Land use Regulations in Alberta

[danm]

I am in Manitoba & the province is reviewing the land use regulations & wanting to set provincial standards for Intensive Livestock Operations etc. What the operations want is to take final say away from our municipal councils & leaving us no teeth in it for the locals that live there. I guess what I am afraid of is taking away some more democratic rights & giving the province more power. Has anyone ever had to deal with a beuraucrat telling you water does run up hill?
The reason I am asking how Alb. is doing is because I have had the Alb. example given saying that they have provincial law so why can't MB.
Do you feel that provincial stadard took away more say from locals or did it give more? What is the system now,how does it work want to bring back the old?

[Deb]

I'm no expert, but this is what I recall. The Alberta Natural Resources Conservation Board has taken over the siting of ILOs. The local governments can object but the NRCB doesn't have to listen. If the Code of Practice for ILOs is followed (which lots of us think is lacking) the NRCB sees no reason to deny them. Cumulative effects of many ILOs near each other and near hamlets or non-ILO farms is not considered. Odour, road wear, crap on the road, the spread of fusarium and all other effects are not considered. Feedlots and hog lagoons are engineered to contain runoff but odour and dust is a HUGE problem.

The NRCB is supposed to monitor and enforce but the first year they have been swamped by complaints by residents and are hiring more inspectors.

If you do go the same route, make sure the new employees of the NRCB-like outfit are NEW employees, since the present employees here were hired from the Alberta agriculture department that was so gung-ho on ILOs and so they are now in an even more powerful position to push ILOs through. They should be impartial people.

Alberta has an Energy and Utility Board which oversees the granting of licences to oil and gas wells. They rubber stamp 99.9% of oil and gas wells no matter who lives nearby. They stifle dissent and manipulate the press to downplay horror stories from families who become seriously ill or have cattle mutating, etc. The NRCB is chaired by the former chair of the EUB so we didn't hold out much hope for fair deals for residents of the county here.

It is too bad the local government now have their hands tied. Good luck. I could find out more info for you if you like.

[Deb]

I just learned on my e-mail that the NRCB is using Draft Amendments to the Standards and Administration Regulations under the Agriculture Operations Practices Act as a legal document on which to base approvals. It lets the Approval Officer approve an expansion of manure storage even if it doesn't conform to the requirements of the regulations. Also the Approval officer can approve applications previously denied.

This is scary when the law is bumped in favour of a draft document. No public input of course. Alberta Agriculture doesn't like that sort of thing here in Alberta.

For more info (and probably clearer info) please contact the Society for Environmental Responsible Livestock Operations. Call Sue Pearson at 403- 347-3299. I think they are at Red Deer.

[dalek]

This is the same road we're going down in Ontario, and with the variety of municipal bylaws we have across the province, it's pretty clear that we need overriding provincial regulations if agriculture is to have any future here. Farmers are just too badly outnumbered and municipal councillors too easily intimidated by cottagers and other non-farmers who think farms should all be the way they were 50 years ago (don't believe me? The next county over is now being pressured by a large group (with funding from PETA, Sierra Club etc.) who think any farms over 75 animal units should be banned. 75 animal units works out to about a 38-40 cow dairy farm). There are also a number of these people running in this fall's municipal elections on anti-agriculture platforms, including promises to ban tile drainage and liquid manure.
I'm a 28 year old dairy farmer in a municipality with roughly 20 full-time farms,1800 town residents and about 500 cottagers who live 340 days a year in Toronto. Province-wide legislation will make it expensive for me to farm, but without province-wide legislation to override the municipalities I would have no future at all.

[countryguy]

Dalek,I bet if you explained to these people what would happen to the price of milk if they got their way they would change their minds.City slickers tend to be pretty persistent about things until it hits them in the pocket book.

The Ontario city slickers already screwed up the rest of rural Canada now it looks like they what to finish off rural Ontario.What are they going to cry about next?

[countryguy]

Some sort of "common rules" would be nice, but who's rules do you adopt? Most of us certainly wouldn't want a Taiwan Sugar in our backyard, but at the same time the fear mongering that the likes of PETA, HogWatch, Sierra Club etc are preaching where will our milk and cookies, ham and eggs come from in the future?
At one HogWatch meeting I attended ( incognito), they were bringing in people from all over NA just to stir the pot in an otherwise very pleasant to your neighbor type town, and I am afraid they were painting every hog (and cattle) operation with the same "IT Stinks" "IT Pollutes", ITS Cruel paintbrush. I think they have been able to drive enough RMs and Counties to the point of having the members throw the ILO problems back to the provinces and to let them fight the fight. With the "SH*T and abuse that some of the councilors have gone though, some of the good ones have just given up the fight to attract ILO's knowing full well that any legislation that might come in as a result will just prevent the young farmers that are left to farm from expanding into a viable size livestock opertion.

