Alliance warns and informs
By Mike Masterson
The Buffalo River Watershed Alliance is sounding an alarm to warn of the potential storm of hog factories approaching Arkansas.
The nonprofit group’s forewarning comes in the form of a seven-city educational tour of public meetings it’s sponsoring beginning next Friday in Fayetteville and concluding a week later in Little Rock. Good for the alliance and the crucial awareness it’s freely spreading.
At their sessions, four national Waterkeeper Alliance experts will explain the disastrous environmental and health effects of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), especially in North Carolina. That once-pristine state has been despoiled by hog-factory waste and the speakers will explain what we can expect if Arkansas officials and lawmakers allow corporate hog factories to pollute our precious public waterways.
We took our first giant step toward a similar fate in 2012 when the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (cough) unbelievably approved the state’s first hog CAFO under the new General Permit in the state’s karst-porous Buffalo National River watershed at Mount Judea.
The Buffalo River Watershed Alliance website says it was formed in 2013 specifically to protect and preserve America’s first stream to be designated as a national river within the national parks system. The Alliance is one of several groups that have coalesced in what’s become known as “The Battle for the Buffalo-Again” to fight the wrongheaded permitting of C&H Hog Farms.
CAFOs mass-produce meat by confining thousands of animals into small spaces. The C&H hog factory near Big Creek in Newton County is contracted to Cargill Inc. Big Creek is a major tributary of the Buffalo in Arkansas’ most environmentally sensitive area. With up to 6,500 pigs, C&H will spread about 2 million gallons of hog waste annually over fields adjacent to Big Creek.
The first of the Alliance’s seven gatherings begins at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct.25 at Fayetteville’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church with one of the four experts, Rick Dove of North Carolina, explaining his experiences. Dove tells me he’ll warn not to let “the swine industry do to Arkansas what it’s done to us in North Carolina.” A fundraising bonfire will follow.
A military veteran who last served as a military courts-martial judge, Dove was a commercial fisherman until fish and fishermen alike began developing sores. In 1991, after more than a billion lesion-covered fish perished in the state’s Neuse River, Dove returned to practicing law until the Neuse Riverkeeper position became available in 1993.
Dove’s responsibility as Riverkeeper was to restore and protect the Neuse and its tributaries. And it became apparent from observation and scientific studies that the swine industry’s factory practices were largely responsible for the degradation of the Neuse and other rivers in eastern North Carolina. He said their waters are impaired by nutrient pollution (fertilizer), a leading cause of algae blooms and fish kills.
“We’ve fought to stop factory farms from destroying streams, polluting air and groundwater and tearing at the fabric of our communities,” he said. “While successful in passing a state law that prevents this industry from constructing further cesspool lagoons and spray fields on new and expanding farms, we’re stuck with approximately 2,500 existing facilities still operating in the environmentally sensitive area of the state’s coastal plain,” he said. “The industrial facilities spray raw hog waste onto ditched fields which connect to our rivers and streams.”
Professor Mark Sobsey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered that hogs produce 10 times the fecal matter of humans. That means the 10 million swine in the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina generate as much daily waste as about a third of the population of the United States, that waste running into streams and permeating the air with toxic gases such as ammonia, methane and hydrogen sulfide.
Dove and the other speakers with similar horror stories want Arkansas to learn from North Carolina. “The industry can’t build new facilities in North Carolina any more using open cesspools and sprayfields. This outhouse technology uses our air, groundwater and rivers and streams as a part of the disposal system. There are alternatives we’ve developed … that, while a bit more costly than the lagoon and sprayfield system, have proved more effective in managing waste and protecting the environment,” he told me. “The swine industry could use these new technologies but won’t. Instead, they are moving to other states where they can still use the cheaper, highly polluting cesspool/sprayfield method.”
These informative CAFO confabs will be 1 p.m. on Oct. 26 at Yellville’s First Presbyterian Church; 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 28 in Jasper at Carroll County Electric, and later that same day at 5:30 at 17 Elk St. in Eureka Springs; 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 29 in Harrison at North Arkansas College’s Durand Center; 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 30 in Mountain Home at the Reynolds Library, and twice more in that city at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. at ASU’s McMullin Lecture Hall; and finally in Little Rock on Oct. 31 in the Central Arkansas Library System Main Library’s Darragh Center Auditorium at noon and again at 5:30 p.m.
Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.