New report questions goat dairy for prison farm

Jeff Green | Feb 17, 2021

Back in the summer of 2018, the day the “cows came home”, to Joyceville Penitentiary, was a good day for Liberal Party politicians and the activists in the Save our Prison Farms organisation.

After the Harper government decided to close the Kingston area prison farms, the group raised funds to purchase some of the animals in the herd. This was done to protect the genetics in the herd and to signal that the local agricultural community in Kingston and Frontenac County intended to keep up the political pressure to reopen the prison farms someday.

Liberal Party politicians seized on the prison farm issue before and during the election campaign of 2015.

Once elected, they began to work on a plan to revamp the prison farm program and bring the cows home. It took three years, but in the summer of 2018, local, regional and national media were invited to join with government officials and Save Our Prison Farm activists on a dusty, windy morning, as a few of the cattle, that had been under the care of local farmers, went back to jail and politicians and prison officials talked about a rejuvenated prison farm program that was being developed.

One of the reasons it took three years, for the Liberal government to deliver on their promise to restart the prison farm program, was that it had to be different. Changes in regulations made it impossible for milk and eggs, produced on prison farms, to be consumed within the prisons, and with no milk quota available to sell milk to Ontario consumers, there was no ready place for the milk to go.

A group calling itself Evolve Our Prison Farms, founded by Calvin Neufeld, said that instead of trying to find a way to transition the prison farm to a new dairy or beef production model, the prison farm should be set up on a model of “plant-based agriculture and therapeutic rehabilitation.”

While Evolve Our Prison Farms has not gained a lot of support in local agricultural circles, the group has continued to monitor how the prison farm program has progressed.

“As we developed our proposals for the prison farms, we have also monitored what has actually been happening, by asking questions of CSC [Correctional Services Canada], using freedom of information requests, when necessary, to try and find out what they have been working on,” said Calvin Neufeld, in an interview with the News last week.

Enter Royal Canada Milk

As the Liberal government in Ottawa was working out how to bring back the prison farm model to the Kingston area, other ministries were being engaged by KEDCO, the Kingston Economic Development Corporation, to help entice Feihe, the makers of a popular high end brand of dairy baby formula, to set up operations in Kingston.

The project had a few things going for it. The Chinese market was well disposed towards a made in Canada product, and Canadian dairy farms have been producing a surplus of skim milk, which could be taken up by the baby formula operation. The prison farm came into the picture because Feihe, which has now built its factory, and has incorporated in Canada, as Royal Canada Milk, wants to produce a second line of formula using goat’s milk. Goat’s milk, it turns out, is chemically more similar than cow's milk is to human breast milk, and makes a more digestible, higher valued baby formula.

The factory has twin facilities, one for cow's milk and one for goat’s milk.

As we reported over three years ago, the scale of the Royal Milk operation far outstrips the capacity of the small Canadian goat dairy industry, and a solution to the goat milk needs of Royal Milk and the lack of a ready use for prison farm products has led to a new plan, a large goat dairy operation at Joyceville.

CSC has been working on developing a 2000 dairy goat operation at Joyceville to sell the milk to Royal Canadian Milk. If constructed, it will be the largest goat dairy operation in Canada.

In an attempt to demonstrate how setting up this operation will not serve the interests of the local prison population, the local agricultural community or the interests of neighbouring property owners in Leeds Grenville and Frontenac County, Evolve Our Prison Farms has commissioned an academic report to look at two things, the implications of a goat dairy operation at Joyceville, and the alternative, vegetable based model that is favoured by Evolve Our Prison Farms.

The analysis of the goat dairy impacts was done by Professor Amy Fitzgerald from the University of Windsor.

Professor Fitzgerald looked not only at the goat dairy proposal from the point of view of its potential benefits and harms to prisoners working there, and found it was much more likely to cause harm and was very unlikely to aid in rehabilitation and reintegration for inmates, which is the overarching goal of all prison programming.

Summing up her findings on that score, she wrote: “Our analysis highlights two main issues of concern here: failure to meet the stated objectives; and potential contravention of human rights.”

Fitzgerald also noted the environmental impacts for everyone living or working on the prison property, neighbouring properties and the goat dairy industry.

“Finally, our analysis points to potential implications for the communities surrounding these prison farms. Risks to air and water quality could extend beyond the prison walls, as could odour. These externalities have been demonstrated, in the literature, to negatively impact property values surrounding intensive livestock operations. A goat dairy, of the size that is in the works, could also have a negative economic impact on the commercial goat dairy industry, which according to our analysis is already facing a number of uncertainties, due to a significant increase in production in the past few years, that has outpaced demand,” she wrote.

In addition to her report, Fitzgerald has published a breakdown of her findings in the Conversation, an independent non profit news source that publishes analysis of public issues by academics.

The article, which is entitled “The Correctional Service of Canada's goat plans won't help inmates” has been picked up by the Canadian Press and Post Media and is readily available online.

Among the observations about potential risks to the public, stemming from the kind of intensive operation being proposed at Joyceville, is the following: “Large concentrations of animals can contribute to viral spread and diminished air quality. Just last week, experts in the Netherlands reported a zoonotic illness — one that passes from animals to people, like COVID-19 — is responsible for a 20 to 55 percent greater risk of developing pneumonia among those within 1.5 kilometres of a goat farm. This follows on the heels of an outbreak of Q fever transmitted from goats to people that killed 95 people.”

(This was part one of a two part article. Next week we plan to look at the proposed goat operation from the perspective of one of the original prison farm advocates and that of a goat farmer)