LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
MY wife and I moved to Toongabbie in June 2011 to escape the rat race and congestion and noise and smells of city living in Melbourne.
We were looking forward to retirement in the next few years.
The two planning permits for the construction of two broiler farms, only two or three kilometres east of Toongabbie on the Toongabbie-Sale Rd, have put a damper on our hopes for clean air and a quiet retirement.
I am not opposed to broiler farms per se, as long as they are located far enough away from rural communities, and environmental risk assessments have been carried out.
The two broiler farms, one on 91.36 hectares and the other on 152.44 hectares, each with nine sheds, 174 metres long and 17.4 metres wide, and each farm with 400,000 chickens, adjoin each other.
They are not separated by private property or a road.
They will share the one driveway from the Sale-Toongabbie Rd.
The farms have been classified as Class B farms in accordance with the broiler code and are exempt from the requirement for an odour environmental risk assessment.
Surely the farms should be classified as one farm.
And the code applied for is for chickens inside sheds, but the permits state that the chickens will have open areas attached to the perimeter of each shed, hence ‘free range’.
I have a lot of issues with the proposed farms.
Traffic on the Sale-Toongabbie Rd and the Traralgon-Maffra Rd is estimated to increase by an estimated 30 semitrailers and b-doubles a day — yes, a day.
Chickens will be removed from the farm every nine weeks and transported elsewhere for slaughter and will be replaced by more chickens.
There is also an unmanned school crossing on the main road through Toongabbie, and traffic generally ignores the 60 and 80 kilometres per hour speed signs and roars through the township with little or no regard for other motorists or residents.
What about the extra noise from this traffic?
Odour control is a big issue.
Winds generally are from the west during the day which will mean, luckily for Toongabbie, that odours will be dispersed through the Shire of Wellington.
But in the afternoons winds are predominantly from the east and sometimes from the south-east, affecting Toongabbie.
We know that odour knows no boundaries.
I also have issues around the effects of increased heavy traffic on the road system, the health of the chickens, pest and vermin control and about the seepage of contaminants into the land and into the nearby Rosedale and Fells Creeks during heavy rains.
Latrobe City Council is concerned enough about the potential effects of the farms on Toongabbie to have written its own submission to Wellington Shire.
Wellington Shire Council has underestimated the power of the community and of community action.
We may be a small community, but we can fight a tough fight and educate the community about the likely impacts of these farms.
We want to know that we are going to be given a fair hearing against the might of the big bucks when it comes to considering the real and long-term impacts of the planning permits on the township of Toongabbie.
