Land use Regulations in Alberta

[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!

[Deb]

Just out of curiosity, what would be wrong with having more farmers on the land and each one with a "self-sustaining slightly more than hobby farm" with a little extra to sell at the local market? No exporting food, but so what. We'd all eat and eat healthier and our communities would become more healthy as well.

[Deb]

having more families on the land is just what most of us would like to see Deb.......

The unfortunate thing about all of this is that with the increases that we have seen in our generation alone, we can't afford to send our kids to college, or buy a decent vehicle, or buy a modest piece of equipment farming the same size of farm, or raising the same number of animals that our fathers did. The margins that we get now for livestock and grains just don't cover a lot of the bills that are made just to put the crop in. The bankers and lawyers in their foresighted nearsightedness says that we have to produce more, on less margin to keep up with the JONES/Other countries in this annoying new world we call the Global Village.

As a result the number of acres, or the number of hogs or the number of cattle that a single farmer has to look after just keeps increasing. We don't have the luxery of a raise increase (or paid vacations) like some of the the new generation Anti-farm groups do that are preaching how we should be farming. Unfortunately, like I mentioned earlier, when these groups come to some communities to fight the nasty corporate barns and ILO factories, they are also alienating many of the farmers that are still trying to farm on a smaller scale. Rules being imposed in some RM's are making it necessary for even the family with 40 sows, or 50 cows, etc to make some expensive upgrades to their farms.

One of the latest Stats Canada reports says that on many farms, the off farm income is contributing most of the income that is keeping the farm running. Why not let us keep another couple of hundred hogs, or add another couple of pens to our feed lot? These outside groups are just making it harder for many of us to do what we are trying to do.

I'm not frustrtated by any of these groups on a personal basis by the way, but with the media attention that they are getting, it won't be long before their vision of the agriculture scene could make Canada a net importer of food

[dalek]

Deb it's one of those cutesy-pie acronyms somebody spent a week dreaming up but I can't think of it right now so maybe it didn't work as well as they hoped.
As for your other question, I guess it depends on what your definition of self-sustaining is. A lot of the people in these groups that I see seem to think self-sustaining for a farmer is something that will give that farm family roughly the same lifestyle as their grandparents or great-grandparents had, yet few of them would accept that same lifestyle now for their own families.
Life changes. Most of these people in this area think I should be farming the same size farm as my grandfather when he was my age, but you can't turn back the clock on technology. When he was my age, he was milking 15-

20 cows by hand, shipping to the cheese factory half a mile a way, pumping all the water for them by hand. The farm was still 20 years away from hydro and 15 years from their first tractor, they hadn't heard of even a square baler yet, and all the manure was taken out in a wheelbarrow to a horse-drawn spreader and spread as close to the barn as possible year round.
If I was to work the same ground and animals today that he did, even with some minimal technology (round baler, front-end loader, pipeline) it would take me about an hour and a half a day. Why should I expect to make a full-time living working much less than part-time?
The group here is now advocating farming on the scale of the late 40s or early 50s, yet Dr. Surgeoner from the University of Guelph did a study in the early 90s comparing 1951 practices to 1991 practices and found that in 1951 it took anywhere from 2 to about 3.5 times as much feed to produce a kg of meat (higher for chicken, lowest for beef), more than twice as much manure was produced for each kg of meat produced, and that if the Ontario hog industry of today used the same practices as in 1951 it would take nearly twice as much farmland to produce the same amount of food, roughly 9 times the area of the city of Greater Toronto extra for pork alone. The land just isn't there.