Farm-Scape, Episode 2095

Manitoba Pork Council reports initial feed back from its sister agricultural organizations to its alternative plan for water quality management has been very positive.

Officials from Manitoba Water Stewardship and Manitoba Conservation are now examining feedback gathered during public consultations examining the draft Water Quality Management Zone Regulation for Nutrients and proposed changes to the Manitoba Livestock Manure and Mortalities Management Regulation.

Last week Manitoba Pork Council released details of Agriculture Plan 5-10, an alternate approach to encourage farmers to better manage nutrients on their land.

Pork Council general manager Andrew Dickson explains the plan calls on the province to take another look at the idea of extensive soil testing on all fields across the province to determine their nutrient status to make better use of individual environmental farm plans producers are putting together now.

"Something like 25 hundred to three thousand plans have already been completed by producers on a voluntary basis and what we're saying is we need to go down this path more and encourage more producers to get involved in this and then, over a five to ten year period, start looking at some mandatory rules about things like soil testing and so on that producers can provide information back to the province.

This will identify out some of the hot spots in the province where there might be issues regarding excessive nutrients either from manures or from artificial fertilizers.

What we're suggesting back to the province that we use these maps that they seem very keen on as more of a guide that can be used by individual producers as to how they might develop their individual environmental farm plans."

Dickson says feedback from the other farm organizations has been very positive and the hope is that the province will see this as a collaborative effort in terms of achieving common goals.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.