The Rural Voice, 2001-07, Page 191
sustainable approach because that
way we could always get better. We
rely on a voluntary effort by every
farmer, back that up with a good
educational component, and after that
was exhausted, we could always go
to a regulatory approach for some
areas that needed some consistenity
or areas where a voluntary approach
simply wouldn't work. We thought
these would be very minimal and so
far we're been proven right."
The other ongoing issue has been
water quality, specifically high
nitrate levels, Verkley says. "You
can't grow crops with 10 parts per
million (ppm) in the root zone and
yet for drinking water, you have to
be under 10 ppm (of nitrates)."
Farmers are on the front line of
this issue with problems showing up
in their wells first. Though pathogens
like E. coli are also a concern, not as
much was known about the dangers
in the early '90s so the OFEC looked
at the nitrogen problem, feeling if
they could find the ways nitrates
made their way into wells, it would
also point the way to how bacteria
Farmers are in the
front line of infected
water wells
could infect the groundwater.
Ontario didn't have the livestock
density in the early '90s that parts of
Europe and the U.S. did and didn't ,
have many regulatory restrictions.
The groups set out to make sure
things stayed that way.
"We didn't want to be the ones to
have to say in any given watershed
'there's too many animals here, the
natural system can't cope, you have
to start getting rid of them'. That was
going to put a lot of strain on some
farmers," he remembers.
"We decided that kind of decision
would be done by government. It was
not going to be up to farm
organizations to impose controls on a
farm -by -farm basis.
"We decided we could handle this
through the proper nutrient
management strategy. The real pillar
of our nutrient management strategy
is that we want sustainable
production — and sustainable
production is long-term, viable
farming. You grow the crop, you
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