Saskatchewan's growth industry: Intensive livestock

When George Flotre ran a small farm, he knew every one of his cows. Now he only really knows Rita.

When George Flotre ran a small farm, he knew every one of his cows.

Now he only really knows Rita.

Rita was born on a cold, ugly morning. It was April 16, 2013, the same day singer Rita MacNeil died. As a newborn calf, Rita couldn’t drink from her aging mother’s udders, so Flotre had to feed her from a pail.

“She kind of grew up thinking she owned the yard,” Flotre said.

Rita has personality. Every other cow and calf wears a number on its ear. Rita wears her name.

There are a lot of numbers. Flotre now raises about 1,300 calves. These days, he says, it’s impossible to make a living on much less.

“When I started this, I never thought I wanted 1,000 head.”

Flotre feels like the economics of the cattle industry are pushing him down a road he doesn’t want to travel. He likes animals. He believes each one is unique. He likes trying to understand them.

But a feedlot is no place to get to know an animal. It’s business. And Saskatchewan is looking to cash in.

The province has a goal of pushing livestock cash receipts — the money brought in from selling livestock — to $3 billion per year by 2030, up from $2.3 billion in 2018.

Agriculture Minister David Marit said intensive livestock operations (ILOs), like Flotre’s feedlot, will be a major part of getting there.

With that in mind, the government’s Saskatchewan Growth Plan, released last year, promises to introduce “a more responsible and predictable approval process for intensive livestock operations.”

Nothing is set in stone. Marit is waiting for recommendations and says he’s keeping an open mind, but he believes regulation can be a major obstacle to growing the sector.

“I think it’s even something that we, as a government, have to look at,” he said.

There are 946 operating ILOs in Saskatchewan. ILOs are defined by density. If an operation has less than 370 square metres for every animal unit, it’s an ILO.

The ministry doesn’t approve animals. It approves standardized quantities of nitrogen. A cow releases roughly the same amount of nitrogen as three sows, six feeder pigs or 200 broiler chickens. They all amount to one animal unit.

Together, those 946 ILOs are approved for 670,541 animal units.

That includes 386,988 beef cattle units on 413 farms, 43,207 dairy cattle units on 159 farms, 189,155 hog units on 224 farms and 48,385 poultry animal units on 150 farms.

Broken down into individual beings, that’s about 970,000 hogs and several million chickens.

Henry Van Ee’s three barns house about 60,000 of those chickens. He has a rule of thumb for how much space to afford each bird: Five-eighths of a square foot.

At two weeks old, the birds move like a sea. Waves of white and pink flow through the barn, exposing patches of brown dirt in their wake.

But once the chickens reach their slaughter weight — after about 35 days — they’ll fill out the barn. Van Ee said it’ll be tough to see the dirt.

Flotre’s rule is less formal.

“I like to think that everything can lay down at the same time,” he said. “As long as everybody can find a dry spot to lay I think we’re good to go.”

With those concentrations, it’s easy to rack up the animal units. The largest feedlot has 24,000.

The biggest hog operation, west of the Quill Lakes, is approved for 3,758.2. It’s one of three huge farrow-to-finish operations raising pigs from birth to slaughter weight in the Rural Municipality of Leroy.

Cody Block lives a little over 13 kilometres from one of them. If the wind is blowing the right way, he’s close enough to smell it. But Block doesn’t mind.

That smell means jobs and a thriving rural community.

“Our RM, especially the Town of Leroy here, really relies on the hog barns for employment,” said Block, who is also an RM councillor.

“It keeps the community going and the schools full.”

The cattle on George Flotre’s feedlot eat up to 25,000 bushels of grain each year.

He feeds them corn, barley and roughage. All of it comes from his neighbours.

“I spend a lot of money in the community.”

One neighbour, a small farmer more than a kilometre across the field, doesn’t even bother marketing his grain anymore. Flotre is that good of a customer.

“I got a really good deal with him. I buy all the barley he can grow,” said Flotre.

Flotre isn’t hesitant to use low-grade crops that would have to take a heavy discount at the grain elevator.

In the ministry’s view, that’s one of the boons of ILOs for local communities.

“You only have to look at what growing conditions happened in the fall of 2019,” said Grant Zalinko, executive director of the ministry’s livestock branch. “We got weather-damaged feed grain production.

“Having local markets available for those types of grains is a major, major benefit in the province.”

That’s just one side of the metabolic equation. Every year, Flotre’s calves turn those 25,000 bushels into 5.5-million kilograms of manure.

The Agriculture Ministry’s approval process is centred on managing that manure. Flotre and Van Ee had to submit plans detailing how they’d protect water quality from contamination.

