There are a lot of livestock barns cropping up all over Canada, especially in my area of the Great Lakes.  Manure from these barns are making their way into the water systems, not to mention the SMELL!  Here are some little known facts that everyone should know:

1.  Each unit in a pig barn is a small stall that can hold up to 5 pigs.

2. If it is a Sow Barn. each sow could have up to 4 littters per year of up to 18 piglets per litter.

3. Piglets are not counted in this unit count until a certain weight but they have sewage too.

4.  Pigs have 3 X's the sewage of people

5.  A 500 Unit Sow barn could have up to over 80,000 pigs per year.  That's enough sewage for a good size city, on just a very few acres of land, (10 acres) compared to the 4500 acres a small city would take up.

6.  Manure pits are just holes dug in the ground, not all...some farmers have pits built.

Where does all this manure go...in our waterways!!!!

7.  When manure is spread on the fields, it averages out to 85 45-gallon drums per acre.

8.  If a farmer gets caught dumping manure into the waterways, notice I said "IF", and he gets convicted, any fine he may get from this is Tax Deductible as a business expense.  So in other words, the farmer is getting paid to dump s**t!

9.  The Ministry of Environment doesn't always respond to calls, so getting one to come out is almost nil.

To find out more about livestock barns, check out the search engines by typing in "intensive hog barns"  There you will find out a lot about the damages that could be done to our health, water and land.

Farmers in Ontario are even threatening to spread in the dark of  night to avoid getting caught!  When the MOE employees are not working.

More people need to get involved and stop this nonsense! 

Quebec has put a Moritorium on pig barns, the rest of Canada needs to as well.