Karst Hydrologist John Van Brahana requests suspension of the C&H Hog Farm permit stating no experienced Karst geologist would recommend a CAFO on this site. Document

 Subject: Arkansas Democrat June 1 letters re C & H Hog Farm

Letter #1) We could all benefit
The hog farm near the Buffalo River has opponents and proponents. Perhaps each side can win. We can have our bacon, ribs, etc., and another products from hogs along with a clean Buffalo River.

I suggest drying the manure, bagging it, selling it nationwide, or worldwide, as fertilizer and potting soil. And believe me, this could be done at a nice profit.

Cargill and the producers have enough financial backing to support such an operation. And perhaps some small company such as Wal-Mart would make a great distributor.

Seriously, problem solved? For everybody?

JOHN WHITTEN

Rogers

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Letter #2) Some changes needed
Does Arkansas need an agency to protect our environmental quality? I had thought that was the job of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality. But how then did we get a permitted 6,500-swine farm, built on the most porous rock terrain in the state (the Boone Limestone), where sewage will be stored in open lagoons until it can be spread on fields less than a mile upwind of a school, and where runoff and seepage through the porous rock may pollute wells, endangered bat caves, and even the country’s first national river.

The department says the C&H farmers followed the proper application procedure for their permit. Therefore, without local public notification, comment period or public input, a permit was granted. And this is in accordance with the department’s own statewide rules for permitting contained animal feeding operations.

How did these rules evolve? Has there been pressure from outside the agency? Could the Department of Environmental Quality have allowed giant agribusiness to foist these rules on them? Has it lost its power to protect our natural resources and human habitat?

Statewide permitting without local input is bound to meet the unexpected-karst topography, endangered species, an adjacent school, or even a national river. Arkansas’ natural resources and human habitat need better protection. Arkansas needs a change in laws, a better permitting system, and an agency with the power and courage to protect our resources and the quality of our environment.

PAMELA E. STEWART

Jasper

Note- "Pamela" is better known to most of us as "Pam" Stewart and is married to Jack Stewart

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Letter #3) Do something, stop it
See the Buffalo River hog farmer with his hand on the sow in the pipe-framed enclosure? That is not a chute and she is not on her way to somewhere else.

That is a containment crate and she is going to live almost all her life in it (four or five years). She cannot turn around or even really lie down. She will never see the sun or wallow in mud or even walk on green grass.

These are not pork production units. These are God’s creatures.

For the love of God, good people, do something to stop this!

