Farmscape for August 23, 2010   (Episode 3397)

The Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium says each of the 6.6 million inhabitants of the lake Winnipeg water shed have a role to play in improving water quality in the lake.

Pork producers have drawn attention to the fact that, despite a moratorium on the construction of new or expanded hog barns in much of Manitoba, water quality in Lake Winnipeg continues to decline.

Water quality monitoring has shown there is a lot of natural annual variation depending on weather but the concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus have increased over the past eight years.

Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium managing director Dr. Al Kristofferson suggests the solution lies in the hands of the 6.6 million people that live in the Lake Winnipeg water shed.

Clip-Dr. Al Kristofferson-Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium:
Number one, certainly the majority of people in the watershed have to know there's a problem, in the first place and secondly they have to understand the nature of the problem and then they have to look at themselves and say I'm doing something that's contributing to this nutrient input, I'm going to have to do something differently.

On the various web sites of the Lake Winnipeg Stewardship Board, our web site, the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium web site are a list of things that people can do to help turn the situation around.

There's hope.

We know that this is a reversible issue.

It's a global issue, it's not just here in Lake Winnipeg, it's all around the world as a matter of fact and if we're willing to change our lifestyle to the extent that we need to and work as a groups we can turn this around and we have to.

There's just to much at stake for everybody.

The other thing too is that people living in the water shed some distance from Lake Winnipeg, there's an immediate benefit to them as well because if they start improving the way they're doing business they're going to improve the water quality in their backyard as well.

Dr. Kristofferson acknowledges we haven't started to slow the speeding train yet and that's what we have to work on.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council