Skip to main content

Table 1 Factors influencing the locations of swine farms in Ontario, scoring guidelines, and geographic information system data used to assign scores

From: Modeling livestock population structure: a geospatial database for Ontario swine farms

Attributes

Scoring guideline

GIS Data

Zoning and Local Regulations

  

 Population centers

Farms are not allowed to be established within a municipality or a population center

Ontario Population Centers /Residential Land Use

 Agricultural zone

Swine farms are encouraged to be established within the area zoned for agricultural use

Agricultural ecumene

 Roads within population center

Although farms are almost always near a road network, the roads passing within a population center or residential area should be away from a swine farm

Road Network Passing through a population Center/ Residential Location

Land Availability

  

 Crown Land

Crown Land - MNR Unpatented Land Public are not supposed to have any private establishment. However, since the most recent update in the database (2010), a proportion of the land may have been given access to public. Therefore, we assigned a suitability score of 5% within the Crown Land, and 100% for the remainder

Crown Land - MNR Unpatented Land Public

 Crown Game Preserves

Farms are not allowed to be established on land designated for Crown game preserves

Crown Game Preserves

 Government Institutional Land Use

Farms are not allowed to be established on land designated for government institutions

Government Institutional Land Use

 Industrial Land Use

Farms are not generally allowed to be established on land designated for industrial establishments

Resources and Industrial Land Use

 Camp, Recreation

Farms should be located a certain distance from camp and recreational establishments

Camp, Recreation

Facilities Supporting Farm Infrastructure

  

 Road Network

Roads that do not got through population centers have a higher likelihood of being near swine farms

Road Network

 

Swine farms could be located near highways, but their access to transportation will depend on the local road network connecting the farms, thus we only kept the local road network attribute.

 

Geographic Barriers

  

 Waterbodies

Swine farms are generally not located near shorelines of the large waterbodies (e.g. Great Lakes). Therefore, we considered that it would be unlikely that farms would be within 1 km of the shorelines of the Great Lakes.

Great Lakes

 Large Inland Waterbodies

We consider it highly unlikely that a swine farm would be located within the boundaries of large inland waterbodies (e.g. rivers and lakes).

Inland lakes and rivers