Your Vancouver Sun
Slaughterhouses irked over enhanced feed ban
Recycling system -- enforced to stop the spread of BSE -- was in limbo last week as many waited for federal money and new rules
Margaret Munro, CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, July 09, 2007
Cattle carcasses hang from giant hooks on the ceiling at B.C.'s largest slaughterhouse. Rivulets of blood and bone dust trail off into drains on the concrete kill-room floor.
The animals' lungs sit in a bucket waiting for a local farmer to fetch them for his hungry mink. Other animal parts -- the brains, spines and organs that can harbour the infectious prions that cause mad cow disease --disappear down special chutes. They fall into bins that will be taken by waste-hauling trucks along the Trans-Canada Highway to Calgary and turned into everything from chicken feed to dog chow.
But this elaborate and controversial recycling system becomes illegal in Canada this week as part of the federal government's sweeping "enhanced" feed ban.
On Thursday, cattle tissues linked to the spread of mad cow disease must be removed from carcasses and destroyed or permanently contained. They are no longer allowed in pet or animal feed, and are banned from fertilizers and bone meal widely used on farms and home gardens.
The change sounds straightforward, but insiders say it is anything but.
"It's a bureaucratic nightmare," says Dave Fernie, who runs a small slaughterhouse in the B.C. interior.
Fernie and many others were still in limbo last week, waiting to find out if the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) would allow them to drop their high-risk tissues in landfills or if they have to ship it to a special processing plant in Alberta.
And the $80 million the Harper government promised to help ease the transition a year ago has yet to reach many people on the front lines whose bills are soaring as they scramble to meet the new rules.
"It's enormously frustrating," says Dennis Laycraft, executive vice-president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, which is asking the federal government for another $50 million to offset the "extraordinary" costs piling up because of government funding delays and continuing confusion about the rules.
These so-called "specified risk materials," or SRM, include the skull, brain, eyes, tonsils, spinal cord and the nerves attached to the spinal cord and brain. They must be removed from slaughtered cattle 30 months or older. The distal ileum, a less than one-metre chunk of the small intestine, must be cut out of cattle of all ages.
Under the new rules, SRM must be removed using special equipment and precautions, hauled away in dedicated trucks, processed and then buried in landfills, burned in high-temperatures incinerators, or dumped into composters and bioenergy plants. Permits from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are required every step of the way.
The ban and its paper trail will stretch from the farm gate to slaughterhouses, rendering plants and landfills -- which require not just special permits, but often costly renovations.
The 70-year-old company Johnston Packers, for instance, tucked on a mountainside near Chilliwack needs a major overhaul: special filters on drains in the kill room to catch any bits over four millimetres in size, separate waste shoots, costly new saws and equipment for removing SRM, and an air-conditioned room dedicated to SRM storage.
Bonnie Windsor, assistant manager of the slaughterhouse, says the $1-million renovation project was derailed by delays in government funding; she and her colleagues have cobbled together an interim solution that entails erecting steel partitions in the kill room and segregating SRM so the plant can continue to operate when the new rules take effect. But there was no government financing available to help offset that cost -- which she estimates at close to $200,000 -- as the rules say funding for SRM renovations must be approved before the work is undertaken.
"We've been left to burn," says Windsor.
At his meat plant in Big Lake, Fernie's voice shakes in frustration as he describes his dealings with CFIA over the ban. "It's been a fiasco," he says.
Fernie asked the CFIA more that a year ago whether he would be able to dump SRM into a dedicated pit at the nearby Big Lake landfill east of Williams Lake with the other waste from his slaughter operation. He was still waiting for an answer last week.
The federal government announced the feed ban a year ago, along with the promise of $80 million to help implement the new rules.
But the money didn't materialize until this spring, when federal Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl started divvying up the funding among the provinces after they agreed to kick in extra funding. The last of the federal-provincial deals to establish "a safe and effective disposal system" -- a $3.8 million agreement with Prince Edward Island -- was announced on June 29.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007