In the middle of Jean-Guy Hamelin's pig barn, a hairy-and frankly, scary-looking-boar squirms in his stall. He's the only male in the place, but he's not there to impregnate Hamelin's 320 sows; they're artificially inseminated. Instead, the 300-kg nameless boar is paraded every now and then past the cramped stalls where the sows spend their lives, to "stimulate" their hormonal impulses, aiding fertility.

It's not as big as they come, but the Hamelin operation, southwest of Montreal, is a factory farm in style if not scope. The days of pigs rolling freely in the mud outdoors are long gone; today's hogs are raised with assembly-line precision in big industrial-looking aluminum barns like Hamelin's. His provocative boar is the face of a transformation, at once industrial and rural, that's sending tremors across Canada-even, in fact, within the sprawling boundaries of the nation's capital. The big hog farms are promoted by both the meat-processing industry and provincial governments keen on economic growth, but they're not so effusive about specific projects. They know that everywhere a factory hog farm seeks to locate, it seems to find people who aren't persuaded that big means better.

on a breezy evening in July, friends and neighbours gathered for a party at the Lafleur family's dairy farm on Ottawa's eastern fringe. The 300 guests met to mark an increasingly rare milestone in Canadian agriculture: the 100th anniversary of a family farm. The evening's festivities offered only a temporary respite from the worries that have dogged the Lafleurs in recent months. Their farm is threatened, although not by the usual menaces-financial difficulties, urban sprawl, or kids disinclined toward agriculture. The threat is another farm.

The Lafleurs, who keep about 50 milking cows and grow corn, hay and alfalfa on 120 hectares near the village of Sarsfield, were shaken to learn a year ago that a neighbouring property had been sold to one of Canada's biggest hog producers. Les Meuneries Côté-Paquette Inc. applied to the City of Ottawa (which swallowed this area in a 2001 municipal amalgamation) to convert the 280-hectare site into a mega-hog farm with 2,800 sows. An average sow gives birth to about two dozen piglets a year, putting the likely output of the operation at about 65,000 pigs annually.

Fearing the stench, a decline in property values and potential ground-water contamination from the torrent of liquid manure generated by a big pig operation, the Lafleurs and hundreds of other residents of this mostly francophone corner of Ontario banded together to fight the proposal-under the language-leaping acronym PORC, for Protect Our Rural Communities. "We're not against pig farms. We're against big pig farms," says Marc Lafleur, 34, who is the fourth generation to work the family farm. "Our quality of life is threatened."

A year into their battle, the Lafleurs have discovered that fighting factory farms is not for the skittish. It takes determination, money and, perhaps most of all, political connections. Across Canada, the debate over mega-hog farms has pitted small, independent farmers against their industrial-sized cousins. The big farms, which are often owned by or allied with large corporations such as Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods Inc. or Côté-Paquette, have benefited from the tacit, if not outright, support of governments in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta, which are all aggressively challenging Quebec's title as Canada's top pork-producing province.

Canada raised 26.2 million pigs in 2001-70% more than it did a decade ago. Apart from the sheer economic growth, provincial governments are happy about that trend because factory pig farms, unlike many types of agriculture, don't require government subsidies to survive. And because factory-farm hogs are raised exclusively indoors, they don't depend on co-operation from Canada's unpredictable weather. Finally, foolproof agriculture.

Except for this: A farm of 3,000 pigs can produce as much waste as a town of 10,000 people. Phosphorus, along with nitrogen and ammonia, is one of the main constituents of pig manure. It spurs algae and weed growth in water, often killing fish. Untreated liquid hog manure-the solid waste is watered down to make it easier to spray on fields-also contains countless pathogens, such as the infamous E. coli bacteria. When the manure is spread, much of the nutrient content is displaced into the air.

The smell is not the worst result. Vaporized hog manure is increasingly linked to respiratory problems in humans. And when the amount of liquid manure exceeds the soil's ability to absorb it, its nutrients and pathogens seep into the ground water or run off into lakes and rivers, potentially contaminating drinking water.

