H2O: Ideas & Action for Canada's Water

Since March 2025, I and other environmental and animal welfare groups have been working with the Dakota Resource Council to try to stop the construction of 2 massive dairy operations close to the Red River in North Dakota. The first of these two operations, Abercrombie Dairy, will house 12,500 cows at one site and the second, Herberg will house 25,000 cows. Those numbers of cows confined in two sites will produce an amount of excrement similar to a city of 1.5 million people. The manure and wastewater will be stored in lagoons that are the size of 52 Canadian football fields.

Image courtesy of Humane Decisions

The manure these cows produce will be spread on adjacent fields as fertilizer but due to the vast quantities, it is very likely that much of the phosphorus and nitrogen in that manure will not be taken up by the crops and will remain available to run off during the spring melt, rainstorms or floods. As I have mentioned in previous posts, phosphorus and nitrogen are what feed the often toxic blue-green algae in Lake Winnipeg. Almost 15 years ago the Manitoba government set a goal of reducing the phosphorus concentration in the south basin of Lake Winnipeg to .5mg/ml but there has been virtually no progress to meet that goal

As someone who came to this environmental advocacy from an animal welfare perspective, I really shudder to think of what kind of life these animals will be subjected to in close confinement with thousands of other cows. It is hard to imagine that the company proposing these operations (Riverside Farms) thinks of the cows as sentient beings but must view them as milk producing machines who do not suffer, boredom, pain or fear. In my view, anytime we resort to cramming thousands of creatures together to produce meat or other food products in the cheapest way possible, it results in suffering of animals and humans who work in the facilities as well as pollution of the natural world.

We are working to increase awareness of these mega projects that will undoubtedly have negative impacts on water quality in Lake Winnipeg as well as the Red River, to encourage the Canadian government to request the International Joint Commission become involved to resolve this transboundary water issue.