STORY STINKS
City newspaper lacks facts in attack on pig farming

By Patrick Meagher

A newspaper report, that lashes out at pig farms reeks of its own odour.

A front page article in The Ottawa Citizen March 19, later published in other newspapers across the country, appears more interested in creating a sensation than truth, say scientists interviewed by Farmers Forum.

The Citizen article charged that industrial-scale farms are causing air and water pollution and are a health risk to the people working in them. The article under the headline "Huge pig farms are a menace: federal report" gave the impression it was using new and secretive federal government documents attained through the Access to Information Act to back its arguments. In fact, the document was posted on a federal government website four years ago.

Most troubling of all is that it was not a scientific document. Ted Pigeon, who sat on the committee that drafted the document in 1997, said The Citizen article misrepresented the truth. There is little to be alarmed about, said the economist with the market and industry services branch of Agriculture Canada.

"There's a lot of real good technology out there," Pigeon said. "Having five million people with sewage in one place is a bad thing. But we do it. We have the technology and no one thinks twice about it. The same thing applies to pigs."

The Citizen article argued that large pig farms are a menace based on three main points.

1. They generate phosphorous that pollutes soil and water;

2. When the farm is close to a city, they generate ammonia fumes that can combine with industrial air pollutants and car exhaust to create a dangerous acidic compound;

3. Manure odor generated can make you ill.

Farmers Forum took the charges to researchers and scientists. Here's what we found.

Ron Fleming, a research engineer at Ridgetown College, who has studied phosphorous, noted that rather than being a pollutant, phosphorous is necessary for the environment. Phosphorous is not a big issue to worry about, he said. "You do want to limit phosphorous. If you spread the correct amount, phosphorous is not an issue."

He added that "To say that all phosphorous is from farming is silly. It can come from many places. Typically, most comes from sewage treatment plants and farms. No one has proven high levels of phosphorous in the soil is a problem, he says.

He said that some interest groups have tried to argue against intensive farming based on odour but found they didn’t have a leg to stand on so they switched their argument to focus on water quality.

The mixing of ammonia with air pollutants is not a concern in Ontario, he said, as in some areas of Europe. Canada’s worst-case scenario, the Fraser Valley, which accepts pollution from Vancouver, is a problem because pollution gets penned in by the mountains, he said.

John Goss, chair of land stewardship, at the University of Guelph, says one-2,000 pig farm "is not a huge operation. With 20 or 30 farms you would want to be concerned. We are not drowning in a sea of manure. It’s quite the opposite."

Pig manure odor is also not cause for alarm. Studies at the University of Minnesota have shown that by filtering air through wood chips, so much smell is eliminated you can host a barbeque next to the barn.

But what about illness caused by odors? "If you delete odors to an acceptable level you dilute pathogens to a point where it will not hurt you," said John Feddes, Alberta department of agriculture and nutritional science. "There’s a lot of people working in these barns. They are not dying and they are at the source. From the research we’ve seen, risk is very minimal. It’s an acceptable risk."

How acceptable? " You can’t design a zero-risk society," he says. The downside is that technology to cut back odor is expensive. Meantime, "we can’t hold ransom an industry" out of fear that something might happen or you would never leave home, he said.

The latest research on health effects, due to air-borne emissions from intensive livestock operations, was assembled by Dr. Brent Auvermann, assistant professor at Texa A&M university agricultural research and extension center. "We didn’t find anything of immediate concern to public health in terms of a crisis," he told Farmers Forum in an interview. "I didn’t find anything to recommend that intensive livestock operations be closed down. There were very few documented public health effects from emission."

His review, submitted to Alberta Pork, included more than 1,000 references to primary research, he said.