The 11 one-day-old piglets suck hungrily, their pink skin almost transparent, as the sow grunts rhythmically.
The porkers will be weaned at three weeks and grow to 125 kilos, heftier than a heavyweight boxer, by the time their short lives end at five months.
"It's very fast," producer Jean-Paul Roulin says of the journey from birth to butcher block.
He raises 2,500 pigs and 250 breeding sows on his 80-hectare farm in St. Urbain-Premier, 40 kilometres southwest of Montreal.
Three times a day, premixed feed falls from a chute. Pigs promptly convert it to meat.
"It takes 2.5 kilos of food to produce one kilo of pork," explains Roulin, 50. "Chicken takes even less. Beef takes much more."
In the controlled environment of Roulin's hog barn, every detail is precisely worked out, from the minimum number of teats on a sow (16) to the size of the sows' 24-inch by 90-inch pens.
But despite his meticulous calculations, Roulin's numbers are not adding up to a profit.
This year, Quebec's 1,800 pig producers expect to lose $47 for each of the 7.5 million hogs they sell.
Criticized for polluting waterways, spewing odours and raising animals in factory-like conditions, beleaguered hog farms are also hemorrhaging money.
Last year, farm-income insurance doled out $361 million to hog producers and payments are expected to top $500 million this year.
A global pork glut has depressed prices, while the cost of feed and fuel has soared.
"If you're the nervous type," notes Roulin, "it's keeping you up at night."
Jean-Guy Vincent, president of the federation of Quebec pork producers, likens the problems facing his members to a perfect storm.
In the past two years, swine viruses decimated herds. The strong Canadian dollar made exports less competitive. And cheap U.S. pork has undercut Quebec producers.
But critics say the crisis is a symptom of a deeper malaise, one that spotlights the failings of industrial-style agriculture.
"Hog farms are symbolic in many ways," says Guy Debailleul, a professor of agricultural economy at Université Laval.
Inspired by assembly-line industries, modern hog operations are producing meat faster and more efficiently than ever before. But some say the cost to the environment, rural communities and animal welfare is too high.
Once barnyard animals that rolled in the muck and feasted on leftovers, pigs have become indoor creatures, raised in antiseptic barns where they never see direct sunlight.
Visitors to Roulin's hog barn must shower and don fresh clothes before entering.
Pigs are intelligent creatures that like to rootle - dig up earth and roots with their snouts, says Susan Heller, an artist who lives on a farm in St. Bernard de Lacolle, where she raises five pigs.
"I think it's cruel for an animal that's so bright never to go outside," adds Heller, who sells the pigs for slaughter even though she's a vegetarian.
"You can't organize agriculture like an assembly line in the automobile industry," says Debailleul.
For example, raising animals in close proximity increases the risk of illnesses like porcine circovirus, which ravaged Quebec herds in 2006-07.
This week, a Montreal supermarket displayed a package of four pork chops for $3.85 - a bargain by any measure.
But the price at the checkout only tells part of the story, says Debailleul.
"You're benefiting from a cheap price at the grocery store, but as a taxpayer, you're compensating the pork producer," he says.
"More and more, it's up to the state to subsidize the industry."
In the U.S., concentration in the pork industry has led to hog operations with as many as 2,000 sows and 15,000 pigs - almost 10 times the size of the average Quebec hog farm.
"Pig farms are a caricature of everything that's wrong with agriculture," says Denise Proulx, co-author of a book on pig farms, Porcheries! La porciculture intempestive au Québec (Pig Farms! The Untimely Pig Industry in Quebec, published in French by Écosociété, 2007).
"We've made the error of looking at agriculture only from an economic angle," she says.
"We've forgotten that agriculture is also about our relationship with nature. There is a direct connection with public health and with protecting ecosystems," says Proulx.
In the 1960s and '70s, Proulx and co-author Lucie Sauvé recount in the book, agricultural experts preached the benefits of specialization.
Federal and provincial incentives encouraged farmers to modernize. Cattle disappeared from pastures to be fattened in feedlots. Specialized hog operations replaced subsistence farms.
In the 1980s and '90s, as free trade agreements opened the door to farm exports, Quebec pork producers set out to conquer foreign markets.
Pig production grew from 2 million to 4 million from 1974 to 1981, and stabilized at 7.5 million in 2003.
