Dreams Collide: Communities and Factory Farms in Conflict
Jill Sherrill Smith

“Let me tell you about my dream,” Lynda Hunter, Erinsville, resident flashes “and how it’s being destroyed.” Hunter doubts her family want to attend family reunions once the smell of hog wafts over their 150 year-old farmhouse, “If the hog farm moves in, my dream moves out. I’m not against pigs,” she says “it’s just the quantity.”  Hunter and other residents of the hamlet of Erinsville, a sixty-minute drive north and west of Kingston, are engaged in Ontario’s hog factory farm wars. Rural residents and industrial hog operators all over the province are butting heads in a struggle that pits neighbour against neighbour and corporate farming against rural communities. As eigthy-nine year-old Erinsville resident Madeline Hopkins puts it, “And, we do not like it one bit.”

Hopkins, no stranger to country smells, is angry and worried. Despite her sixty-three year residency in a house now less than 100 yards from the proposed hog farm, she is powerless to stop it. “We already have water running in the basements of all these houses on the main street. What is it going to be like if there is pig manure in it. There is just one thing I want to say about this business, no, no way. We do not want it, no way.”
        
Marie Kennedy, Madeline’s friend and retired schoolteacher, wants to keep the rural life she has lived and loved most of her years. “Leonard, my husband, was a farmer. He worked like a slave. He loved farming and worked hard at it to provide for his family. Now, I am afraid none of the ten children and the grandchildren will want to come home. Not with the smell. They say you can smell it for twelve miles”

Hog stench, the “smell of money” to producers, is the “odor of loss” to neighbours. When hog factory farms move in, residents want out but their property values drop, making it difficult to move. For cash strapped rural municipalities, property tax reductions resulting from real estate value reductions, are also a reality. In January, an Alberta Municipal Government Property Tax Appeal Board set a precedent by ruling in favour of residents living within a two-mile radius of a feedlot/factory farm. Residential property taxes were decreased 50% for those living inside a two-mile radius reflecting the reduction in property values. When factory farming moves in neighbours lose.

Rumours of a hog factory have affected real estate sales in Erinsville and the cottage area of Beaver Lake. Robert Storring, a Tamworth realtor says, “As soon as people hear about the hog farm, they lose interest.”

Business dreams are lost too. Dave Greenland and Poppy Harrison, co-owners of The Bakery also in Tamworth, chose this location because the area was clean and unpolluted. The Bakery, a hot spot for great food and talk especially on the summer patio, may fail if the hog operation goes ahead. “We could have stayed in Toronto, but we chose not to. Instead, we took all our savings and invested them here. We are very concerned. We love this place and we have made it our home. Much of our business depends on tourism. I don’t see how we will survive if the hog farm comes in.” Dave is firm,” Look, I am a baker. No clean water, no baking.”

Conflicts between communities and factory farms are old news to our neighbours to the south. “Factory farms promise to be good neighbours and environmental stewards. They promise economic growth and jobs. But they don’t deliver. They are nothing but multinational conglomerates parading as family farms,” Scott Dye, a former farmer now the Agricultural Coordinator for the Sierra Club of the United States, told delegates to the Sustainable Livestock Farms and Healthy Communities Conference in London, Ontario, this March. In the high stakes conflict between rural communities and hog factory farms pollution of the environment and destruction of fragile economies are at risk. Factory farmers claim these are non-issues while rural residents know better. Learning from the United States, where hog, cattle, and chicken manure has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in twenty-two states and contaminated drinking water in seventeen states, Ontario rural residents are fighting back.

In Huron County, members of Agricultural Livestock Expansion Response Team (ALERT) argue factory farms damage their communities environmentally and economically. Bryan Welsh, in Havelock, and the Association of Concerned Citizens for our Environments (ACCE), stopped a hog factory farm from moving in last summer. Factory farms are killing family farms, these groups argue. For every factory farm that opens ten family farms shut their doors. Most citizen groups agree the only way to control intensive livestock operations (ILOs) is to treat them as industry, with regulation and monitoring. Treating them as farms leads to unregulated disaster.