J.E. CALDWELL

Stuttgart

ADEQ: CAFO Permit Is Just Fine

Grassy greeting

Weeding out dissent

Mike Masterson


Scores of visiting demonstrators were welcomed to the town of Jasper last week by constant noise and debris tossed from a weed-trimmer and lawnmower after they’d peacefully convened on the grassy Newton County courthouse square. They’d come to make their voices heard as international corporation Cargill Inc. entertained legislators with a lunch across the street at the popular Ozark Cafe.
The startled visitors, who shielded their faces from the flying refuse, had come from as far away as Missouri to display signs and chant. They opposed Cargill’s backing of C&H Hog Farms in the nearby community of Mount Judea and the risk that industrial farm poses to the purity of the Buffalo National River.
A half-dozen uniformed county deputies watched from across the street as this gathering of middle-aged folks peaceably milled on the side of the courthouse where two county workers suddenly showed up at noon to repeatedly mow the same relatively small area over the entire lunch hour.
It appeared to me that both workers clearly had been instructed to do what they were doing and to summon the police if anyone dared object, which is just what the 6-foot-five, 300-pound weed-trimming employee did as soon as a man asked if he’d please consider doing his work there later. His retort: “You’re interfering with my work!” Then he called the deputies across the street on his cell phone.
Good grief. Really?
When deputies strolled over, the officers wound up shaking their heads and soon returned to the cafe. It was obvious that no county worker had been threatened or even interfered with.
Meanwhile, the remaining three sides of the grassy square went unmown during the length of the demonstration.
It was plenty apparent to those who’d come to express their feelings about Cargill’s role in the factory hog farm and the corporation’s hosted lunch for lawmakers that this display of noise and potentially dangerous flying sticks was calculated. I wonder who’d have been liable had someone lost an eye.
While hungry lawmakers filed in and out for the Cargill’s lunch, I was surprised to learn not one walked across the street to speak with those in the crowd.
Oh well, hey, it was a ham sandwich or a pork chop on Cargill, a float on the nearby pristine Buffalo and a tour of the new hog farm that didn’t yet stink to high heaven since it’s only been operational for a short time.
I suggest holding another lawmakers’ tour and smell check in August 2014 after millions of gallons of waste are lapping in two lagoons and more waste has been amply spread across the fields surrounding Mount Judea and Big Creek.
Those attending the protest carried signs that read: “Cargill Shame on You,” “Cargill Go Home” and “Hog farms Yes. Hog factories No.” Among the videotaped crowd was a prominent Newton County family concerned about polluting the river. Afterwards, the wife described her perspective.
“I was part of the protest in Jasper in front of the Ozark Cafe while Cargill fed the state’s House and Senate Agriculture Committee members. We surely needed to let Cargill and others see some of the concern for the Buffalo National River. Many came early … and held very creative signs,” she said. “At one point I believe there were over 70. It felt good to get to be among others and chant … as [Cargill’s] guests filed into the cafe. We stood directly across the street in front of the Newton County Courthouse.
“At 12 o’clock sharp, mowing and weed-eating was going on all around us. [My husband] went inside the courthouse to speak to the County Judge [Warren Campbell] about postponing yard work until later and expected to get to do so by phone, but the woman he talked with seemed to just disappear. The yard workers insisted their mowing needed to be done at this time!
“One informed us he was a county employee and we could be guilty of obstructing their work,” she continued. “There was some risk for the bystanders who cooperated by moving. The mowers were old and didn’t have protective shrouds. No one was injured, though my son did feel something hit the side of his face from the weed-eater.
“The worker who was weed-eating explained how they had to mow at that time because it was for the holiday [six days later] for the veterans and the flag and also it was shady on that side of the courthouse. Then he wanted to explain how safe CAFOs are and how Mount Judea is fine. He explained how he prefers to eat a CAFO pig instead of an outside pig who wallers about in everything. Those swine are just not clean in his opinion. He thinks the real problem is that some bathrooms are closed at the national park.”
She concluded: “It’s disheartening when a local disdains this outpouring of concern and continues saying this [factory hog farm] won’t hurt the river. It’s obvious this CAFO is in the wrong place.”
And as further evidence of just how divisive this CAFO near the Buffalo has become in Newton County, one former official at the demonstration told me that, as he was leaving, a local business person leaned over to him and said: “Thank you all for coming.”
 
Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.

Geoscientist: CAFO a no-no

Mike Masterson


If you were responsible for permitting an industrial hog farm in the Buffalo River watershed along Big Creek, would you ask an expert to analyze what kind of drainage to expect from tons of swine waste applied atop the porous limestone of what geologists know as the Boone Formation?
And what if you didn’t do that and later were told the estimated odds of such contamination was 90 percent?
It seems like just prudent due diligence that any state would consult with an expert on groundwater circulation through the karst of the Boone Formation in Newton County before issuing a permit for a concentrated animal feeding operation in such an environmentally sensitive area.
So I wondered why the state’s Department of Environmental Quality didn’t retain someone like professor John V. “Van” Brahana of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas, who I’m told does have a phone. Brahana is an expert on the fractured karst that underlies much of Northwest Arkansas. He’s more than capable of examining the site of this 630-acre operation at Mount Judea. After all, this place will house 6,500 swine continually generating at least two millions gallons of waste pumped into two lagoons and applied across fields near Big Creek.
And certainly no responsible people would want misinformation spread about what can be expected from this farm’s waste output, especially alleged omissions and misinformation of the kind cited in both the Farm Service Agency’s environmental assessment report and the Department of Environmental Quality permit’s nutrient management plan. Right?
But since the state didn’t recruit Brahana to prepare such a study, I asked his thoughts.
Few, if any, geoscientists are more familiar with the distinctive Ozark karst that forms the Boone Formation and how easily and rapidly it carries groundwater pollution. He told me the formation, particularly beneath Newton County, is honeycombed with caves, sinkholes and underground springs.
“Newton County has the single largest number of reported caves for any county in the state,” said Brahana, who had performed a cursory review of the C&H Hog Farms site. “The setting of this … hog farm overlies one of the most intensively karsified rock units in the state. … The concentration of animal wastes is huge and safely retaining them in the clay-line [lagoons] proposed is highly unlikely.”
The professor said if waste should escape this farm, it would likely negatively affect the overall water quality of the Buffalo National River. “Identifying all the subsurface short-circuits that could deliver waste to the river is neither practical or economically feasible. The Buffalo is the major regional drain through which groundwater and tributary surface water (Big Creek) leaves the region and pollutants would ultimately end up in that waterway. Cleanup after the fact is much more expensive than avoiding the problem before it occurs,” he said.
Formerly with the U.S. Geological Survey, Brahana has taught for 23 years at the University of Arkansas. The professor’s numerous studies include a dry creek bed along the Carroll-Boone County line where poultry waste had contaminated nearby wells and springs. A highway expansion had exposed underlying karst bedrock with interlayers of “horrible-smelling gooey sediment composed of decaying poultry debris and waste and a spring that was proven to be connected to the dry creek bed that was horribly contaminated,” he said. “In my 51 years of professional groundwater studies, I’ve never encountered a more contaminated spring anywhere.”
The makeup of the karst hydrology along Big Creek adjacent to the hog farm is very similar, he added.
The professor told of another instance along a tributary of Osage Creek where the weight of a pond formed by damming that stream caused it to collapse into a previously undetected cavern. From there the flow traveled subsurface along the stream valley and into Osage Creek. “Big Creek at the CAFO site has nearly identical hydrogeologic properties and settings,” he said, further explaining that various contaminants can travel through karst anywhere from feet to a matter of miles in a single day.
I closed my exchange with Brahana by asking on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most likely (and knowing what he has learned of the Cargill-supported and supplied site for this industrial hog farm), what he believes are the odds of our nation’s first national river becoming contaminated from the waste the farm generates. “A nine on Big Creek and a nine on the Buffalo,” he responded. But of course, our state never asked this expert for a truly scientific opinion before issuing the permit.
Meanwhile, it was interesting to see scores of folks gather Wednesday on the courthouse square in Jasper to protest the hog farm. In what struck me and lots of other Arkansans as a blatant public relations move to build support for the farm, corporate giant Cargill sponsored a lunch for some legislators at the popular Ozark Cafe, also on the Jasper square. Silly me, I wondered why Cargill wasn’t also kindly buying lunch for all those potential customers carrying signs across the street.
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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.