It isn’t complicated. Van Ee’s chickens eat about 60 tonnes of feed per barn every 35-day cycle. Once they’re on the trucks heading off to slaughter, they leave about 60 tonnes of manure to scrape off the barn floor.

Van Ee is happy to have it. He uses that manure to fertilize the wheat crop he grows to help feed the next cycle of chickens.

On Flotre’s feedlot, runoff from the pens drains off toward two holding ponds. Every spring, when thaw comes, he pays for corral cleaners to come and clean the manure out of the pens.

Flotre has 1,069 acres available to spread it over, far more than the 443 acres the ministry says he needs.

The ministry conducts audits and inspections to make sure producers follow the rules. Violations are infrequent. Ministry records show 65 “instances of non-compliance” over the past two years.

Most are minor, according to the ministry. It could be an eroded holding pond berm, scavengers getting at animal carcasses or an operation expanding beyond its approved number of units.

Only one violation was serious enough to warrant a minister’s order to force a producer to move a manure stockpile stored too close to a watercourse and submit a plan to prevent overflowing.

It’s hard to find someone to criticize the way the ministry deals with manure.

Greg Van Luven, a rancher who also serves as a director of the Qu’Appelle Valley Environmental Association, has a lot of worries about the impact of agriculture runoff on water quality.

But ILOs aren’t really one of them. He thinks the ministry’s approval process is adequate to protect the province’s water, even if the industry doubles in size.

“Nutrient runoff from livestock is probably the least of our worries,” he said.

“I would say that it is a valid concern. But it’s easily mitigated,” he added.

“You can do it right, and it’s pretty easy to figure out.”

Marit said the ministry is always examining its own regulations and needs to “look in the mirror” as it explores how to expand the industry. But he insists it won’t come at the expense of safe water.

“We have to look in the mirror and say, ‘OK, what is the approval process from our side?’ ” he said.

“But I also do not want to fast track anything and not go through the right process from the environmental side.”

For Mark Ferguson, manure sets the upper limit for how the provincial pork industry can grow.

It’s a high ceiling.

According to Ferguson, general manager of SaskPork, only about two per cent of acres in Saskatchewan currently receive manure from livestock.

“The sky’s the limit basically,” he said.

But manure isn’t only a problem to be surmounted. It’s part of the solution. He thinks many farmers on the remaining 98 per cent of land would be happy to have some.

“Manure is a very valuable resource for the people that are around hog barns. It’s a really big benefit and one of the main reasons they like having them there,” he said. “Really you don’t want to waste any of it. Every pound of nitrogen in there is important.”

In Ferguson’s view, the speed bump slowing down Saskatchewan’s pork industry is not manure. It’s municipalities.

Starting or expanding an ILO is a two-stage process. The ministry approves manure and mortality plans, but municipalities have the last word on whether and where ILOs can operate on their territory.

ILOs are generally a discretionary use in rural municipalities. That means council makes the final decision on each project, often after considering public concerns about land values, traffic and smell.

Council also sets separation distances, which can vary widely from one RM to the next.

“It’s all over the map,” said Ferguson.

He warned that the inconsistency can lead to lengthy delays and unpredictability that scare investors away from a project.

“It can take years to manage one of these applications from start to finish the way the process is now,” he said. “You know, markets can change during those years.

“You kind of need to strike while the iron is hot on some of these investments. A delay, when you’re talking years in some of these cases, isn’t helpful in growing the industry, that’s for sure.”

Ferguson sits on a committee, along with representatives from the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM), government and other industry groups, that’s trying to find a way to simplify the process.

His proposal is simple: standardization.

He looks across the border to Alberta, where a single province-wide body handles all approvals — covering everything from environmental protection to land use. He likes what he sees.

“It’s all one process,” he said. “We think that’s a really good way to go.”

SARM president Ray Orb does not.

“That’s a bone of contention,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you.”

He fears the Alberta model would disempower municipalities.

Orb agrees there are challenges for the industry in rural municipalities that have to be resolved. As more people move onto acreages, there’s more residents with reason to push back against ILOs.

“Some of the communities where these ILOs wanted to go, people just turned them away and said they didn’t want them,” Orb said.

“We really believe that if we don’t do this now, within the next two or three years Saskatchewan won’t attract any ILOs.”

But he thinks rural municipalities can streamline approvals themselves — without relinquishing their powers.

“The discretionary use is a sensitive issue and our members are not willing to give that up,” he said.

Even in the hog barn capital of Leroy, Block doesn’t want to give it up. Neither does Van Luven, who serves as a councillor in the RM of Lipton.

He notes that municipalities bear many of the costs of intensive livestock, including for road use.

“Your RM takes a bigger hit,” he said, “because there’s more trucks on the road, there’s more dust, there’s more road compaction. There’s more problems.”