Quebec producers will raise 7.5 million pigs in 2008 - matching the human population. Quebec exports about 45 per cent of its pork; the U.S. and Japan lead the list of 70 countries that buy it.
Quebec's pigs generate $840 million in farm income and $2.4 billion in sales of meat, cold cuts and other products.
The producers pay $8.74 per hog for farm-income insurance and the provincial and federal governments contribute the same amount. However, in bad years, like 2006, 2007 and 2008, the government share is greater.
This year, the federal government announced a buyout program to reduce herds across Canada by 10 per cent. Some of the pork slaughtered under the program will supply Quebec food banks.
While the outlook for this year is grim, pork producers are banking on a growing appetite for meat in newly industrialized countries. "International demand is growing," Roulin says hopefully.
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Johanne Dion has been lobbying for protection of the Richelieu River since 1985.
"It was the main treasure of my childhood," said the retired receptionist in Richelieu, a village of 5,500, 35 kilometres south of Montreal.
"I swam in that river when I was little and I was hoping to do it again before I died."
In the 1980s, towns and industries along the Richelieu were dumping untreated industrial and human waste.
By 2000, Dion's campaign to clean up the waterway had largely succeeded.
Then, pig farms started moving in.
In 2005, Quebec lifted a three-year moratorium on new hog operations.
"We found out in the fall of 2005 that a pig farm was planned," recalls Dion.
"The whole population was in a hullabaloo."
Stormy public consultations made national newscasts and local voters elected a new mayor who vowed to fight the hog barn. But the farm opened anyway last year.
"The people of Richelieu are very bitter because democracy did not work," says Dion.
"Everything is stacked up against us."
Despite a provincial law calling for public consultation on new pig farms, opponents say local residents have little power to prevent them.
For farmer Roulin, much of the opposition to hog barns is irrational.
"A lot of outsiders came in to stir up fear. It's always the fear of destroying the environment."
On Roulin's farm, pig stalls have a slatted metal floor where excrement falls through the gaps.
Waste is flushed out and piped outside to a huge cement lagoon, like an above-ground pool the size of two Olympic-size basins. A brown crust floats on the surface.
Twice a year, the liquid is sprayed on nearby fields.
Roulin, who has planted fruit trees around his lagoon, points out the cement enclosure ensures liquid manure does not leak into groundwater.
Under provincial law, farmers must monitor soil content before spreading manure, which is high in phosphorus and nitrogen. But Debailleul notes that runoff from farmers' fields can leach into waterways, especially when it rains or if the ground is frozen.
"The issue of pollution of waterways by hog production is far from solved in Quebec," says Debailleul. "In some areas, waterways are continuing to become degraded."
Liquid manure is also a significant source of methane emissions.
Pig farms contribute to blue-green algae, says Daniel Green, a scientific advisor to the Sierra Club of Canada.
Microscopic organisms created a green bloom on many of Quebec's lakes and rivers last summer. The problem is caused by high levels of phosphorus in the water. Quebec has launched a 10-year, $200-million action plan to combat the plague.
Researchers at the University of Guelph have come up with a novel solution for phosphorus pollution from pigs. They created a genetically engineered a pig, the Enviropig, whose manure contains 50- to 75-per-cent less phosphorus than a regular pig.
But Ann Clark, an associate professor of agriculture also at the University of Guelph, charged the Enviropig focuses attention on the symptom rather than the real problem.
"The problem is not the animals," says Clark. "It is the concentration of animals which transforms manure from a valued resource to a major waste problem."
North Carolina, which has the largest hog farms in the U.S., recently passed a law banning new hog lagoons, although existing ones are grandfathered. New and expanded farms will be required to install equipment to treat manure and recycle it as compost.
"We have developed innovative technologies that eliminate ammonia, odour, pathogens, discharge to streams and heavy metal soil contamination," says Joe Rudek, a senior scientist with the North Carolina office of Environmental Defence, a non-profit organization that worked with producers and legislators on the reform.
Not unlike the process at a municipal water treatment plant, the technology separates liquid from solid waste and composts solids.
Environmentalists have raised concerns about contamination of soil and water by antibiotics and heavy metals from hog waste.
Livestock accounts for half of antibiotic use in the U.S., according to a 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Low doses of antibiotics have been found to promote growth in livestock.
However, Quebec producers say non-therapeutic use of antibiotics and growth hormones is banned here.