Agency sticks with its OK for hog farm

LR lawyer says response to letter not good enough

RYAN MCGEENEY
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE


The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality is standing by its 2012 decision to issue an operational permit to C&H Hog Farms, the large-scale concentrated animal-feeding operation in Mount Judea.
In a May 15 letter to the department, Little Rock lawyer Hank Bates claimed the farm’s permit application was flawed and should be revoked until several “omissions, errors and misrepresentations” were addressed by the department and the farm owners. The letter included documentation for a half-dozen purported inconsistencies in the application’s nutrient management plan, the 263-page document that details the farm’s design and plan for safely disposing of the manure of about 2,500 sows and as many as 4,000 piglets at any given time.
Bates sent the letter on behalf of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, a coalition of several environmental and economic advocacy organizations that have voiced concern about the impact of potential water and air pollution from the hog barn for several months. Bates, a partner at the firm Carney, Bates & Pulliam, said he was not being paid for work done on behalf of the alliance.
In a response signed by department director Teresa Marks and sent to Bates Wednesday and publicly issued Thursday, the department addressed some of the concerns raised in Bates’ letter.
In his letter, Bates said soil tests performed by the University of Arkansas Soil Testing and Research Laboratory indicated that the majority of the 630 acres surrounding the C&H Hog Farms production facility, upon which the facility operators plan to spread hog waste as fertilizer for warm-season grasses, were already saturated with phosphorus. The farm’s nutrient management plan later states that “[b]ased on current soil tests, there are no fields at this time that are identified as having high and/or very high soil phosphorous (P) levels.”
The department’s response says that terms used in assessing a soil’s nutrient levels such as “optimal” or “above optimal” refer to the amount of a given nutrient needed to successfully grow a given crop.
“[T]he optimum and above optimum soil phosphorus levels are indicative of the agronomic viability of the land application site,” the department’s letter says. “The permit does not limit application based solely on agronomic rates but … is one of many site specific factors and management practices included in the [phosphorus]-index.”
The department’s response does not address the contradiction between the soil-test results and the statement that none of the farm’s fields is high in phosphorus.
In streams, excessive levels of phosphorus can cause algae blooms, clouding waterways while choking off other aquatic life dependent on sunshine.
Bates’ letter also raises the concern that the nutrient management plan does not list the flooding probability for four of the 17 fields that make up the farm’s 630 spreadable acres. Those portions of the planning worksheet instead read “#N/A.” The soil maps included with the nutrient management plan identify these fields, which lay adjacent to Big Creek, a major tributary to the Buffalo National River, as prone to “occasional flooding.”
The department’s response identifies the use of “#N/A” in other portions of the plan as a simple problem of data-entry error, but does not make direct reference to the use of “#N/A” in the flooding probability estimation for the four fields.
The department also explained that while flooding frequency is factored into the permitting process, propensity for flooding does not necessarily disqualify an area of land for use when spreading manure.
Bates’ letter also expresses concerns that the nutrient management plan inaccurately estimated how much phosphorus will be lost from the hog manure between collection and distribution over the farm’s fields. The plan estimates that 80 percent of the phosphorus content in the manure will be lost before being applied to the land, but Bates contended that most of the nutrient content will simply become concentrated at the bottom of the waste lagoons but eventually spread with the rest of the manure.
The department’s response says that the farm operators plan to agitate the lagoons, removing waste solids and applying them as part of the manure mixture to five fields, four of which are the fields where the flooding frequency was not properly identified elsewhere in the nutrient management plan. The department’s response does not state how often the lagoon holding the waste solids will be agitated.
Other concerns in Bates’ letter go unaddressed in the department’s response. These include the nutrient management plan’s use of nitrogen-based analysis for one portion of the farm (again, the same four fields mentioned above) instead of the phosphorus-based analysis used for the rest of the farm’s 630 spreadable acres, and the plan’s recommendation to apply 57 pounds of phosphorus per acre, per application, over the entire acreage, while the university soil test results recommend applying no phosphorous to most of the area.
The department’s response concludes by saying that the department does not agree with Bates’ assertion that C&H Hog Farm’s operational permit should be revoked, based on the information included in his letter.
Bates said Thursday that the department had failed to adequately address the concerns raised in his letter.
“[The Environmental Quality Department’s] response to our letter enumerating the inadequacies in the C&H Hog Farms permitting process undefined specifically the Nutrient Management Plan undefined is really a non-response,” Bates said via e-mail. “[The department’s] response inspires little to no confidence that the agency will be enforcing the permit and protecting the Buffalo River as this factory farm ramps up operations.”
Katherine Benenati, a spokesman for the Environmental Quality Department, said Thursday that department staff members were working to further address unanswered questions in Bates’ letter.
Bates said that he is scheduled to meet with Environmental Quality Department representatives June 7.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I12E3klg-4E&list=UUmc8YYwD-gzUXfzVZ_gF4iA&ind