Marit said he’s open to considering any recommendation that comes out of the committee. He won’t give any sense of where the province wants to go. But he notes that the Alberta approach has led to “some concerns at the local level.”

So far, Agriculture Ministry officials are stressing the need for more education to promote consistency among municipalities, rather than plotting a wholesale takeover of municipal authority.

“Everything is sort of being talked about,” said Zalinko, from the ministry. “We’re nowhere in terms of bringing forth any complete overhaul of the review and decision-making process in the province.”

As for Flotre, he doesn’t see the problem.

“The RM was good to deal with; the ministry was awesome,” he said. “The process was just so simple. It was just that easy.”

He said he wouldn’t change a thing.

Flotre believes his calves are happy.

“I most certainly do,” he states, without a moment’s hesitation.

“They’re content. That’s what you want, is a content calf laying down in the straw chewing his cud.”

In the pen closest the pasture — the least cramped of the six — two calves butt heads in what looks like play. Flotre said it’s not unusual. His calves lead active lives, he insists, even when they’re squeezed more tightly.

“You should see when I bed,” he said. “It’s like a rodeo tryout. They just get so excited with fresh straw and fresh bedding. They have a lot of fun.”

Van Ee feels the same way about his chickens.

“These guys are having a fairly good life, I think,” he said. “If you treat ‘em right, then they survive, they eat, they grow and they get to market.”

But Van Luven isn’t so sure. He prefers grass to feedlots, and finds feedlots far better than poultry and hog barns.

“You slide over to the hog side, and I think that’s almost disgusting. Same with the chickens,” he said.

“They never see the light of day. They never breathe clean air. They’re crowded. I’ve raised pigs here before, and they’re quite a sentient being. They like being out, eh? And they never see the light of day.”

Van Luven lets out a sound halfway between a sigh and a gasp when he hears the words “gestation crates.”

About 60 per cent of breeding sows in Saskatchewan are kept in individual enclosures — known as gestation crates or gestation stalls — while pregnant.

“The animal basically has room to lie down and stand. In a typical gestation stall they don’t turn around. So that’s the set up,” Ferguson explained.

“They’re usually plenty wide for the animal but not wide enough to turn around in.”

When Van Luven raised pigs years ago, he tried to put his sows in gestation crates. The response, he said, was “aggressive.”

“It was terrible. I had a bad experience with that. A pig’s not supposed to stay in a crate. It’s not right,” he said.

“They just lost their minds.”

Ferguson said animal science used to suggest that the stalls were the best ways to prevent aggressive sows from hurting each other.

That’s changing now. According to Ferguson, about 40 per cent of the province’s sows are now housed in group pens of 10 to 200 sows fitted with tracking technology to monitor their behaviour.

By 2024, all sows will live in group housing or stalls with sufficient space to turn around, according to Betty Althouse, Saskatchewan’s chief veterinary officer.

That requirement is set by a national code of practice. There’s one for every species of livestock. Saskatchewan’s animal welfare legislation essentially defers to the codes, which are created through a process that involves scientists, industry, retailers, veterinarians and humane societies.

In Althouse’s view, the codes are sufficient to protect animal welfare. She believes most farmers follow them, in order to comply with industry inspections that are conducted at least annually.

Althouse doesn’t have data on the results of those inspections. But she does have information on animal welfare complaints made to Animal Protection Services of Saskatchewan (APSS).

APSS responded to complaints about 130 cattle in 2019, but Althouse couldn’t say how many of those might relate to intensive livestock operations.

There were also 11 hog responses and nine fowl responses.

Violations usually prompt only education measures, but can result in corrective action orders that hold up in court. Althouse said animal seizures are rare, but do happen.

In Althouse’s view, there’s no sign that animal welfare gets worse the larger a farm becomes. Quite the opposite, she says.

“A lot of the intensive livestock operations, because they have more animals, there’s often professional staff, they have staff training procedures, written protocols for animal treatment,” she said.

But Flotre disagrees. He thinks he does a better job than a Nebraska feedlot operator with hundreds of thousands of animals. “It’s just not the same,” he said.

“I know exactly what’s going on in this place every day. I have my hands on. I do everything.”

Althouse understands that. But she isn’t sure an emotional connection is always a good thing. She worries, for instance, that it might make producers more hesitant to euthanize animals that need to be put down.

Van Ee sees hundreds of thousands of chickens a year. Perhaps half a million. He doesn’t know much about their personalities, if they have them.

He doesn’t hesitate to weed out those that aren’t shaping up — by snapping their necks.

Asked whether a chicken is a commodity or a sentient being, Van Ee doesn’t choose.

“When we started here a chicken was a way of life for us,” he said.

“We’ve raised five kids here and they’ve all enjoyed living on the farm.

“Growing chickens is a lifestyle.”

awhite-crummey@postmedia.com