The Union Farmer Quarterly/Fall 2001

Traditionally in Canada, pigs were raised on family farms, either as part of a mixed operation or as the main product. An independent hog producer ten years ago could reasonably expect to make a living from a farrow-to-finish operation with about 100 sows. Although the industrial methods now practiced in ILOs were already being widely adopted, many hog farmers still kept their animals in barns with straw bedding, room to move around, and access to the outdoors. The farm family grew and mixed some or most of their own feed, and the manure accumulated in the barn and barnyard, to be spread on the farm's fields when conditions were right.

Marketing arrangements varied. In provinces where there was a producer-run hog board with single-desk selling, farmers shipped to the nearest assembly yard and could count on getting the same price as every other producer. Elsewhere it was more like a free-for-all, but at least there was no monopoly.

Like other farmers, pork producers worked hard and got less than their fair share of the consumer's dollar in a market that was notorious for its ups and downs. In the 1990s, however, things began to get much worse. Packing companies got fewer and bigger, demanding bigger shipments and imposing more conditions; imports flooded the market and prices plunged. Many farmers were forced to get out of hogs, for some it meant leaving farming altogether. Those that stuck it out were pressured to expand and specialize, build big barns with slatted floors and liquid manure systems, and adopt industrial management methods like farrowing crates and growth promotants and mass medication.

Even then it was not enough. The ILOs began to appear, thousands of pigs in a single factory or complex, contracting to supply the newly consolidated packing plant. The packers and the mega-barn owners - often one and the same - pressured for an end to single desk selling, so the packers could play off the remaining smaller producers against the mega-barns. Independent hog farmers were robbed of what little market power they had left. Their right to market access and price transparency disappeared, and the precarious margins that had provided some part of the family's income were cut away and replaced by losses. Once again the word was "Get big or get out", and for many, getting big was not an option. As a result, the number of hog farmers dropped drastically as hog numbers expanded. Manitoba, for example, had 2 million hogs on 3150 hog farms in 1990; ten years later there were 5.4 million hogs, but 1700 hog farms were gone. It is hard to expect farmers to be enthused about this trend.

In the broader community, the advent of ILOs has been equally unwelcome. It did not take long for rural citizens to realize that mega-barns were a new phenomenon, not merely an extension or modernization of existing farming methods. The typical hog mega-barn is a vast windowless building, more like factory or giant warehouse than a barn. There is no barnyard, no manure pile, no animals, no signs of life. Seldom do you even see any farm machinery; the mechanization is all inside. From the outside you see only huge fuel tanks, massive feed storage structures, lots of bare level space for tractor-trailer access.

What you don't see, you smell. The manure drops through the slats in the floor to form a liquid slurry which flows into a specially constructed lagoon that may hold millions of gallons of the stuff. It sits there for months until field conditions are right for spreading. There is a constant smell from the barn itself, which depending on the wind can travel for miles, and when the contents of the lagoon are being spread the stench becomes unbearable.

We are not talking nuisance here, an unpleasant odour that you have to get used to; we are talking significant health hazard. The air is being polluted with quantities of ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, and other substances known to be poisonous if inhaled. If a truck carrying these chemicals overturns, people in the area are evacuated. But the folks who live near a megabarn, and those who work in it, are supposed to go on breathing that air day after day.

The health concern around water is even greater. Especially since the Walkerton E. coli disaster, people everywhere are worried about large quantities of animal manure entering the environment and contaminating water supplies with pathogens and nitrates. True, such contamination can also come from smaller farms or other sources. But the public's perception is that the bigger the operation, the bigger the risk.