A thousand animals, barn gone ‘right down to the concrete’

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

There are highs and lows, and farmer Jim Lamb says a half-million dollar barn fire Nov. 1 is “just one of those things. “All the pigs - they’re gone. There were hardly any flames, because they were all trapped inside the steel of the barn. Once those things take off, they just go. This went right down to the concrete.”

The Bond Road barn’s alarm went off early Saturday morning, indicating one of the barns was too hot for the weaner pigs inside. “It was,” Lamb says.

Waterville firefighters were first on arrival shortly after 6 a.m. and found the single-storey, H-shaped barn fully engulfed. Firefighters from Kingston to Wolfville responded in mutual aid, with Canning and New Minas standing-in at the Waterville station. Paramedics were on-site as a precaution, and RCMP closed nearby Hwy. 1, between the Bent and Rafuse roads, for over three hours because of heavy, drifting smoke. An excavator hauled down the siding so firefighters could reach the fire. Tankers shuttled water from a nearby pond, and Michelin loaned out a huge mobile exhaust fan to protect hogs in a nearby building from smoke.

Lamb says about 1,000 animals died on the fire - sows and babies in the farrowing space, bred sows and boars and weaner pigs. “We’ll lose 10 weeks of production, and I’m just going to make some phone calls today to see if we can get some extra ISO wean pigs. We’ve got a vacant barn....”

Lamb’s Meadowbrook Farm celebrated its launch of new omega 3-enriched pork the last week of October and Nov. 1, the first farm to produce and market the higher-quality meat in Atlantic Canada. It also marked the one-year anniversary of the farm’s on-site meat shop.

Lamb says he has insurance on the pigs and barns - a $500,000 total loss, but how that will be settled is in the paperwork process now.

He did save 115 sows from a nearby tarp-covered shelter, damaged by the fire, moving them with help and livestock trailers brought by family members as the fire burned.

He also credited firefighters and the community for their effort during and since the fire. People showed up at the farm immediately afterwards with dinners and other contributions. “Sonny Pinner - you know he likes to cook - he arrived with a pot of soup that would feed the Town of Berwick,” Lamb says. “It’s all really appreciated.”