The Times Advocate, 2004-01-14, Page 1414
Exeter Times–Advocate
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Farm news
What is fouling the beaches of Lake Huron?
By Joseph Hall
SPECIAL FROM THE TORONTO STAR
(Editor's note: The following story appeared in the
Jan. 3 edition of The Toronto Star. The Times -Advocate
is re -printing the story because its subject matter is of
local interest.)
GODERICH — At the crack of the pen door, they spring
to their feet with the precision timing of a rising flock of
starlings. And they send up a cascading bout of squeal-
ing that would drown out a jet engine.
It's the deafening sound of 330 pregnant
screeching for their breakfast
"They know it's feeding
manager Chad Pickering
screams out over the
early -morning din,
which is shaking
the rafters of this
2,700 -pig Premium
Pork hog operation
near Lucan.
"They're pigs and they
really do love to eat,"
Pickering shouts.
Unfortunately, much of what goes in one end of
these hungry, crated hogs is bound to come out
the other.
And what's been coming out of the 600,000 or
so pigs that call the Huron County area home has
been feeding a growing concern and controversy.
Health officials in the western Ontario farm and
cottage community have permanently posted five
beaches along 40 km of Lake Huron shoreline as
unsafe for swimming.
Those beaches, including Amberly, Ashfield,
Port Albert, Goderich Main and Black's Point, had
regularly showed E. coli levels well above —
sometimes 50 times above — provincial standards
for safe swimming.
Finger pointing
The reaction — often as quarrelsome as the
ruckus raised by the pre -slopped sows — has
been marked by finger pointing, denials and
angry debate among cottagers, officials and farm-
ers as the community grapples with an environ-
mental mess threatening its reputation as
Ontario's "West Coast" playground.
The problem, to put it bluntly, is feces.
In particular, it's E. coli — the stomach -churn-
ing pathogen of Walkerton infamy — that inhabits
animal and human waste.
While not all strains of E. coli are harmful to
humans, their presence in water samples is an
indicator that something sickening could be lurk-
ing.
Over the past decade, levels of E. coli have been
so persistently high in tests along portions of the coun-
ty's Lake Huron waterfront that local health officials
appeared to basically give up on five of their beaches.
In all, half of the water samples taken at beaches by
the Huron County Health Unit during the 1990s failed to
meet provincial water quality standards. Testing in
some lake -feeding streams has shown levels 100 times
higher than the standards.
County authorities insist, however, that the permanent
postings were simply a cost-saving measure, allowing
the cash-strapped municipality to concentrate expensive
testing on other beaches and waterways.
"Those beaches have been posted (on a regular basis)
for the past 10 years; we just decided to quit putting the
signs up and pulling the signs down," says medical offi-
cer of health Dr. Beth Henning.
Stable data
Henning says it's "most unfortunate" that the perma-
nent posting strategy has been misinterpreted, in
national media coverage, as a sign that pollution prob-
lems are increasing. "In fact, the data has remained
fairly stable over the past 10 years."
Henning's department has long urged local doctors to
report any illnesses that might be related to swimming
and contaminated water. Reports haven't come forth,
she says.
But neither Henning nor any other county official
claims that the stability of pollution levels and lack of ill-
ness reports mean there's nothing to worry about.
"We clearly have an issue to address," says Scott
Tousaw, the county's planning director.
"An embarrassment"
Ontario environment commissioner Gord Miller has
called the county's pollution an "embarrassment" to the
province. "Of course there's a legitimate concern; the
kinds of bacterial contamination ... that turn up in the
streams are well beyond those we deem acceptable in
sows,
surface water in Ontario," Miller says. "Plus, we've just
had the permanent closure of five beaches ... that consti-
tutes an escalation of the problem."
The key question: Who or what is behind the problem?
Tousaw names three probable sources for elevated E.
coli levels: agriculture, septic systems and sewage treat-
ment plants.
"As to the relative percentage con-
tribution of any one of
those categories ...
there's been finger
pointing,"
tune,,, barn
manager
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fie,aCere
t
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coli came from animal sources.
But this does not point to any specific species as the
main culprit, as farming associations and academics
point out.
"It could be coming from wildlife, it could be coming
from land application of municipal bio -solids, it could be
coming from land application of manure, it could be
coming from septic systems," says Michael Goss, chair-
person of the University of Guelph's land management
program.
