The problem with pig shit

>> >> After Walkerton, critics of Quebec's water safety system raise a stink

by RINA CALABRESE

Normand Provost gets his water from a well on his pig farm in St-Édouard-de-Napierville, just south of Montreal, but he isn't too worried about pollution. "It's water that I drink myself," says the pig farmer. "I wouldn't pollute myself."

Besides pork for the market, Provost's 2,600 hogs produce an average of 17,000 litres of pig manure every day--enough to smear the whole side of the Molson Centre and still have lots left over.

Like all hog farmers, Provost keeps his pigs in pens where their droppings fall through grates in the floor. The waste is then transported to two cement basins just metres away from his house. They look like huge swimming pools, brimming with manure, urine and rainwater. "You want to go for a swim?" he jokes.

And then each year, Provost empties out the basins, using the waste to fertilize his corn and soya crops. All over Quebec, pork farmers do the same.

While Provost says that he runs a tight ship, the problem is that some farms apply more waste than the soil requires or is allowed by government regulations, which means that some of the manure runs off into the water supply.

Pig watchdog

Quebec is the largest pork-producing province in Canada: according to a census by the Quebec Federation of Pork Producers (QFPP), there were 3,000 hog farms in Quebec in 1997. From 1995 to 1998, the volume of pig production in Quebec rose by nearly 1.25 million to reach 6,327,000 pigs.

As the number of pigs increases, so does the volume of manure they produce--4-million cubic metres last year. And increasingly there is more than enough crap to go around. For environmental lawyers like Yves Corriveau, this excess pig shit is no laughing matter.

"After what happened in Walkerton, we realize that animal manure can have very serious implications for public health," says Corriveau, who works for the Quebec Environmental Law Association (QELA).

Corriveau was in Dallas this week attending the annual meeting of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), NAFTA's environmental watchdog. He went down to ask the environment ministers of Mexico, Canada and the USA to reconsider a 1997 submission made by QELA--and a dozen local environmental groups from around the province--to investigate the health dangers and the weak enforcement of regulations in the pig farming industry in Quebec.

If the submission had been accepted, the CEC would have done a fact-finding mission on the issue of water contamination by pig manure--which can contain the deadly E. coli bacteria. But the submission--one of the very few supported by the CEC staff themselves--was rejected by the CEC ministers on May 16. And the latest attempt by QELA to have it reconsidered was also denied, leaving Corriveau bitter about the CEC's effectiveness.

"When the ministers reject a submission like this it's bad for the credibility of the whole organization," he says.

QELA's submission was based on government records, including a 1996 Quebec auditor general's report, which found widespread illegal activity among pig farmers. "Pig farms were having more animals than they had the infrastructure to handle, and they were over-fertilizing with manure. Four hundred and five producers were responsible for 73.5 per cent of the illegal activity," Corriveau says.

Since then, he says, the problem has not been addressed. In fact, he asserts that it's gotten worse because, despite the increase of pig farms, the number of environmental inspectors has decreased from 52 in 1997 to just 28 in 2000.

Pigs and whistle blowers

But it's not just a bunch of environmentalists who are carping about crap. Quebec's government engineers (APIGQ) issued a press release on June 2 dumping on the Quebec government for being too lax about water safety.

"The Quebec government must stop exposing the public to unnecessary risks," says Pierre Sirois, president of the association which represents 1,000 government engineers employed in 30 departments and agencies.

The problem, Sirois says, is that there is more pig manure to spread than there is land on which to spread it. "If there's more manure than the soil can absorb, at some point it overflows into the water," he says.

Sirois believes that a Walkerton-type situation is a real risk in Quebec. Many small municipalities, he explains, get their drinking water from surface water like lakes and rivers, while other municipalities get their drinking water from wells which contain little or no chlorine. Residents who draw their drinking water from wells are more susceptible to contamination that comes from agricultural production. The substances--like E. Coli, other bugs and excess nitrogen--that infiltrate the soil in large quantities can result in a contamination of the wells.

"If you get a heavy rain season," he says, "the wells can be contaminated. Some small municipalities all over the province have to regularly boil their water, and in some cases, it's for more than six months out of the year."

Quebec Environment Minister Paul Begin has recently ordered the doubling of water-quality sampling to eight times monthly, and instructed laboratories to inform municipalities if they detect any contamination.

Green manure

According to a recent report by the Bureau d'audiences publiques sur l'environnment (BAPE) the amount of manure spread by farmers in Quebec regularly exceeds the limits set out by the government. In the region of Chaudière-Appalaches, pork producers keep 29 per cent more pigs than allowed by the regulations--which means a similar amount of excess dung.

So it makes sense that it's in that region that a new company called Agrior has recently been launched, and plans to build the first animal waste-treatment plant in Canada.

"It's going to cost $4.5-million to construct," says Cecilien Berthiaume, Agrior's president. Construction of the plant is scheduled to start in August as soon as the project receives the building permit and an approximately $1-million grant from the federal government.

Once it begins operation, Berthiaume says the plant will process 50,000 tonnes of manure per year--eventually increasing to 150,000 tonnes within five years.

Berthiaume says that getting rid of the stinky stuff doesn't come cheap. Farmers have only two choices: they can either travel long distances by truck to export it outside the region or they can purchase more land. Both of these options, he says, are very expensive.

At Agrior's new plant, the manure will be treated, dried, cubed and resold to golf courses or to corn producers and reincorporated into the soil. "Right now in Quebec," says Berthiaume, "even though there are areas like ours that are in surplus, there are golf courses that import fertilizer from Boston." In the U.S., organic fertilizer like what Agrior will produce sells for $1,000 a tonne. They plan to sell it for a third of that.

All this is part of what is being called an "environmental shift" by the pork producing industry. Clement Pouliot, president of the QFPP, says that in 1997, following public criticism of the environmental impact of pork production, the federation implemented an environmental plan to show they are responsible about protecting the environment. "There was a very negative perception by the public," says Pouliot, who admits that "like all industries, we had some abuses and it provoked a negative response." This year, he says, the federation put in place a plan of intervention to protect the environment.

Chantal Foulds, an agro-environmentalist advisor with the QFPP, admits the problem isn't going to be solved overnight. "We are correcting the practices that are responsible for this pollution," she says, "but it's going to take years before there's going to be an impact."

But APIGQ president Sirois thinks this might well be just a bunch of hogwash. "They've made those kind of promises before," he says, adding, "we're skeptical." :

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