No surprise, then, that factory farms have given rise to a rural variant of the NIMBY syndrome. For farmers and other rural residents, factory farms are to agriculture what Wal-Mart is to retailing. Corporate-owned or -associated factory farms are rapidly displacing small, independent farms across North America. Agriculture, the last bastion of the old economy, has become a business like any other, where a few big players rule the roost. In the United States, the hog industry is virtually synonymous with Virginia's Smithfield Foods Inc., which has swallowed many of its main competitors in recent years. In Canada, where Maple Leaf dominates the pork and poultry industries (and where Smithfield owns Maple Leaf's rival, the venerable Schneider Corp.), a similar story is unfolding. So the Lafleurs' fight is about more than preserving the fresh smell of their air or the potability of their water supply. They are fighting to preserve a way of life.

A couple of years ago, a leading U.S. agricultural magazine, Successful Farming, decided to include Canada in its annual ranking of Pork Powerhouses. The reason was simple. "While the big boys down here sit on their hands, stymied by a myriad of new laws and regulations," the magazine's editors noted, "the Canadians are dreaming big."

Pig production has exploded in Canada not because Canadians are eating more ham. Per-capita pork consumption in Canada has been flat for years. Almost half of all shipments are now sold outside Canada-as live pigs, fresh meat or processed products-thrusting this country into first place among pork-exporting countries, from third in 1997. Less than a generation ago, Canada was barely self-sufficient in pigs. By last year, the value of exports had ballooned to $2.8 billion, from only $750 million a decade ago. (Adding domestic shipments brings the total to $5.6 billion for last year. And when retail prices are considered, the Canadian pork industry pegs its total value at $11.5 billion.)

More than half of the exports go to the U.S.; Japan is the destination for about a quarter of exports. "There is no one involved in pork in Canada who is not exporting, because that is where the growth is," says Martin Rice, executive director of the Canadian Pork Council, the umbrella body for hog marketing.

Producers have expanded here just as environmental scrutiny and public disfavour stunt their competitors in the U.S. Huge operators like Smithfield have been forced to answer in court to the charges of well-funded environmental groups, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Waterkeeper Alliance foremost among them. Public pressure has forced states such as Iowa-which produces 26 million hogs a year, as many as all of Canada-to impose tougher regulations on operators. North Carolina has slapped a moratorium on new pig farms (it now has 3,600) until 2004. The federal Environmental Protection Agency this year released draft regulations for factory farms that, if implemented, are expected to cost the industry about $1 billion (U.S.) a year.

So, less-burdened Canadian pork producers can count on a lucrative export market for years to come. Industry players here see their expansion strictly as a good-news economic story. For them, Canada's growing importance in hog production stems not from relaxed environmental scrutiny, but from a simple comparative advantage: cheap grain for feed, abundant farmland to house pig barns and spread manure, and a cold climate that kills the bacteria and viruses that can attack pigs and lower yields.

One thing that is not growing in Canada's pork industry is the number of farms. A generation ago, in 1976, there were 63,602 farms raising pigs in Canada. By 1996, the number had fallen to 21,000. Last year, there were only 12,405 such farms, while their average size had climbed to 995 pigs from 523 in 1996 (and a mere 91 in 1976). Half of the pigs produced in Canada last year were raised on the approximately 950 farms that boast more than 2,600 hogs.

With the growth of the business, though, thousands of Canadian farmers have lost a measure of independence. Most now work under contract for one of the big processors, raising pigs to specifications-for example, feeding the animals only barley to yield a premium product for the Japanese market. Increasingly, processors own part of the farm and provide their partner-farmers with working capital, feed, antibiotics and other supplies and services. Maple Leaf and Quality Meat Packers Ltd. dominate in most of the country; Côté-Paquette and F. Ménard Inc. are the leaders in Quebec. Through its Elite Swine Inc. subsidiary, Maple Leaf has a direct ownership stake (typically 40%) in some 300 farms, with more than 90,000 sows, while Ménard and Côté-Paquette each have more than 30,000 sows. In Ontario, producer-processor partnerships account for more than 70% of hog production.

Maple Leaf calls the system it pioneered "vertical co-ordination"-a variation of the vertical integration model of the U.S. industry, where processors own farms outright. Contract pigs are usually fed with grain purchased from the company's Shur-Gain/Landmark arm. Maple Leaf's executive in charge of the system insists there's a big difference from the U.S. model. "Vertical integration uses a lot of capital and doesn't engage partners as partners," says Michael Detlefsen, executive vice-president of vertical co-ordination. "If [farmers] own something, they're highly motivated to make it work."

