Before I begin my remarks I would like to tell you about who I am and the journey that has brought me here in front of you today. Except for a phone call from one of our neighbours late in November I would not be here, nor would I have read the draft regulations for the Nutrient Managemnt Act 4 times, as I have so far. That night my long term plans for myself, after a long day of cleaning out pens, and working until mid-evening at my off-farm job, was to have supper and to go to bed early. Trying to operate a farm for someone in my age group is an all encompassing experience that leaves little time for much else. For example, my day began today at 5:30 am in the barn and I will still have chores to do when I get home that is quite apart from the normal day to day routines all of us here do. However, what is happening to my family, my neighbours and my community, and to rural communities all across Ontario brings me here today full of concern and worry about the future.

All I have ever wanted to do is farm. To combine what nature gives us with my own efforts and produce high quality, healthy food. Every time I strayed from this idea something would pull me back. I pursued a post-secondary education primarily because I knew that if I wanted to farm I needed a good job to make enough money to pay for it. My wife and I saved for a long time and through the generosity of family we were able to purchase land and so we now own and operate a mixed farm near Paisley. We are what you might call a start-up operation but we have plans to grow, mostly by value adding products on the farm and by bringing customers to our home to buy those products. In this way they could have a direct connection to the food they eat and the people who produce it. It is our own small way of trying to help make farming a sustainable occupation for our 3 young children - the next generation. With support from family, both financial and otherwise, we have self-funded our farm without any direct input from the public purse. We also both work off the farm and all of that money is funneled into its growth. In short, we are everything that government and farm organizations pretend to want - a young couple with young children who are involved in their community; a family farm trying to find ways to niche market and grow. And yet, we are on the verge of being destroyed - not by poor weather, not by low prices, but instead, by the lack of a regulatory framework that protects us.

We and our farming neigbours discovered, through happenstance, that an application has been submitted to build a very large 800 by 120 foot pig factory across the road from us. We and our neighbours feel it will have a severe detrimental effect on our quality of life. I believe it likely that the manure produced at this operation will contaminate my well water and threaten the health of my children. It will even affect my children's ability to just play outside, our long term business plans for our farm, the value of our property. Yet we are virtually powerless. This is despite the fact that we live in a municipality that should have the most stringent protection of water resources. We have been told time and again by municipal officials that their hands are tied in regards to our concerns. In fact the Government is about to make the protection of water and rural communities worse. One of the tools municipalities have used to protect water and communities has been livestock numbers cap. With the proposed regulations for the Nutrient Management Act those tools will be taken away, so conceivable the sky is the limit.

In looking for allies we have found that many of the organizations that presume to speak for us have been, in fact, captured by the big operators and are actively working as apologists for these types of operations - operations that can rip the heart out of rural farm neighbourhoods. When we called our own MPP, the Honourable Helen Johns, the Minister of Agriculture, the next morning asking for help and spoke to a representative in her office, we were told, in essence, that we were whiners for being concerned about these issues. We waited for someone to say "You matter. Your rights are at least as important as those of these large commercial enterprises." I am proud to say that the Directors of the Bruce County Federation of Agriculture have stood with us and our neighbours and said that communities and people matter and that they do not support the building of the facility near us. And today Marilyn Churley and the NDP are taking a stand saying that people and the environment matter more than corporate profit taking.

These large intensive livestock operations are not farming. To suggest otherwise is to distort everything that farming is about. Two major elements of farming are good stewardship and good animal husbandry. These operations practice neither good stewardship of the land nor of the water nor of the surrounding community. Most of these operations routinely feed antibiotic-laced feed to their animals, not because they are sick, but so that they can survive the conditions in which they live. These antibiotics have been found to enter the water table and cannot be removed by common equipment like ultraviolet filters. These operations follow an industrial model of production; they should be treated as such.

The proposed facility near us will create the equivalent to the waste produced by a town of 7500 people. And yet this waste will remain untreated and efforts are not made to ensure compliance of nutrient management plans for large operations. There is nothing in the new draft regulations that will correct this, or ensure adequate protection of the environment or rural communities.

Let us be clear, it was not farming that caused the Walkerton Crisis, it was poor management of government resources, and two incompetents who admitted to drinking on the job and falsifying records. Perhaps if every small and medium sized farmer in Ontario was given the kind of money my municipality gave these two, we could all afford to do better. Small and medium sized farmers across this province should not be asked to pick up the tab for the actions of these two and those who were supposed to be overseeing them.

It is quite clear that the government's direction will have little or no impact on the types of operations that pose the greatest risks to our communities. The government must begin to examine the real impact of these operations on small and medium sized farmers, on rural communities, and most especially on our environment. We must come together not as provincial bodies and organizations but as people - and determine what is good for our long term needs, for our children's needs. The people who built my barn, built it to last generations. That was the thinking of the preceeding generations that built this province. We must not put short-term corporate gain ahead of the survival of farm families and our rural communities. Someone farming in my age group is already somewhat rare, but if we continue down this road, the combination of the unchecked growth of large intensive livestock operations and the current Nutrient Management draft regulations will mean that I, or someone like me, will be the last independent family farmer in this province and there will not be a healthy glass of water from a tap available anywhere in rural Ontario.