Ag Engineer Suggests Concerns Over Phosphorus are Exaggerated
Farmscape for June 7, 2002 (Episode 981) A Manitoba based agricultural engineer says environmental concerns related the agricultural discharge of phosphorus are among the most exaggerated by some opponents of the swine industry. Dennis Hodgkinson, with DGH Engineering, has called for the creation of some sort of agency to make people in the scientific and journalistic world more accountable for the information they are producing. He says the swine industry has been ineffective at counteracting some of the misleading messages, an example being information on phosphorus that may not be precisely erroneous but is deliberately misleading. Clip-Dennis Hodgkinson-DGH Engineering Recently in the province of Alberta some seemingly reputable scientists have been going out with messages that the livestock industry in Alberta is presenting an enormous risk for the overloading of phosphorus in the environment. If you stand back for one moment and do a few simple calculations you can see that, even limited just to agricultural sources, the proportion of total phosphorus inputs that occur into the agricultural ecosystem on an annual basis by the pig industry are somewhere less than three percent. We have allowed people to go out and greatly influence public opinion and our industry has not stood up. Hodgkinson says there is case after case where people with the appropriate background and seemingly appropriate credentials are deliberately misleading people about the risks and dangers of continued growth and expansion of Western Canada's livestock sector. He says a more aggressive and a more proactive approach is needed to discredit the half truths, incomplete information and in some cases absolute falsehoods. For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane. *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council