The shift to contract-based production has allowed processors to focus more on premium meats and customer-dictated products. Finding such niche markets is increasingly necessary in a fiercely competitive global industry. Pig prices, although cyclical, have been essentially flat for a quarter of a century-in real terms, a fraction of what they used to be. Yet production costs have increased substantially with the introduction of new technologies, sophisticated feed and government-imposed health standards. The result is paper-thin margins.

And intense pressure on farms everywhere to achieve economies of scale. Charlemagne Hamelin raised a family of six on a farm of fewer than 20 sows in the 1960s. Today, the farm that his sons Jean-Guy and Sylvain now run has 16 times as many sows in one barn and holds more than 2,000 hogs in adjacent buildings at any given time. In all, their "farrow-to-finish" farm produces about 7,500 pigs a year. The expansion began in 1995, when the Hamelin brothers borrowed $800,000 from Quebec's farm finance corporation to more than double the size of their operation. It was the only way, Jean-Guy Hamelin says, to remain competitive. Still, Hamelin isn't a bit nostalgic for the old days. "When my father ran the farm, he got the same price for a hog that we get today. Yet, we can [afford to] sell at the same price because we're more efficient. My father got 12, maybe 13 piglets out of a sow each year. We get two dozen," Jean-Guy, 36, points out. "People have got to stop looking at farming as anything other than a business. Farms are huge in the States and France. We've got to follow the trends in the market."

In Quebec, those trends have been set in L'Ange-Gardien. The Eastern Townships village of 1,400 is to pigs what Newcastle is to coal. Together, Côté-Paquette and F. Ménard Inc., both headquartered here, raise more than a million pigs a year. For a weekend each July, the village celebrates its pork-producing prowess at Le Festival country du porc. This year's event drew a record crowd of 8,000 people, many of whom came expressly for the greased-pig competition. Contestants had to trap a well-oiled, and inevitably unco-operative, 100-kg hog with their bare hands.

The party mood of the festival belied the prevailing anger of Bernard Paquette, one-half of Côté-Paquette and founder of the festival. In June, the Quebec government extended a moratorium on new or expanding hog farms until at least 2004 in most of the province. The land south of the St. Lawrence River between Montreal and Quebec City is saturated with hog manure. It simply cannot absorb any more of the stuff; the hog waste has contaminated surface and ground waters with dangerous levels of phosphorus. Thousands of citizens protested at the National Assembly this spring. Even the farm lobby, widely considered one of the most effective interest groups in any jurisdiction, has not been able to overcome the tide of public opinion regarding pigs. "It's not funny," complains Paquette. "We've become criminals [in the public eye] just because we want to make a living."

This is why Côté-Paquette became Marc Lafleur's prospective new neighbour.

Normally, Lafleur feels a sense of solidarity with fellow farmers. He spent a good part of this past summer organizing a drive to send hay from Eastern Ontario farms to feed drought-stricken western cattle. But the news of Côté-Paquette's intentions made him boil. "The manager of the caisse populaire in Sarsfield told us the value of our properties would fall 25% to 50% if Côté-Paquette got approval," Lafleur says. Rural residents who have seen factory farms set up near them in Ontario and Alberta have won property-tax cuts of between 10% and 50% in the past few years by complaining to provincial assessment boards that the value of their land and quality of life have been adversely affected.

The Lafleurs' 50-odd Holsteins, individually named-Natasha, Carla-roam freely as they graze from dawn to dusk in the family's field. The pigs raised in a modern factory farm never see the light of day. Most big hog producers categorically refuse visitors, citing "bio-security" concerns.

Jean-Guy Hamelin makes a rare exception for me-but only after I take a shower on-site and don the coveralls and manure-laden gum rubbers that he provides. Inside the barn, dozens of sows, weighing up to 200 kg each, fill individual metal stalls, so narrow the animals are only able to lie or stand. Feed falls through a tube in each stall; cloudy water flows past in a trough just shy of each hog's snout.

It's hot and humid outside, more stifling still inside the barn-even though it's equipped with a modern ventilation system. The pigs look lethargic. Every now and then, one sits up to defecate. The waste is meant to fall through metal slats in the floor, from where it is flushed to an outdoor holding lagoon. But that only happens when the stalls are hosed down. In the meantime, the acrid stench of feces and urine overpowers every other smell in the barn.

