The Rural Voice, 1999-11, Page 8�OX
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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.