This important book builds on earlier work by the same author, Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (1995), which made a strong case that customary common law in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada has been an effective means of pollution control, where and when it has been allowed to work. As that earlier book showed, however, legislative law, often drawn up on the premise that it would promote economic progress or the public good, has often weakened these customary common law remedies to air and water pollution.

This new book applies the same analytical lens to the narrower issue of air and water pollution originating on farms.  read more »

"What does Environment Probe gain by this display of disunity?" demanded one farmer. His anger, voiced in a letter to the Ontario Farmer newspaper, was directed at our public rebuke of the new Ontario ALUS Alliance, a coalition pushing for a provincially funded program that would pay farmers to provide environmentally friendly "alternative land use services." His organization, a local of the National Farmers Union of Ontario, fears that a debate over the program's merits could jeopardize its public funding.  read more »

The new Ontario ALUS Alliance proposes incentives rather than regulations to encourage farmers to protect the environment. The Alliance's market friendly rhetoric obscures its reliance on tools that are antithetical to markets: taxpayer subsidies and violations of rural residents' property rights.  read more »

As researchers in the field of agri-food studies turn their attention to the institutional mechanisms that enable indus­trial agri-food systems to persist in spite of their ecological contradictions, environmental regulation is likely to become an increasingly important topic.  read more »

In her review of Greener Pastures: Decentralizing the Regulation of Agricultural Pollution, Harriet Friedmann is right to insist that not all agricultural pollution can be addressed by restoring rural residents’ rights to challenge agricultural nuisances in court. As Friedmann explains, “to hang the solution to agricultural pollution on courts responding to complaints by neighbours seems wildly inadequate.... [Neighbours] cannot be expected to take responsibility for wider problems that affect whole societies, watersheds, and bioregions.”  read more »

A seven-year mystery about the contamination of well-water in Walkerton, Ontario was solved for me in Elizabeth Brubaker’s very first paragraph. I recall good media reports when it happened in 2000 about the livestock operations that were a possible source of the bacteria which caused illness and death to citizens of the town. Yet the livestock operations faded from view as the public inquiry turned the spotlight on government inspections.  Brubaker’s treatise on agricultural pollution begins with a paradoxical finding of the Walkerton Inquiry ---- that pollution of wells came from manure which had been spread on farm fields in accordance with provincial regulations.  read more »

A new book takes aim at right-to-farm legislation, arguing that relying on the creation of common law through court decisions would result in fewer disputes and would make polluting farmers responsible to their communities.  read more »

With the passage of a new Planning Act last month, Manitoba's NDP government furthered its 33-year campaign to foist factory farms on an unwilling public, ensuring that neither individual property rights nor the desires of a local community can stop large farm operations that create nuisances or pollute the environment.  read more »

Traffic chaos again disrupted Toronto yesterday as convoys of tractors – in the second such demonstration in as many weeks – converged on Queen's Park to demand more privileges for farmers. Last week, 8,000 farmers organized by the Ontario Federation of Agriculture lined up at the legislative trough for cash. Yesterday's protesters, led by the Lanark Landowners' Association, demanded a different kind of subsidy: freedom from accountability.  read more »

Last month, 150 residents of Ashburn, Ont., filed a civil lawsuit against Greenwood Mushroom Farms, claiming the stench from the farm has created a nuisance. Thanks to a provincial law designed to promote agriculture, the judge hearing the case will have to consider not whether GMF's operations are harmful but whether they are "normal" – a standard that defies economics and undermines the property rights of all rural residents.  read more »

Last Friday, in a national "day of action" against factory farming, rural Canadians denounced the giant feedlots, mega hog barns and concentrated poultry operations that increasingly threaten their health and well-being. While demonstrators in Saskatchewan and Ontario called for provincial moratoriums on the hog industry's expansion, activists in Alberta and Manitoba cut to the heart of the matter, insisting on local control over the siting of livestock operations. Their demands point to an often-overlooked fact: In robbing Canadians of their property rights, heavy-handed provincial legislators have brought us factory farms.  read more »

"Subsidizing farmers has backfired in Canada," says Lawrence Solomon, one of the authors of a report released last week by the Urban Renaissance institute, which is a division of Toronto environmental group Energy Probe. Energy Probe is also affiliated with Environment Probe, an organization which recently sent out a fundraising letter slam­ming Ontario's farmers for polluting the environ­ment, living off the avails of subsidies, and hiding behind exemptions in environmental protection laws.  read more »

A Toronto-based envi­ronmental group has sent out fundraising letters to people who supported it and its partner organizations in the past, criticizing Ontario's farmers for "threaten(ing) both human health and the environment," for "enjoy(ing) special sta­tus under the law," and for accepting economic subsidies which "discriminat(e) against responsible small-scale farms."  read more »

When it comes to polluting, farmers shouldn't be treated any differently from industry, the Walkerton inquiry heard yesterday. Among the experts at the public hearing in Toronto was Elizabeth Brubaker of the Energy Probe Research Foundation. Farmers treated like industrialists, she said, would have to bear the cost of preventing pollution on their land. When it comes to polluting, farmers shouldn't be treated any differently from industry, the Walkerton inquiry heard yesterday.  read more »

"What farmers facing environmental restrictions have suspected about provincial urban sewages systems is true: they are massive environmental polluters of sewage and other compounds. Because it would cost so much to upgrade facilities in cities and towns, the situation often gets a blind eye."

It took just a few minutes. A manure irrigation gun, left unattended, pumping at full throttle. A faulty connection. Before anyone knew what had happened, several thousand litres of liquid hog manure were flowing down the slope towards the small trout creek.  read more »