In an adjacent room in the barn, the atmosphere is almost festive. The squeals of dozens of piglets, only days old, fill the air. The pink babies are as playful as puppies. Each litter is separated from a sow by metal bars, which allow the piglets to nurse but prevent the mother from rolling over and crushing her babies. Within days of their birth, the piglets are castrated and their tails are cut short. Both procedures occur without anesthesia. By their 18th day, the piglets are usually weaned and transferred to another barn to grow. Shortly afterward, their mother is impregnated again, and the cycle resumes.

Hamelin's sows look like inmates of a dungeon and appear about as happy. Not so, he objects: "The well-being of [our] animals is reflected in their productivity. Would you be better off if you were left outside, unprotected from the elements, or inside, warm and dry?" In groups, pigs become aggressive, Hamelin explains; the weakest among them would be bullied into starvation.

Still, animal welfare concerns prompted the European Union to impose a ban on sow stalls by 2013. No such ban is being considered in North America.

Compared to a 3,000-pig farm, the smell from Lafleur's dairy cows is barely noticeable. It's not only a question of volume. Far from being sprayed in the air, cow manure is mixed with hay, which absorbs its smell and nutrients while composting.

Lafleur has the luxury of farming on a modest scale. Dairy farms in Canada remain shielded from global competition by a production quota system administered by the provinces. The number of quotas is limited, and the price of milk regulated, effectively preventing new competitors from entering the market. The system also puts a premium price on the milk quota. If the Lafleurs were to sell their quota today, it would fetch well over $1 million.

No Canadian pig farmer enjoys quota protection. Hence the emphasis on size, and, for Lafleur, the bane of his prospective neighbour. Lafleur's biggest concern isn't smell, but his family's drinking water. The Côté-Paquette site is home to 11 unused wells that Lafleur believes are inadequately capped, meaning that liquid hog manure could penetrate the water table.

Last fall, Lafleur and other leaders of PORC took to lobbying city council to reject the Côté-Paquette application. Luckily, they had an ally in their local councillor, Phil McNeely, a spunky retired engineer. "Anywhere these large operations have been, the odours are terrible. And I've seen how they police water quality in this province," McNeely says, recalling the Walkerton tragedy of 2000. Within days of hearing of the Côté-Paquette application, McNeely persuaded council to slap a one-year moratorium on factory farms in his ward. The delay was meant to give the city time to devise a policy on a phenomenon it had never before confronted. In the absence of provincial regulations, dozens of Ontario municipalities have lately passed bylaws that, among other things, limit the size of pig farms, prohibit their location near residential communities, and require big farms to submit a "nutrient management plan" on how they will deal with manure. And McNeely aimed to follow suit.

the nutrient management plan for Jean-Guy Hamelin's farm dictates that 206 hectares of cropland are needed to accommodate the manure generated by his pigs. Hamelin's property has only about 120 hectares; he has had to find neighbouring farmers willing to take the excess manure. On this day, the spray trucks, known as "honey tankers," are working flat out to spread the waste on the Hamelin acreage (which he rents out, being fully engaged with pigs) and the neighbours'. The trucks return periodically to one of Hamelin's cement, open-air lagoons to refill.

The stench is even more overwhelming than inside the barns. But the farmers who use the manure are spared the cost of chemical fertilizers for most of the season.

Canada's pig industry insists it is investing millions of dollars annually to develop environmentally sustainable ways to deal with the manure problem-from breeding genetically modified pigs that produce cleaner waste to concentrating manure for disposal. "We've tried to be very forward-looking and innovative on environmental issues," says Maple Leaf's Detlefsen, whose company is sponsoring a bio-diesel pilot project with the Montreal Urban Community Transit Commission that converts hog waste into fuel. "We believe in responsible and sustainable development. We engage in best practices. We monitor all the farms that are part of our system. We tend to meet or exceed provincial standards."

Still, manure-minimizing technologies are a couple of years away from market, and those provincial standards, where they exist, form a crazy quilt of obligations, regulations and voluntary guidelines. Where provincial governments do intervene to regulate factory farms, it is not clear the environment comes out the winner (see map, page 68). In Alberta, the Klein government stripped municipalities of their power to regulate factory pig farms after several jurisdictions bowed to pressure from citizen groups to stop new projects. Under legislation that took effect in January, Klein instead handed factory-farm regulation to the province's newly created Natural Resources Conservation Board.