The FAO report, Livestock's Long Shadow, said farm animals are the world's leading source of water pollutants. Animal wastes, antibiotics, hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and pesticides used for feed crops lead the list of contaminants.
The report said farm animals are also responsible for 18 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and almost two-thirds of ammonia - a cause of acid rain - from human activity.
Feed crops use one-third of the world's arable land. Livestock also accounts for more than eight per cent of the world's water use - mainly to irrigate feed crops.
When you drive along Highway 20 east of Montreal, you might not connect the vast fields of corn and soybeans with pigs.
But those crops are grown to feed livestock, points out Clark.
"The livestock industry is the tail that wags the dog of agriculture."
Overproduction of industrial corn has driven up meat production and consumption, Clark notes.
"It was a direct result of the great excess of grain that we have."
Spiraling energy and grain prices are eroding the assumptions on which intensive meat production is based, says Clark.
"It worked fine as long as energy was cheap, but the energy is not cheap any more," she says.
"When grain costs $7 a bushel instead of $2.50, your cost as a pig producer goes through the roof."
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On the Rheintal farm in Ste. Monique de Nicolet, 150 kilometres northeast of Montreal, a big sow lowers herself up to her ears in a mud bath. Grunting with pleasure, she luxuriates, then emerges covered in black muck except for two pink circles around the eyes.
"Here, they do what comes naturally," says farmer Guylaine Buecheli as the sow saunters off to snack on alfalfa growing under the wide blue sky.
Buecheli and husband Sebastien Angers recently took over the 84-hectare organic farm started in 1984 by Buecheli's father, Hans, a pioneer in Quebec's organic-farming movement. They raise beef cattle and pigs.
"People acted like he was from outer space," says Buecheli, 29, said of her father, who immigrated to Quebec from Switzerland, where he also practised organic farming. But interest in organic meat and produce is growing, she adds.
The couple raise 40 sows and 300 pigs and plan to increase production. They also have 60 head of beef cattle. They sell the meat to individuals and health-food stores.
Angers, 28, whose father runs a maple sugar bush, studied organic farming at Laval University.
"It just clicked with me," he says. "It reflects my values: health, the animals' welfare, the environment - just common sense, really."
The pigs on the Rheintal farm (the name means valley of the Rhine) nest in straw. Their manure is composted and used on fields where the couple cultivate organic corn, oats, wheat and flax to feed their livestock.
Angers views manure as a valuable resource.
"You're nourishing the soil. If we got rid of the manure, it would be like exporting the farm's organic matter."
Free-range pigs grow more slowly than penned pigs and reach slaughter weight between six and eight months.
"We don't cut the piglets' tails. We don't cut their teeth," says Angers, as sows flake out in the straw on a hot summer day. Some conventional hog producers do so to prevent crowded animals from hurting each other.
As Angers chats, veterinarian François Cardinal drops by to check up on the herd.
The farm is unlike any other in his practice, says Cardinal, whose client list includes 150 hog operations across Quebec.
"There is less density. The fact that the animals are loose, for sure, it improves their well-being," he says.
Many hog farmers would switch to more humane methods if they could afford it, Cardinal adds.
"Most of them are barely managing to meet their costs. It's really a question of economics."
Those economics could change if the government revised farm-support programs, argues Denis Boutin, an agricultural economist with the province's Department of Sustainable Development, the Environment and Parks.
Farm-income insurance, which ties payments to production, encourages higher output and even overproduction, Boutin wrote in a 2004 report.
"Support that varies directly with production volumes is considered amongst the most environmentally harmful, since it couples maximum support to maximum output," he noted. This means large, industrial farms benefit most.
In 2003, a committee that held public hearings on Quebec's pig farms reached a similar conclusion. It proposed that farm-income insurance be phased out and replaced by a new scheme not tied to output or to a specific agricultural product. Instead, all farmers would be guaranteed a certain level of revenue, regardless of volume, type or cost of production.
Laval's Debailleul envisions a future where pork producers could develop niches like organic meat and gourmet products.
He draws inspiration from Wisconsin, a dairy state where small producers have developed hundreds of specialty cheeses and ice cream.
In recent years, the state offered incentives to farmers to transfer cattle from feedlots to pastures. "It's a tourist state, so it's important to see cows in the fields."
Pork producers, take note.
"I think in the future we should envisage producing less (pork), and not only for environmental reasons," adds Debailleul. "We should bank on quality, not quantity."
mascot@thegazette.canwest.com