Intensive livestock operations (ILOs), like factories, are in the business of producing product and profit for the global marketplace. While family farmers generally take pride in their livestock, on the factory farm animals are “livestock units.” Because agribusiness economics require the least amount of land be used to produce the most meat, confinement or containment rearing characterizes ILOs. Hogs, raised intensively for pork, never see the light of day. They are densely housed in barns that make most community hockey arena’s look small. Sows, tightly penned in confinement housing, never see their own tails. The tonnes of manure produced by high concentrations of animals, stored in open sewage ponds called lagoons, often equal the human waste production of cities. The difference is this sewage is untreated and unregulated. Manure, a pork production byproduct, is spread as fertilizer on neighbouring fields but because of its sheer volume and the lack of monitoring, there is a serious risk of ground water contamination. In the USA, industrial agriculture is the number one source of water pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that these agricultural practices have impaired 60% of rivers and streams, 50% of lakes, ponds and reservoirs, and 30% of estuaries.

Factory farmers claim ILOs are the farms of the new millennium. “Mark and Sarah have a dream,” hog operator Mark Slack, told over two hundred local protesters at a public meeting. Slack, who seeks to locate an intensive farm in Erinsville, paints a portrait of bucolic bliss that hides the corporate interest behind his dream. “We just want to make a living and raise our kids,” Slack told listeners. The Slack’s intensive hog farm with over 1,400 breeding sows and approximately 11,500 piglets is proposed for land butting tight against the town and not far from Beaver Lake. No one, claims Slack, would have been upset by a one hundred and forty-sow operation twenty years ago. Times, he claims, have changed. Now, it takes 1,400 sows to support a family.  

For Erinsville, Mark Slack’s dream threatens to unsettle a way of life. The tiny town, nestled snugly between limestone bedrock of the south and granite outcroppings of northern Canadian Shield country is unlikely farming country. Nevertheless, scattered beef farms coexist with the occasional dairy operation. Founded in 1836 by Irish Catholic settlers, the town has always struggled to survive. Marg Thompson, local history buff, says that by the 1870s Erinsville’s Irish recognized the surrounding marginal farmland would not sustain them. Glacial soil deposits drain quickly and are shallow. Suited to rough pasture, Erinsville’s rocky fields make for difficult plowing at the best of times.
 
The Catholic Church, as in the past, is at the center of the community. Situated across from St. Patrick’s separate school, the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary has been an active parish since the town’s founding. Today, Father Brian Hart stewards a wide range of community-based programs, including area computer skills training, an energy cooperative, and a community newspaper. Subtract the separate school and the church, which lies within spitting distance from the site of the proposed hog farm and its spreading fields, from the picture and the heart of Erinsville would stop beating.

Just as the first whiff of hog farm was detected, Father Hart and Steven Alls were preparing to launch a project designed to rejuvenate the hamlet. Coordinated by Alls, the Irish Village eco-tourism project, stalled when the community got wind of the factory-farming plan. “ I watched six months of work and lots of people’s dreams go up in smoke,” said Alls whose vision of a market site for craftspeople located in a reconstructed, environmentally, and energy efficient Irish village replica seems incompatible with the odour of hog manure, “Who wants to walk around a tourist site with a hog farm right behind?” Dreams, it must be said, are colliding in Erinsville.

Nor is it easy for an operator to get started in intensive hog farming with so much community resistance. Residents packed a municipal council meeting in February to register objection to the proposed ILO. Mrs. Slack, petulant at the protest since this was the second attempt to locate in Stone Mills Township, snapped, “Is it going to start again?” The Slack’s first attempt failed when protestors found a serious problem with the human septic and the building permit was revoked. Around the time of the Walkerton tragedy, an angry Mark Slack, who was a student at St. Patrick’s School as a child, told the Agrinews, “You’ve got a circle of command that are looking for a way out, an Achilles heel, with absolutely zero tolerance.” Clearly, Slack found resident protests unjustified. Communities are divided when corporate agribusiness comes to town.

