By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
jlyon@arkansasnews.com
LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality will hire independent experts to study the liner integrity of manure ponds at a hog farm in the Buffalo National River watershed, ADEQ director Becky Keogh told the state Pollution Control and Ecology Commission on Friday.
The study at C&H Hog Farms in Mount Judea will involve drilling in the watershed and is expected to be conducted within the next 60 to 90 days, Keogh said.
She said the results will add to information that already has been collected by the Big Creek Research and Extension Team, or BCRET, which operates out of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and is conducting a five-year study of C&H’s impact on the local environment.
“This evaluation will be done in an open and transparent manner and is part of our statutory authority to conduct investigations and studies needed to gather data and information in the administration or enforcement of our laws,” Keogh told the commission.
Andrew Sharpley, a UA professor and member of BCRET, told the commission that to date the team has found no consistent evidence of higher levels of E. coli bacteria downstream from C&H than upstream of it.
“We don’t see any scientific evidence at the moment that those ponds are leaking or that there’s a massive leakage of manure from them,” he said.
The Buffalo River Coalition, which includes several groups seeking to protect the Buffalo National River from pollution, applauded ADEQ’s decision to bring in independent experts to conduct further testing.
“This is the first step in proving or disproving whether there is a release that could be disastrous to the Buffalo River,” Richard Mays, attorney for the coalition, said in a news conference after the meeting.
Gordon Watkins, president of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, one of the groups in the coalition, said the UA System’s Division of Agriculture seeks to assist farmers, but BCRET is supposed to monitor C&H’s environmental impact.
“Those two things, they’re not necessarily incompatible, but they are in conflict to some degree,” Watkins said. “You can’t assist on one hand while monitoring for potential negative impacts on the other without putting yourself in a position of some compromise. So I think that if that’s the situation here, that it’s important that there be some outside, independent, unconnected, unbiased researchers that are specialists in this particular field who are actually overseeing the testing that goes on to avoid that conflict.”
Mays said he believed the decision to bring in independent experts would not have happened if the coalition had not obtained, through Freedom of Information Act requests, emails between researchers that ADEQ had not previously seen. The emails suggested a “cozy” relationship between BCRET and the owners of C&H and included a reference to “a major fracture and movement of waste,” he said.
ADEQ spokeswoman Kelly Robinson said Friday she did not know how big a role the coalition’s involvement played in the decision, but she said, “We do try to listen to what people have to say.”