Lovely County Citizen

Wednesday, June 4, 2014
By Kathryn Lucariello, CCNhi@cox-internet.com
NEWTON COUNTY -- Those floating the Buffalo River over Memorial Day weekend got more than time away from work and responsibilities. Many of them also got an education.
Several dozen people from a group called Ozark River Stewards took to the river at Grinder's Ferry in two separate groups, packing signs, banners, balloons and pennants to raise awareness about the potential environmental impacts of industrial hog farms, called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, on rivers such as the Buffalo, the nation's first designated scenic, natural river.
C&H Hog Farms houses 6,500 pigs to supply pork for Cargill Corporation food processing. The farm was approved by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality last year and set up six miles from the Buffalo River.
Ginny Masullo and Lin Wellford, who is from Carroll County, led the educational float trip. Several people from Eureka Springs took part as well.
"We're here to call attention to the factory hog farm that is operating in the watershed," Masullo said. "A lot of people have not heard of it, and they need to know that there is reason to believe that this beautiful river will be impacted by hog waste washing off of spray fields. Even worse, thousands of gallons of sewage are seeping into the ground every single day. In this watershed, that kind of leakage is going to end up in the river. It has nowhere else to go."
Wellford said there are two efforts at testing whether waste is seeping into the river. The first is by the University of Arkansas, which receives funds from Cargill for its agriculture department, which is looking at nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen and only doing a grass surface test, but of greater concern is antibiotics and steroids in hog waste.
"In Iowa, steroids are showing up in well water. People are drinking that," she said, "and they have topsoil. Imagine what happens in an area like ours with no topsoil."
She said the university did not want to dye test, which is a more reliable way to see exactly where waste is going, and the field owners would not give permission for such tests.
But UA retired hydrogeologist Dr. John Van Brahana has been doing dye testing around the perimeters of the farm.
Wellford said there was "extremely rapid transmission, because it's karst. There was almost no filtration, and within a day and a half above the farm, it came out at Big Spring and Creek. They used different colors of dye, so they can tell you exactly where it was put in."
She said the CAFO permit, a "one size fits all" around the country, allows up to 5,000 gallons per day of discharge of hog waste per lagoon, and there are two lagoons.
"Their estimate was 3,400 gallons per day -- day in, day out, since last summer. So where does it go in a watershed? Everything goes downhill. They're seeing algae growth in a place where last year there was no big bloom."
She said Governor Mike Beebe said if it can be proven that unsafe levels of pollution are hitting the river, C&H will be closed down.
"Of course, 'unsafe' is a slippery slope. I don't know what his definition of unsafe is."
Wellford said the reception to her group's handing out plastic baggies of information on the river was overall positive.
"We had 200 cards printed out and at the end had about 15 packets left, and the other group gave away all of theirs," she said. "Some people said they already knew about it or were not interested, but most said, 'Are you kidding? I thought that was all taken care of.'"
She said they ran across two hog farmers who had small farms in the Mt. Judea area who felt the Buffalo should not have been made a national river; that that ruined it. But they have small hog farms, no more than 300 head.
"We're not against farmers," Wellford said. "We think C&H should get compensated by Cargill, who lied and said this was sustainable, and it's not. A city the size of Russellville has this same amount of sewage. Can you imagine Russellville saying 'We won't bother to treat our sewage anymore; we'll just dump it on the ground'? They also lied about it creating new jobs. Six jobs were created, high school students making minimum wage."
Wellford said Ozark River Stewards is planning another float in the near future and are looking at July 5, weather permitting, to try to continue to educate people about the river.
"People are out on the river because they love it, especially families with children. We're planning to do it again because it really hit home to us that people were not keeping up with the news."
She said the EPA estimates that 35,000 river miles have been degraded by CAFOs since the 1980s.
"This is the first National River," Wellford said. "If we can't protect and even improve its water quality, the Buffalo may end up adding another 134 miles to the EPA's tally of impaired waterways. That's a tragedy for all of us."