AGRICULTURE & THE ENVIRONMENT

Today's K-W Record (pg. A3) has an article by Shannon Montgomery titled "Fish anomalies raise red flags". These fish anomalies are primarily to do with unusual gender distributions, namely as high as 90% of the fish are female. At the same time the researchers have concerns that specific chemicals entering rivers are capable of not just feminizing fish but may have human health effects including cancer. For me the most surprising revelation was that these gender "disturbances in fish populations were greater downstream from cities than upstream and were most notable around several major cattle feedlots". Clearly as a student of industrial contaminated sites it isn't the downstream of cities effects which surprised me, it's the downstream of cattle feedlots.

The O'Connor Report after the Walkerton tragedy emphasized a multi barrier approach to water safety. In other words putting all our eggs into one basket, such as final treatment only, is very risky. Far better is final treatment AND source protection of the water. This specifically means in the Walkerton case, removal of cattle feedlots and bathrooms located right beside drinking wells, rivers used for drinking water etc.. The Walkerton case dealt primarily with E-coli courtesy of cattle. Here in Waterloo Region we had an outbreak of Cryptosporidium which is also courtesy of cattle. In the early 90's, hundreds were made ill and a few people died.
Therefore what has surprised me here is the linkage now of cattle with chemicals which apparently are hormone mimickers affecting gender distributions. I don't know if this has anything to do with medications or antibiotics which the cattle might receive or possibly even chemical enhancements to improve milk production in dairy cattle. Regardless, as I've mentioned before, Woolwich Township farms along the Conestoga, Grand and Canagagigue are contributing to these problems.