Farmers and municipalities agonize over the shape of nutrient management regulations to come

by DON STONEMAN & SUSAN MANN

He and his wife Betty raise a crop of 35,000 broilers every eight weeks and cash crop 350 acres. Bill is the mayor of Zorra Township, which encompasses the town of Thamesford, between Woodstock and London. He also represents the Rural Ontario Municipalities Association (ROMA) on the Ontario Farm Environmental Coalition that then lobbies the province on nutrient management issues.

Betty is chair of the environmental committee of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA). She makes it clear that her views are not "totally in the same vein" as those of ROMA. "We have some interesting kitchen table discussions," says Bill with a laugh.

The Semeniuk kitchen table isn't the only place where this "interesting" discussion will be aired in the next few months. The province, farm groups and rural municipalities may well be pitted against each other as the second and third stages of new regulations for nutrient management law are brought into place.

Helen Johns, the newly-minted agriculture and food minister, has set out the ambitious goal of enacting all regulations to do with this act by the spring of 2003, in time for the next barn-building and manure-spreading season. There will be several rounds of consultations with stakeholders before then.

In late August, the province made public the first stage of proposed regulations for its Nutrient Management Act, passed in the legislature June 27. Regardless of how these regulations play out, it is clear that provincial nutrient management legislation will supersede municipal bylaws, wherever the words appear to be similar, and not all municipalities are happy about that.

Bill Semeniuk got a preview of the three stages of regulations before the minister announced the first round of consultations in August. He describes the first stage as giving farmers "a heads up." The draft regulations set out classes of farmers, define which farms must develop nutrient management plans (NMPs) immediately and detail the requirements that farmers must follow to develop those plans. Consultations for the second stage start about Oct. 1, and will have a lot more to do with municipalities' responsibilities, says Semeniuk. "That's where the rubber's going to hit the road."

John Fitzgibbon, chair of the Ontario Farm Environmental Coalition, uses exactly the same metaphor when describing the stage two process that begins this fall. Municipalities are divided into two camps, he says. Some townships, towns and cities are happy to have the province take care of nutrient management. The planning and squabbling over decisions has been a drain on resources and a source of intense conflict that has split the rural community. With the province taking over ultimate responsibility, a township becomes "more of a mediator than a decision-maker," Fitzgibbon says.

Animals per nutrient for livestock operations*	Number of animals per NU
Dairy Cow, large-frame, milking or dry, 1,200-1,400 pounds	0.6
Dairy Cow, medium-frame, milking or dry, 1,000 to 1,200 pounds	0.7
Dairy Cow, small-frame, milking or dry, 800 to 1,000 pounds	0.85
Dairy replacements, large-frame, 1,000 to 1,150 pounds	3
Dairy replacements, medium-frame,850 to 1,000 pounds	3.5
Dairy replacements, small-frame, 700 to 750 pounds	4.5
Beef cows, includes unweaned calf and replacements	1
Beef shortkeepers, 900 to 1,300 pounds	2
Beef backgrounders, 575-900 pounds	3
Beef feeders, 575-900 pounds	3
SEW sows (includes weaners to 15 pounds)	3.33
SEW weaners, 15 to 60 pounds	20
Sow farrow-wean, lactating sows, including weaners to 60 pounds	2.5
Finishing pigs, 60-230 pounds	6
Horses, mature to 1,000 pounds	1
Laying hens (after 2.9 pound pullet stage until end of laying period	150
Layer pullets (day-old pullets place, raised to 2.9 pounds)	500
Chicken broiler floor growing space	267 Sq feet
Turkey broiler/hen/tom/growing space (regardless of finishing weight)	267 Sq feet
Chicken broiler breeder growers (day old male and females place)	300
Chicken broiler breeder layers (hens and roosters)	100
Sheep for meat, breeding ewes including lambs replacements, rams	8
Sheep for milk, number of milking aged ewes, includes lambs replacements, rams	8
Goats, dairy, number of milking-aged goats, includes kids, replacements and bucks	8
Veal, milk or grain-fed calves	6
*Animal based on highest design capacity of barn(s) at one time Source: Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food

In the other camp are municipalities that badly want to be responsible for nutrient management laws. There are roughly 100 interim control bylaws in place in municipalities across rural Ontario, Fitzgibbon says. The councils passing some of those bylaws want stiffer rules than they will likely see in the provincial regulations. Fitzgibbon says "some (municipalities) are already looking at using the planning act to have some control over this."

Semeniuk agrees that municipalities are split. "Some municipalities fear that the regulations will soften the position they have in place now," particularly regarding requirements for hydro geological studies before a building permit is issued.

