By SYD BAUMEL

This January, the world’s largest public health organization joined the growing number of medical bodies — the Canadian Medical Association included — who are calling for a moratorium on mega hog barns. In its 1134-word resolution, the American Public Health Association cited a host of serious social, environmental and medical concerns.

Hailing the resolution, Robert Lawrence, M.D., Director of The Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote: "Factory farms make their workers sick, pollute the environment, and pose serious public health risks to people living nearby." The system "needs [a] major overhaul, if not elimination."

Among the leading medical worries is antibiotic resistance. The routine feeding of antibiotics to confined animals breeds antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be transmitted to humans in food, water and even airborne barn dust.

In 1999, the intensive hog operations of Malaysia were stricken by a new virus called "Nipah." Encephalitis broke out among hog workers. Over a hundred died, including an abbatoir worker in Singapore.

Antibiotics in animal feed have been banned in Sweden and Denmark and (partially) throughout the European Union. When Denmark prohibited using avoparcin in 1995, bacterial resistance to the drug plummetted from 73 percent to five percent by 2000.

Eva Pip is well acquainted with the research and, through her travels studying water around the province, with the health complaints of people who live near our mega hog barns. In the "numerous, numerous studies" that have been done elsewhere, she says, "the range of symptoms that have been documented ranges all the way from headache and nausea and dizziness, all the way to much more severe and frequent attacks of asthma and bronchitis, much more frequent susceptibility to colds and other kinds of respiratory illnesses."

Pip says that while it’s not possible to prove cause and effect in Manitoba without controlled studies, "you know when it comes down to the bottom line, if you can smell it, then it’s affecting you."

I ask her how the provincial government can encourage the expansion of the mega hog barn industry in the face of such evidence? Because, she says with by now familiar irony, "that’s not science, because that wasn’t done in Manitoba. Somehow Manitobans are unique and different, you see."

But why couldn’t we be exceptional?

"Because all our farm practices are the same as what they have been doing in those other places. And in many cases those are the exact same operators that are no longer able to do that there. In the Netherlands, for example, where now virtually 100 percent of their groundwater is polluted, for years now the Dutch government had been paying them to get out of the business. And so what happens? ‘Come to Manitoba.’"

Every day in Manitoba over 10,000 bellowing hogs are shuttled through high-speed "disassembly lines" and electrically stunned, stabbed, bled, scalded and butchered. Nearly as many are trucked to other provinces or states to be slaughtered or fattened there. The vast majority spend their five or six month existence in large, supercrowded pens on strawless, slatted concrete floors, above an open river of their own wastes. Their tails, "needle teeth" and testicles are clipped or cut off (without anaesthetic) to limit the damage they could do to each other under such stressful confinement. Their parents live in solitary confinement in tight, barren sow and boar "crates" for all or most days of their three or four years of reproductive life; then they are culled, if they haven’t died first.

"It’s horrible. Just the smell just about knocks you over, and the noise," says Eva Pip describing her visit to an Interlake mega hog barn about five years ago. "A screaming sow ," she tells me, "can generate more than a hundred decibels — a single sow. . . .When you have all those animals concentrated there in a building like that, it’s terrible." Hundreds of "organic compounds that it’s just not healthy to be breathing" fill the animals lungs and noses. Occupational health experts advise barn workers to wear protective masks (many don’t and suffer a high rate of illness for it), but the pigs just have to put up with it, 24/7.

"You can see that [the sows have] given up pretty well, that they’re just waiting to die," says Pip. "Or they’re just constantly biting the bars or making repetitive, agitated movements. It looks like something out of a horror movie."

When I ask Minister of Agriculture Rosann Wowchuk if her government intends to ban or phase out sow stalls as they have in the European Union, she replies tightly: "Not at this time." It’s up to the market, she says.

The cliché in modern farming is "get big, or get out."

On the farm his father built, Ian Smith is still in and (by today’s standards) small, raising pigs the old-fashioned way with fresh air, group housing and straw — lots of straw. His family’s been doing it that way near Argyle, Manitoba since 1969.

This winter Smith passed the inspection of the Winnipeg Humane Society and became one of five farmers in the province producing "WHS Certified" humane pork. The move attracted a few more customers to the home delivery side of Smith’s roughly 400-hog per year business.

A couple years ago, when the Humane Society rolled out its WHS Certified pork with a Pepsi Challenge-style taste test, "even the best chefs in Winnipeg could distinguish, blindfolded, the difference between the two products," Fred Tait recounts. "I had reporters telling me ‘if I could get this product that’s all I would buy.’"

Well, they can get the product (see "Where to buy kinder cuts of pork"). Like certified-organic pork, which is produced under comparably humane standards, WHS Certified pork has found its way into several Manitoba outlets. But market share is only a shadow of what it could be, in the view of Vicki Burns, Executive Director of the Humane Society, and John Youngman, Chair of the WHS’s Farm Animal Welfare Committee.

