal border runs of wheat to challenge CWB jurisdiction over exports.
In early October, a number of prominent Farmers for Justice announced they were leaving the organization and leaving behind the border-running tactic to concentrate on court challenges.
One of the reasons cited was an attempt to soften the image of Prairie anti-wheat board zealots to attract Ontario wheat board dissidents to the cause. They hope to organize Ontario dissidents to fight the monopoly of their board.
The issue of the level of farmer support needed to maintain the marketing monopoly will soon become a major issue on the Prairies.
One of the first orders of business for the new Parliament in Ottawa is to debate and approve legislation which will transform the Canadian Wheat Board into a corporation with a majority of directors elected by farmers and rules set to allow future votes on CWB jurisdiction.
Federal wheat board minister Ralph Goodale has insisted that 50 per cent plus one is the standard for future votes. But the Ontario precedent could be a complicating factor.
And Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission chairman Jim Wheeler likely has complicated it even more by refusing to back down from the decision to make two-thirds support the threshold for continuation of a marketing monopoly. He believes marketing monopolies are unnatural and require a high level of support.
"The authority that comes from legislation is artificial," he says. "It is not the natural market. So if you are going to introduce some of those artificial forces that come from legislated authority, you need a high level of support."
To return to a natural "free market," he says, requires less than a majority.
That standard may come back to haunt Prairie wheat board directors as
they try to establish future voting rules.
Barry Wilson is an Ottawa-based farm columnist.