However, Semeniuk sidesteps questions regarding Fitzgibbon's statement about municipalities using the Planning Act to continue to control barn size. That act, along with the Building Code, is already part of the nutrient management development process, he says. And he says that costs are going to be an issue for municipalities. "Until we actually see the regulations, I don't know whether there will be appeals."

Science-based approach

In the third stage of consultations, a flash point will be animal access to streams. Where animals graze in low densities, a requirement to fence cattle out of streams could make life difficult for livestock producers, Fitzgibbon says. He believes that cash croppers face a similar challenge with stream buffers, put in place to keep nutrients from being washed into ditches. In the clay soil croplands, there are many municipal drainage ditches, Fitzgibbon notes. If the draft regulations are accepted "a lot of land won't be farmed the same way it is now," he predicts. "It becomes an appropriation of the productive value of the land. The question is; will there be some compensation? We want to see family farms and the small family corporation continue."

Betty Semeniuk, in her position as chair of the OFA's environment committee, reiterates this position. "We stand behind a science-based approach to nutrient management. It has to be realistic enough not to put farmers out of business."

Not all farmers want to expand, she says. "Some want to function at the level they are at and don't want to be impeded every time they turn around."

The same day that the new nutrient management regulations were announced, Fitzgibbon was attending a meeting out of the province with the federal government on the agricultural policy framework. "Ontario will get its share" of the money, he said. The federal government is putting funds into a new Environmental Farm Plan. That will help farmers a lot, he says. He hopes the province will put its matching money into nutrient management as well.

Bill Semeniuk was at the press briefing in Toronto in August when the first stage of regulations and the consultations pertaining to them were announced. "We asked if there was funding coming forward. Johns said that it would be premature to talk about funding now because, if people though there was money coming, they would hold off on building until March when the final stage is finished."

Costs are a concern for municipalities as well. Semeniuk sat on the nutrient management committee for Oxford County. A couple of years ago, the county commissioned a study to determine its costs if all farms were required to have an NMP. "It was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for a municipality the size of Oxford. We will probably have to reanalyze that as the regulations come forward. We have to determine if the assumptions we made are still true."

Semeniuk says many compromises were made in the regulations and neither farmers, municipalities nor environmentalists appear to have won a complete victory. Planners and building officials must be trained to use the new nutrient unit calculations. Renewing permits won't be free either. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food (OMAF) will certify the farms, while the Ministry of Energy and Environment (MOEE) will enforce them.

Threat to the family farm

The agriculture community wasn't in favor of grouping farms into categories but the municipalities were, and they got their way. Semeniuk recalls Agriculture Minister Helen Johns concluding that 'if we go away with everybody not being happy, maybe we've achieved what we wanted."

Fitzgibbon is critical of some of the lobbying done by the environmental groups, in particular the Sierra Club, which wanted the environment ministry to put very strict restrictions on barn construction. "The Sierra Club doesn't have to pay for things. They don't seem to appreciate that one has to be careful what one wishes for in this. They don't like large farms. On the other hand, if we make this so costly that they (large farms) are the only people who can stay in business, we will see a whole lot of family farms disappear."

Fitzgibbon note that there has been much debate about size and whether it matters. "Our data says that the larger operations manage better because they are in a better position to employ the appropriate technologies. He thinks that the farms that are most likely to create pollution "are those where the farmer is part-time and hasn't got the cash to invest in all those management procedures that the big barns have."

Don Mills of Nairn is no fan of big barns. He helped write a position paper on nutrient management for the Sierra Club Chapter of Eastern Canada. Imposing one regulation across Ontario is not going to satisfy many opponents of livestock barns, says Mills. He thinks there should definitely be caps on the size of barns, and points out that the size of pig barns, in particular, continues to escalate. (He is also concerned about Alberta-sized beef feedlots coming to Ontario)

"The question I have always put to people is whether there is a size of a barn that would be inappropriate for Ontario? And almost everyone says, "Yeah, of course there is." So my next question is what that size is, and the answer is, "Oh, gosh, we don't know. We've taken a position that municipalities should be able to cap single-site density. That is not a restriction on ownership. It just restricts the amount of manure in one spot."

Mills is spearheading the National Farmers Union (NFU) effort to get accreditation as a farm lobby group. The NFU supports a cap on farm size, while other farm organizations have no such policy. Membership in the organization is between 300 and 350 and growing, he asserts. "People are pretty excited," he says. "We take a stance on farm size."

Swift resolution not in sight

Mayor John Van Bakel isn't as concerned as Mills thinks he should be. "We've said all along that if there was something in the new regulations that would address local concerns, then we would be willing to rescind the (township) bylaw or dovetail it into the new (provincial) law."