The government said the move was made to ensure equal standards apply across the province; critics say it was to stop municipalities from banning the farms that Klein sees as good for the provincial economy. "You can make the law sound good, but I tell you, this is the way the [hog] industry operates," Robert Kennedy Jr. of the Waterkeeper Alliance told an Alberta audience in March. "This is the first thing they do when they go into a new area. They make sure local people cannot object.This is one-stop shopping for polluters."

Ontario followed in June with passage of its own Nutrient Management Act. Regulations won't be unveiled until this fall at the earliest. But provincial norms, as in Alberta, will supercede any municipal regulations, leading critics to charge that Ontario has torn a page out of Klein's playbook. During the race to succeed Mike Harris as Tory leader and premier, Ernie Eves said some municipalities were "offside" in passing bylaws regarding nutrient management that "may go beyond what we want to do."

For Lafleur, McNeely and their allies, Ontario's move upended their attempts to have Ottawa City Council pass its own law. In mid-July, city staff withdrew a draft bylaw that would have forced the Quebec company to scale down its operation. Instead, staff proposed a nutrient management "strategy" that would allow the Côté-Paquette proposal to proceed unchanged. "The pork producers' lobby has won the day with city staff," McNeely sighed. "Suddenly, staff has decided a hog farm is good for Sarsfield."

But McNeely wasn't finished. Within days, he found a way to hamstring both city agricultural staff and the provincial government. In late July, city council endorsed McNeely's idea that Ottawa's medical officer of health, Dr. Robert Cushman, should look into the potential impact of factory farms before the Côté-Paquette operation is allowed to proceed. "We're concerned about the location of intensive livestock operations within the city and so close to residential communities," says Cushman. "This is very different from a small dairy farm. This is an industrial operation." Cushman has until early next year to make recommendations to council. McNeely and Lafleur, of course, hope Cushman's report calls for a buffer zone between factory farms and residences. That would give council a way to defy the province's stand that it is the sole authority on factory farms. "After all," McNeely opines, "the provincial government can't tell the medical officer of health what to do."

But Lafleur isn't waiting idly for Cushman to report. Through its $10 membership fee, PORC has amassed a kitty to mount a legal challenge to force the city to intervene. "My family and I are ready to go to court if we have to," Lafleur insists. "This could be the challenge of our second century."

HOG HOT SPOTS

1. Taiwan Sugar Corp.'s plan for a 130,000-pigs-per-year farm in the County of Forty Mile was rejected after residents protested. The company is appealing.

2. Maple Leaf Foods subsidiary Elite Swine has proposed a 3,000-sow barn and four 2,500-pig nursery barns near Lomond. The municipality said no; the province's new Natural Resources Conservation Board overruled it. Residents want a review.

3. Naturalists are objecting to a 4,000-pig farm proposed near Beaverhill Lake, one of Alberta's best-known waterfowl areas.

4. Maple Leaf Foods spent $150 million in 1999 to build Canada's largest pork slaughterhouse in Brandon. The company intends to double capacity to 90,000hogs a week by adding a second shift.

5. Dunnville residents are trying to stop a 3,000-sow farm proposed by Elite Swine. The site is two kilometres from Lake Erie and one kilometre from a provincial park.

6. In March, Judge E.R. Browne revoked a permit granted by the township of Huron-Kinloss for a chicken and hog factory farm, deeming it too close to a residential area. The township has appealed.

7. Neighbours are worried about a proposed 9,000-pig weaner farm in Blandford-Blenheim township. The farm is owned by recent Dutch immigrants, some of whose countrymen have relocated in Ontario after being paid by their government to give up pig farming to protect the environment.

8. Côté-Paquette Inc. wants to build a 2,800-sow farm on Ottawa's eastern fringe. Residents have formed PORC (Protect Our Rural Communities) to fight the plan.

9. In June, Quebec Environment Minister André Boisclair slapped a moratoriumon pig farms in most of the province until 2004. The ban will only be lifted once farmers have invested in new technology to dispose of manure more safely, which will take at least two more years to develop. The government has pledged $257 million over three years to help with the transition.

10. Neighbours are protesting a three-year-old, 10,000-pig farm nearSte-Marie-de-Kent, owned by Metz Farms Ltd. The protesters have staged sit-ins in several government offices, prompting the province to subsidize a $1.5-million plan to develop a new aeration system for the farm.