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The Rural Voice, 1999-11, Page 8�OX CHRYSLER DODGE JEEP GREAT USED LUXURY CARS 1991 CADILLAC DEVILLE Local one owner trade Only 63,000 miles, excellent condition $9,995. to 1994 LESABRE LTD Fully equipped including dual power seats, dual zone air, only 90,000 km., sharp! Both Outstanding Condition "We only sell the best for less and wholesale the rest" CHRYSLER DODGE JEEP DODGE TRUCKS If you don't see what you want, ask us, we'll find it for you. Sunset Strip, Owen Sound Ontario, N4K 5W9 (519) 371 -JEEP (5337) 1-800-263-9579 Fax: (519) 371-5559 4 THE RURAL VOICE Keith Roulston Taking manure seriously When you think about it, it's enough to scare you silly. You're hurtling down a highway in a ton of metal at high speed, passing within inches of other speeding projectiles. A fraction of a second inattention, a few inches too far in the wrong direction, and your life, and the lives of others, can be over. And yet human beings are so adaptable that within a few days or weeks of our learning to drive, and surviving, we take it for granted we aren't about to die. So sure are most people of their safety that they drive faster and faster, some even swerving in an out of heavy traffic in an effort to get ahead a few car lengths. Farmers too adapt to their surr- oundings, sometimes to their own detriment. Because people so often get away with being around danger- ous situations like uncovered augers or PTO shafts, they tend to downplay the danger, until it's too late. Likewise, farm chemicals have been so much apart of farm life that sometimes it's easy to forget that, handled improperly, they can cause serious environmental damage or, worse, cause short and long-term health problems. Perhaps liquid manure falls into the same category. Farmers have been dealing with manure for so long and they know that it can be so bene- ficial for the fertility of their fields, that they fail to fathom the concern manure, particularly in the huge quantities from an intensive livestock barn, is causing to their neighbours. I've heard farmers say large operators are, if anything, safer than small operations because they are more careful. "Has anyone looked at the small barns where runoff from the manure pile goes right into an open drain?" people will ask. There aren't more animals around today, others argue, they're just in fewer, larger, more efficient barns. People should learn to co-operate and stop complaining, still others say. Well they aren't going to. At various times recently I've been at gatherings where the subject has turned to large hog barns and the non -farmers began bitterly complain- ing about the smell and the danger of pollution. You can argue all you want about how these barns are run well and how they're just an efficient rearrangement of the hog population of years past but you're going to lose. Because they have their point. If we're not producing more hogs today than we were 10 years ago, why are so many people furious about the smell (and that includes other farmers)? The problem is concent- ration — concentrating the smell of the manure from 2,000-4,000 pigs in one area creates an odour problem for people in a much greater radius than having more, smaller barns. Similarly, non -farmers take the potential danger from a manure spill more seriously than farmers. You can argue all you want about small farms perhaps being less stringent in their efforts to control pollution than large farms but non -farmers see through the argument. They see concentration and they're right. A deer messing in the woods, for instance, is polluting but nature can deal with it. A thous- and cattle in a feedlot produces a problem nature can't deal with. Farmers are rightly frustrated. Consumers drive down the price of farm products meaning farms must get bigger to make ends meet, then they complain about factory agricul- ture. Consumers can't have it both ways but we have to explain that reality to them. We must tell them bluntly that they, more than farmers, have chosen this route. Meanwhile we need to realize that no matter how much we'd like to see big barns as just the next step in agricultural efficiency, they're so much larger that their effects, and potential for damage, go far beyond the border of the home farm.0 Keith Roulston is editor and publisher of The Rural Voice. He lives near Blyth, ON.