When interviewed, Van Bakel hadn't looked at the new provincial regulations yet. He said provincial officials had assured him that, if the new regulations are silent on an issue, then a municipality's bylaw will stand until the issue was addressed. Van Bakel is concerned about limits on ownership of land, and also distance from the livestock to the fields where manure will be applied. "The only disappointing thing to me is the paperwork that's going to be involved in it all. It will put quite a responsibility on the farmer," said Van Bakel, who runs a small beef herd.

Van Bakel asserts that it is more important to address concerns properly than to rush regulations through quickly. He suspects that a swift resolution to nutrient management issues is not in sight.

Van Bakel says he has fenced his cattle out of a stream on his property for years. But the Ontario Cattlemen's Association has been lobbying to get requirements for fencing streams removed. That will cause considerable debate, Van Bakel says. "If every regulation is going to get that kind of scrutiny, then it will be a while before we see the finished product."

Just weeks before the new nutrient management law regulations were made public, the municipality of Chatham-Kent approved a new nutrient management bylaw of its own. This did not impress Dan Dalgleish of Wheatley, who is president of the Kent Federation of Agriculture. The problem with municipal bylaws, he says, is that decisions made locally are left wide open to political pressure.

He says the farm lobby was ignored when it made presentations to the Chatham-Kent Council because the urban majority now rules in the county. If farm views are going to be ignored, then he sees no point in wasting time sitting on the agricultural advisory committees that are supposed to help municipal counties deal with nutrient management issues.

Recently Kent and Essex federations commissioned an economic impact study for agriculture in their counties. The study showed that agriculture generated $4.1 billion in revenue in the two counties and, while the southwest is renowned for its cash crops, it also found that more than 28 per cent of farm income in the area came from hog production.

"We'll see how it goes when the province gets Bill 81 (Nutrient Management Act) fine-tuned and in place," he said. "We are in the 'not-in-my-back-yard' age," he says. "When it comes to pork production, people want bacon but they don't want any of the adverse parts of it."

"The pork industry is the one that is really under the microscope," adds Bill Semeniuk. "If there is a minor variance (required for a building permit) and hogs are involved, it's not hard to fill a room up with concerned residents, especially if it s large operation. No matter how you try to paint the picture, some people have their minds made up before they even walk in the door. But hopefully we are turning the corner and going down a path that we can all live with."

Betty Semeniuk is a little less optimistic and thinks that the consultation process could still be a rough ride for all involved. "I think there is still a lot yet to come," she says. "We can't breathe a sigh of relief that it's over because it's not." BF

How the act calculates the manure-producing potential of livestock

A nutrient unit is defined as "the number of animals housed or pastured at one time on a farm unit that generates enough manure to fertilize the same area of crop land base (without exceeding limits) of either nitrogen or phosphorus," as determined by OMAF's Nutrient Management (NMAN) software. For a cash cropper with no livestock who accepts manure from a "generator," it is the weight or volume of manure or other biosolids used annually to fertilize the same amount of land, also limited by either nitrogen or phosphorus as determined by the NMAN program.

A "farm unit" is a farm for which a nutrient management plan has been developed. If the farm is generating manure, the "unit" is no smaller than a single land title deed. If the unit is receiving manure (as in a cash crop operation with no livestock), the unit is no smaller than a single field.

Farm units generating manure are divided into categories based on the highest design capacity of the barn. There are four categories -- less than 30 nutrient units, 30-150 nutrient units, 150-300 units and more than 300 nutrient units. The first category could hold manure from one of the following groups: less than 18 milking Holstein cows, 30 beef cows, 100 segregated early weaning (SEW) sows, or 600 SEW weaners.

John Fitzgibbon, the Ontario Farm Environmental Coalition's chair, says that for the most part the first stage draft nutrient management regulations are "on the money." But he thinks there may be some duplication. The province is talking about farmers having a nutrient management strategy and then having a plan, he says. He thinks the plan makes the strategy redundant. "Putting more paperwork in front of a farmer is like a red flag to a bull."

He thinks pig farmers will be happy with the way that nutrient units are calculated. It was often thought that pigs didn't produce as much manure as calculated with livestock and animal units. Dairy farmers will be less happy because it appears that their animals (which are generally larger than when livestock unit calculations were developed 30 years ago) are being attributed as producing more nutrients than before.

On the other hand, Fitzgibbon says, by far most dairy farms "are still under the 300 (nutrient unit) level" and so will fit into category three rather than four. Questions as to whether nutrients account for just milk cows, or for herd followers as well, need to be clarified. BF