After an unsuccessful attempt to relocate in neighbouring Tyendinaga Township, Slack returned to test the new Stone Mills Township intensive livestock by-law in spite of strong and organized resident resistance. “I just don’t see why they want to locate in Erinsville,” puzzled ratepayer and hog factory fighter Dovie Maclaughlin said after the February council meeting, “It’s selfish to disrupt so many peoples’ lives.” 

But, the hog factory farm is still a dream for Mark and Sarah and a nightmare to the community. To stem the mounting opposition, the Slacks held an open house in March. Two hundred residents listened to experts from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) address their fears. Corporate farming interests see public meetings as a necessary evil. Sociologist and anthropologist Desmond Connor told Better Farming magazine open meetings are “the last legal blood sport” for producers and municipal councils. Connor argued, like it or not, producers must work with the community especially since rural demographics have shifted leaving Ontario’s farm population at only fifteen percent of rural residents. 

Expert witnesses failed to calm worries regarding the large hog operation. Residents, who fear their wells will be contaminated by pig manure from the one-acre open hog sewage lagoon, were told the concrete would be inspected regularly for cracks even though the pork industry reports sixteen percent of lagoons leak and many more have “structural issues.”

At the meeting, people with respiratory problems expressed concern regarding the ammonia and hydrogen sulfide gases produced by the tonnes of hog wastes stored in the open lagoon. “What about my asthmatic child who attends Saint Patrick’s school in Erinsville?” Christine Garrett asked. “I have been told the gases will irritate his lungs.” OMAFRA representative, Steve Redmond, responded that trees planted around the lagoon would suppress the odour and that the smells would be worst in the evening between seven and ten, so students would not be in class. This information did not soothe residents aware that in North Carolina’s Sampson County, the amount of ammonia in rain doubled as the hog industry expanded.

Facts are the political tools of the hog wars. Experts said the Slack operation would use 6,000 gallons of water per day for hog washing and drinking contradicting industry information recommending one hundred and eighty-eight gallons a day for each sow. Beaver Lake resident Judy Lemmon asked, “Where’s all that water going to come from?” The crowd laughed aloud when an OMAFRA representative suggested that this amount of water represented no more than the average use of two households, since one household uses an average of sixty gallons per person. Residents learned not to trust experts.

The hamlet of Erinsville’s argument with corporate agriculture is characteristic of conflicts occurring all over rural Ontario as the Harris government opens the barn door to corporate driven internationally owned agribusiness. Attracted by Ontario’s wide-open spaces, depressed rural economies, and weak regulation intensive livestock operations, in particular hog, are appearing all over the province. Provincial legislation to protect municipalities like Erinsville’s Stone Mills Township, is not forthcoming. Agriculture minister Brian Coburn told financially strapped municipalities not to expect any legislation soon. Nevertheless, the Province holds the trump cards since despite municipal efforts to prevent the intrusion of ILOs, appeals at the Normal Farm Practices Board, the Ontario Municipal Board, or Divisional Court can overturn rulings against intensive livestock operations. Regulation and monitoring, applied to most industry, does not exist for intensive livestock operations because they are classified as farms. The deck is stacked in favour of corporate agriculture  not rural communities.

The dilemma facing rural municipalities and intensive livestock operations pits rural residents’ dreams against the presumed inevitability of intensive livestock farming as the next wave of agriculture. Scott Dye speaks plainly. “This is not, “ he argues, “a natural or inevitable development in agriculture.” For rural Ontario’s divided communities, the hope is that the provincial government will act quickly to introduce protective legislation.

Beaver Lake resident Cliff Thompson sums up the Erinsville story this way, “Mark and Sarah have a dream and Cliff and Marg have a dream. For Mark and Sarah’s dream to become a reality, means Cliff and Marg’s dream is history. It’s just not right.”

Jill Sherrill Smith teaches at Trent and Queen’s Universities and lives on the Hog’s Back Road near Marlbank, Ontario.