T° Many have pointed to increasing deer in the area
the es.
fare (-bee/ rhe �'ar and large The province'flocks s Miller slikely dismisses this
�e era argument, however.
j� nd tha nds, , , "There have been birds
for
44/vs a d to` rad b/ah�e thousands of years," and deer he
'''"(14/p
F �e• says. "How did we get
pclean
to with?"
Teresa Van Raay sits the
kitchen table in the pretty farm-
house headquarters of her fami-
ly's hog operation near Dashwood. Passing out
plates of cookies to her guests, Van Raay says
she's deeply hurt that her industry has borne
the brunt of public blame.
"Is there that much mistrust?" asks Van Raay.
"Looking at me, are you going to say, 'You look
like someone who would (foul) their own
water'?"
Van Raay has called together a group of
prominent local hog farmers this day to dispute
the theory their pigs are to blame.
"What hurts is that people might actually think
we would intentionally do something like that,"
she says.
The blame game
Van Raay's kitchen cabinet includes Herman
Lansink, CEO of the giant Premium Pork opera-
tion in Middlesex County, near the border with
Huron.
"To check the water and say, 'Let's blame the
farmers,' we find that hard to take," says
Lansink, whose international outfit has more
than 50,000 breeding sows. "It's fear -monger-
ing..,
Lansink and his quality assurance manager,
Peter Kemmerling, have spent several pre -dawn
hours touring a reporter around a Lucan-area
barn and its "nutrient" control systems.
For a facility containing several thousand pigs,
it's surprisingly clean and odour -free. Even to
enter the barn, visitors and workers are
required to strip naked — rings and jewelry
included — then soap down in a double -
entrance shower and don fresh clothes on
the other side.
So susceptible are the swine,
in their close quarters, to
imported diseases that each
newly arriving pig must spend
weeks in quarantine in another
barn before joining the main
herd.
Each pig produces several kilo-
grams of waste a day.
Cattle, while less abundant in the
county, produce far more feces per
animal, Lansink says. A 200 -head
dairy farm accounts for as many
"nutrient" units as a 1,000 -pig hog
Tousaw says. "We, however,
don't really think it's very
productive to lay blame."
But Mike McElhone,
environmental co-ordina-
tor of the local (and vocal)
Ashfield -Colborne
Lakefront Association, is
less reticent to identify a
culprit.
"I have this much doubt about
where it's coming from," says McElhone, plac-
ing thumb and forefinger millimetres apart.
McElhone, whose cottage association has led and paid
for efforts to deal with the problem, says the big source
is the industrial -strength agricultural operations that
make Huron County the province's largest livestock —
and manure — producer.
On the surface, he seems to have good grounds for
certainty.
With a human population of some 58,000, the county
has 10 times as many pigs as people. Cattle outnumber
Huron's humans almost three to one, according to
provincial statistics.
What's the source?
Refusing to identify the chief sources of contamination
will, McElhone argues, make it harder to devise strate-
gies to stem it.
To bolster its contention that agriculture is chiefly to
blame, McElhone's association, which claims 600 cot-
tager members, released a study assessing the DNA of
E. coli collected by the group in streams feeding the lake
near bacterial hot spots.
There are thousands of varieties of E. coli, most of
which display a marked preference for a particular
species of guts they care to inhabit. The study's DNA fin-
gerprinting suggested that the bulk of Huron County's E.
„It could be
could be coming from wildlife, it
municipal bio -solids, ing from la
from land application
it land c'cat. of
PPlicatio of
be coming n be coming
g from septic systems."
ystems manure, it could
Mama GOOss, cumiP'RSON
OF THE jJ
MANAGE PROGRAM. t AND
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operation.
"But we don't want to go down that road of saying it's
us versus them," says Brent Robinson, who runs a
3,200 -sow operation north of Seaforth. "We're all farm-
ers and we're all in the same nutrient game together."
Caged tightly to keep them from biting one another —
or from rolling over on to their Babe -like broods — the
pigs are placed with their back ends in the vicinity of
grates that take their waste below the floor and into an
extensive pipe system.
Mixed in the underground system with urine and the
water used during regular stall cleanings, the waste
becomes a dark and oily liquid, which is fed by gravity
into two giant concrete pools outside the barn.
The open air pools, 43 m in diameter, can contain up
to 4.5 million litres of liquid manure. As odorous and
ugly as the tanks are, however, it's not here that the
manure has hit the fan in the ongoing controversy.
The sludge must be disposed of, and the vast majority
of it will be hauled by tankers and injected directly into
the soil across hundred of acres of farmland.
For the single Premium Pork barn that Lansink toured
Please turn to page 15