Enough ranting from this person............... but which do we go with, the devil we know, or the devil we don't?

[Deb]

Come to Feedlot Alley in southern Alberta and see if local residents are just making up stories about dust, odour, asthma, etc. Come on a calm evening at the end of a hot summer day.

[danm]

Thanks to all who replied & it sounds like there are still issues not settled. I guess it scares me to think that a non farm person can tell what is best for me.They don't have to live it,breathe it or drink it.This should make for better decisions but most of the time not democratic.
Keep up the discussion & I will keep you posted how MB makes out.

[dalek]

Most of the people organizing these groups actually think it would somehow help them out in other ways to get rid of larger farms. They actually seem to think that unless you're a hobby farm or an organic farm, Canadian farmers are just about the most hopelessly inefficient people in the world and they think they'd be better off turning farms into their own private playgrounds and buying food from somewhere else. Never mind that the largest 20% of farms in Ontario produce 78% of the production.
Most of the people doing the complaining here live 50 or more miles out of the area, yet municipal councils give their opinions the same weight as people who've lived in the municipality for 50 years.
Sometime this summer, there will be a "convention" in the Ottawa area where the organizers are bringing in anti-agriculture organizers from around the world to spread their message.

[jensend]

Would one of these anti-agriculture organizers be Lyle Van Clief? Possibly Clay Serby except that nobody has ever hear of him.

[Deb]

wrong wrong wrong. The people organizing these citizen groups for responsible livestock management are farmers themselves, or live in hamlets, villages and towns. they are people who are tired of the stink and dust. They are tired of paying for the road repair because of the huge trucks that go back and forth 24 hours a day. They are worried about their well water and river water quality. They want to see small family farms survive because they are more adaptable than large 24,000 head feedlots and more money stays in local communities.
These people have better things to do than fight for their quality of life which large industrial animal feeding operations are destroying. They are fighting for fairness for ordinary rural residents. Unfortunately, big money has more control over what the government does.

[dalek]

Not around here. Here they're all early retirees from Toronto who want something to do with their days now that they don't have a job to do and rather than trying to do something constructive, they're trying to turn the countryside into what they always imagined it looked like but it never really did, except they also want it to smell like the middle of a provincial park 50 miles from a farm. They've all been told by Greenpeace and PETA that the large farms are a problem that must be stopped, and never mind that the large farms here aren't all that large. And since we don't have the very large farms for them to go after, they go after the largest one's they can find. And if you happen to be a neighbour to one of these so-called "large" farms (usually anything large enough to support more than one family member around here) and support your neighbour, they'll be sure to come after you too just for disagreeing with them. Because you're just a hillbilly and they know better because they're from the city, so of course you need them to protect you from yourself.
Don't have them yet? You will.
We've got one group here that started out opposing a 1200 sow operation that was there 20 years before any of them moved to the area. They take turns making complaints to any gov't agency they can think of, so that the farmers are dealing with inspections 2 or 3 times a week. THe inspectors know what's going on but they have to respond to the complaints.
When they spread manure, these people jump on the road in front of the spreader trucks from behind the bushes with video cameras hoping the truck will go into the ditch swerving to avoid them and they'll get a spill on tape.
When a small farmer next door supported his neighbouring farm, this group started calling the police and environment ministry every time he went out to spray a crop, claiming he was dumping toxic waste on his property. An SUV full of armed officers in body armour makes an impression, but it hasn't shut him up yet. When he goes down the road with his cultivator, they follow him with their cameras taking pictures if the cultivator wings happen to break off any branches, then use that to accuse him of "destroying habitat"

[dalek]

This same group is now spawning other groups across this part of the province, sharing their "know-how" of agriculture and their tactics. Strange how people will move to an agricultural area then be outraged when they discover agriculture actually happens there.

[Deb]

What is the name of the group? I will keep an eye on them.

[ValueChainFX]

As always the rural community must stand up for itself. Go figure! Leave anything in the governments hands and they "must" follow the will of the people .... Most of these groups have been put together with your money! Yes, funded by your government.

Keep in mind that some of those in the industry make there own challenges. Hmmm thinking of Debs comments on feedlot alley! OH MY and true as well. As an industry don't you think we should be making those wrongs right? No matter who has the regulation control we need to build our future and look after it if there are people not playing fair!
I am not sure we trust the government with our future, but we need to be as organized as those groups or we will all be hobby farmers.

It is not always easy to do whats right, but it is always right!