Note: John McCreadie of the ALERT group  expressed on May 26, 2000 that the Minister of Agriculture would be drafting new regulations for factory farms. There was a full 8 minute interview on CBC Radio. Perhaps the residents and politicians of Stone Mills Township should contact John McCreadie and/or the Ontario Minister of Agriculture for the latest details of these new regulations.

WALKERTON - Ontario's Minister of Agriculture says he's drafting new regulations for factory farms.

There are growing concerns in the wake of the Walkerton tragedy about the potential for water contamination from manure run-off.

Currently, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs gives farmers guidelines for managing manure, but there are no regulations. Provincial officials carry out inspections only when they have been alerted to a problem.

The contaminant in Walkerton's water has been identified as E. coli 0157, which comes from cattle manure. It's still not known which dairy farm was the source of the contamination.

Agriculture Minister Ernie Harderman says the new regulations will be based on provincial hearings into agriculture intensification earlier this year. But he says fertilizer is not toxic waste, it's fertilizer, and it's up to farmers to manage it responsibly.

In many municipalities, groups of residents have formed environmental groups to pressure local politicians to pass bylaws capping the size of dairy and pork operations.

John McCreadie is a member of ALERT (Agricultural Livestock Expansion Response Team), an umbrella group including environmental activists from across the province. Speaking to Andy Barrie on Metro Morning, McCreadie said many large farms are owned by corporations, rather than individual farmers. He says with the average pig producing four to five times the amount of waste of a human, the manure from a pig barn with 5,000 pigs translates into the equivalent waste of a city of 25,000 people. McCreadie says such waste should be treated as industrial waste, and should be subject to tough regulations. McCreadie estimates Ontario's 4.5 million pigs result in 9-million tonnes of waste being dumped on the land each year.

But Ron Bonnett of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture says farmers are as concerned as anyone else about the environment. He favours a voluntary approach and says the Ontario Federation of Agriculture has already developed a voluntary environmental farm program. Bonnet says many municipalities also require farmers who want to expand their operations to submit manure management plans.

A study in 1991 by the University of Guelph found that almost a third of Ontario's wells were contaminated. The study concluded that faulty septic systems were responsible for some of the contaminated wells and that there was a much greater incidence of contamination on farms where manure was spread.