DALKEITH — A few days after North Glengarry Township issued him a permit in August to build two hog barns holding 1,500 finishing hogs each, Donald Crooks had laid the concrete.

The speed didn’t come from a fear that council would cancel the permit. Crooks says he’s running four weeks behind and the piglets that will fill the barn have already been born. "We have to start making income again," he says.

But success only came after months of tension created by an anti-hog protest group. On the evening the permit was granted, protestors chanted in front of the township building: "Farms yes, hog factories no."

In a prepared statement later, the local mayor Bill Frankin sarcastically thanked the protestors for turning a routine administrative procedure into a provincial media story. He accused the group of using tactics that were manipulative. "When you continue to use images of pig farms in the Carolinas and infer they are the same as the one proposed for Dalkeith you are being intellectually dishonest," he said.

A 1973 graduate of Kemptville College, Crooks started milking cows on his current farm in Glengarry County in 1977. When he sold the cows and quota in December of last year, he was milking 57 cows three times per day. He has a flock of sheep and 110 steers in a feedlot ready for market.

When his son Ian decided he didn’t like university and wanted to farm, the family needed a consistent income. The pig finishing operation seemed the best route.

But he says protestors created plenty of myths about his proposed pig barn. "My opponents said we’d use 21 gallons of water a day for every hog and we’d drain the aquifer," he said. But that was for a flush system. His hogs will each consume 1.5 gallons of water per day, he said.

He’s jumped through all the environmental hoops and then some. He hired former ag. rep, Andre Pommainville, to write his nutrient management plan. A Cornwall firm did a water assessment study and found there would be no effect on the aquifer.

He has more than ample room on his 550 acres to meet the manure spreading requirements of the township and the province.

The two barns, 46' X 290' each, are built in a big field surrounded by trees and shrubs. They are 1.5 kilometres from the village of Dalkeith, and there are no nearby neighbours. He built a 1.3 kilometre road into the site surrounded by hills and trees.

The barns can’t be seen from the road or the village. But how much odor will neighbours notice? About as much and as often as before, when he covered his land each year with cow manure fertilizer, he said.

He toured Quebec hog farms to find the very latest designs in barns and technology to handle odor. The manure will go into a concrete holding plant and to the fields in tanker trucks. However, his opponents don’t appear ready to stop. One Saturday in late August they held a garage sale in Alexandria, raising money for a lawyer to get an injunction to stop construction.

The family never expected the protests to become so loud, with articles and letters in local newspapers depicting them as villains. "We had a lot of our life’s savings in this, and we didn’t want another Sarsfield," Donald Crooks said.

At every meeting, he brought the family along. "We wanted them (council and opponents) to think of us as a family farm, not as a factory farm," he said. Still, it was "the hardest summer of our lives."

Mayor Franklin in his statement, said the Crooks family had co-operated in following all the rules. "You are entitled to enjoy the fruits of your labour and the attainment of your dreams," he said, and asked the Crooks to forgive those people who have hurt them.

Crooks was a quiet, reserved youth at Kemptville College. His participation in farm organizations moulded him for the rough and tumble battle through the summer of 2003. He had been a member of the county milk committee, as well as a director in the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and served as president of the Glengarry federation.

He accuses his opponents of "not playing by the rules. They were scare mongering." Accusations that he was a pawn of big business in Quebec was a red herring, he said. He has a five-year contract with Isopork in Quebec, because there are no plants in eastern Ontario. He emphasizes that the barns belong to him and not the processor.

"I shipped milk to Montreal for years," he said. "To me the border is seamless."