Being a weekly news reporter in a rural community area, there are some stories that just ‘stick to your gut’ and you try to follow through on them with every twist and turn along the way, no matter how long it takes.
In short – if it’s interesting, follow it until it isn’t.
One of those stories was the idea of a cattle feedlot being established in the RM of Rudy, on some land located southeast of Outlook. Remember THAT whole ordeal?
This was over seven years ago back in the late spring of 2010, and while it may not sound like a lot of time has passed, it seems like forever ago to me.
The idea came from Namaka Farms, a Strathmore, Alberta-based cattle operation. Their reasoning was that they had no more room at home to expand, so they wanted to move into Saskatchewan and set up operations in the Outlook area, starting with 12,000 cattle and expanding to the point where it would reach approximately 36,000 animals over time.
This would affectively have made it the largest feedlot in the province.
The uproar was modest in retrospect, but at the time, you would’ve thought that things were split completely down the middle between the ‘for’s’ and the ‘not-for’s’. A group of Rudy ratepayers formed a committee and launched a website dedicated to their cause, which stated their beliefs that the operation would harm the drinking water, pollute the environment, and be a general nuisance to neighbouring farms that would be located close by.
Then there were the people on the other side of the coin, who believed it would be a benefit to the local economy and provide as many as 36 good and well-paying jobs.
The topic became the talk of coffee row in all of Outlook’s fine dining establishments, and forced the call for a public meeting that was held at the Civic Centre in June. Over 200 people showed up, and what I saw was a mixture of the aforementioned ‘for’s’ and ‘not-for’s’; the rest were people who I imagine just wanted to get caught up to date on all the ‘drama’ that had been percolating around town.
For my part, I did my best to present the views of each side as my job dictates I should, but I often found myself banging my head against a proverbial brick wall (or was it?) as it was increasingly difficult to interview someone on the concerned ratepayers’ side of things. We would ask to speak to someone, and get denied. Due to perception being almost everything in media, as a result, our publication became known for a short time – at least to a select few – as the paper that was “totally in support of this horrible, horrible feedlot idea!”
Let me be perfectly clear on this, even though seven years have passed. We were ‘indifferent’ to the proposal at best. Several people in the office lived in town at the time, with no rural background, and I’m not even from that side of the river. The reason that it may have looked like we were only presenting one side of the story is because that was the only side we could get at the time.
Months went past and by the time October rolled around, RM of Rudy officials were to decide on whether or not to let this feedlot idea happen by way of a vote at a public meeting. As it turned out, those concerned ratepayers showed up with a petition allegedly containing over 300 signatures, with 60% against the idea, 10% for it, and 30% having no official opinion on the matter.
However, what’s interesting is the fact that a number of the signatures on it came from people who didn’t live or pay taxes in the RM of Rudy, where this feedlot was to be located. Heck, there were people who knocked on our door in Conquest looking for support and opinions, and last I checked, we’re located in the Fertile Valley RM, not Rudy. How much weight could even a list of over 300 names carry if some of those names are people who would effectively be ‘looking in from the outside’ in this situation?
Anyway, even after the proposal ended up getting passed, not much was heard about the whole feedlot thing as 2010 came to a close. If you google ‘Namaka Farms Outlook’ now, you don’t get much of anything.
I don’t really know why I was thinking about this story recently. Maybe because it’s a great example of a truly-agricultural topic permeating a truly-agricultural community.
Either way, sometimes it’s interesting to go back and revisit those hot button issues of years past.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