"Part of the problem," explains Burns, "is that we do not have a meat broker."

Not many stores are interested in buying meat directly from a farmer, especially if it comes in 80-pound halves, like Ian Smith’s does.

"Without the meat being readily available, I think consumers do not remember to ask for it," Burns writes in an email exchange. "And the fact that there are no industry/government programs (incentives, support, etc.) to help farmers like ours adds to the problem," writes Youngman.

Frustrated by his attempts to find a retailer, Smith says "the public has to step up to the plate and say we want this product." And so, he adds, should the government and the Manitoba Pork Council (MPC), which is funded by an 80-cent levy, or "check-off," on all the hogs he and other Manitoba producers sell.

But neither are interested.

"We do not market or promote any specific production style or choice to consumers, retailers or wholesalers," writes Ted Muir, General Manager of MPC, when I ask if MPC would help farmers like Smith grow a niche pork industry.

I ask Wowchuk the same question. "It’s a product that’s out there that’s available," she replies. "I have a poster up in my office of all the products that are available. It’s not labelled one way or the other. . . .We don’t promote a different kind of pork either or a different kind of chicken." And yet, she adds, "we work with the producers when they have an idea of what they want to market."

But not this idea, apparently.

"Several months ago," Burns informs me, "I was contacted by one of our WHS hog farmers who wanted to market his meat to provincial institutions like the U of M, hospitals, etc. I contacted Minister Wowchuk's office requesting a meeting with her and several of our farmers who wanted help to get Manitoba meat on Manitoba shelves. I am still waiting for a response to that request. In my experience, the provincial government has not been helpful at all in trying to encourage the humane labelled meat industry."

Fred Tait had warned me that any industry that might threaten the success of Manitoba’s mega hog barns "would cause the provincial government to get a little nervous, because they have underwritten the loans on these barns." And Maple Leaf Foods, whose hammer lock on the industry was secured by Gary Doer’s promise to Maple Leaf CEO Michael McCain not to reinstate the selling monopoly (single-desk selling) of the province’s hog producers, would not be pleased either. "If Michael McCain felt that his market share was being threatened by some sort of an upstart industry in humane labelling," Tait says, "I think the phones would ring again."

"Why are we promoting this type of industry in Manitoba?" asks Swan River farmer and NFU Regional Coordinator, Ken Sigurdson. "We can raise hogs in a far more environmentally friendly manner. Hooped housing [cosy, tentlike pig shelters] and dry manure systems [straw-composted manure, like Smith produces on his farm] use a fraction of the water and pose less of a threat to the environment."

Which is largely how they do it in Denmark where they still manage to vie with the United States and Canada for the title of world’s leading pork exporter.

On a recent trip there, Cathy Holtslander, organizer of Canada’s Beyond Factory Farming Coalition, visited the Northern European country’s version of a confined hog operation. There were 400 sows, but not a gestation crate or an open manure lagoon in sight. Those are illegal in Denmark. So is antibiotic-laced feed.

But there was straw, lots of straw. And organic pig farms — ten percent of the market. The one Holtslander visited produces 2000 pigs a year. Her photos of it show a pasture speckled with sows, gamboling piglets and the cosy, straw-bedded hoop shelters they call home. And three schoolchildren visiting on a field trip — picture-perfect for an honest commercial.

And when the farmer brings his pigs to the national pork marketting cooperative, he is rewarded with an "organic premium" price. In Denmark, at least, they know how to market a different kind of pork.

Where to buy kinder cuts of pork
(to find sources elsewhere, visit eatkind.net)

PLEASE NOTE: Some of these outlets aren't always in stock. Most also carry other WHS certified or organic meats, dairy and eggs. Prices can be as low as conventional pork or considerably higher. Some of the farmers will deliver.

A-1 Nutrition, Grant Park Shopping Centre

Ambrosia Organic Groceries, 684 Osborne St.

Clinton and Pamela Cavers, Pilot Mound, 825-2465

Bruce and Michaela Daum, Forrest, 727-8058

Eat It.ca

Forks Meat Market, The Forks

Frigs Natural Meats and More, 3515 Main St.

Harry’s Foods, 905 Portage Ave.

Ed and Debra Hodgins, Lenore, 838-2009

House of Nutrition, 770 Notre Dame Ave.

Scott & Jacoba Nault, Woodridge, 429-2281

Organic Bread Basket, 269-0658

Organza Foods, 664 Corydon Ave.

Sara’s Supermarket, 775 Westminster Ave.

Ian Smith, Argyle, 467-8590

Vita Health Natural Food Stores, various locations

Restaurant: Urban Ojas Restaurant and Juice Bar, 684 Osborne St.
 
 

Learn More

“This book is a rousing call to arms....I wish it were required reading for every politician and every citizen in Canada and the United States.” — Robert Kennedy, Jr.
 
 

Read more of our coverage of "The Price of Pork"

There is No Cheap Pork

Why Manitoba Must "Quit Stalling"