 State legislators tour hog farm, face critics

RYAN MCGEENEY
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE


JASPER About two dozen state legislators concluded a two-day tour Wednesday of what have become the two of the most discussed features of Newton County in recent months: the Buffalo National River and C&H Hog Farms.
Tuesday, after a presentation on the Buffalo National River’s founding and history by Kevin Cheri and information about the river’s impact on tourism in the state by Department of Parks and Tourism Director Richard Davies, the lawmakers managed to float a portion of the river during a brief respite from the day’s rains. Wednesday, legislators heard from two area organic farmers before touring C&H Hog Farms, the large-scale concentrated animal-feeding operation in Mount Judea. After the tour, about a half-dozen of the legislators drove to the Ozark Cafe in Jasper for a late lunch sponsored by Cargill Inc. C&H Hog Farms is contracted to provide piglets for Cargill’s pork production operations.
Rep. Homer Lenderman, D-Brookland, said he was impressed by his tour of the farm.
“I was amazed at the air quality,” Lenderman said. “From 30 feet away, you could barely smell the hog operation. It looked to me that they had gone above and beyond the call as far as making sure they were in compliance with all current environmental regulations.”
As the legislators ate their meal in the Ozark Cafe, about 60 protesters stood on the lawn of the Newton County Courthouse, which sits directly across the street. Most were affiliated with the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, which has publicly protested C&H Hog Farms and filed a notice of intent to sue the Farm Service Agency, which provided the environmental assessment for the farm site and helped guarantee the loan to build the facility.
Much of the concern regarding the farm focused on fears that waste from the farm, which is permitted to house about 2,500 full-grown sows and as many as 4,000 piglets at one time, will pollute either the area’s groundwater through its karst geology, surface waters through runoff into nearby Big Creek, or both.
“If they’re monitoring the water quality like they’re supposed to do, I think this is an unfounded fear,” Lenderman said. “I think [the owners of C&H Hog Farms] will be good neighbors.”
As the legislators continued to eat Wednesday, members of the protest alliance gradually put away their signs and filtered into the Ozark Cafe to eat, in some cases sitting at adjacent tables from the politicians.
Gordon Watkins, an organizer with the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance and an organic farmer and rental-cabin owner in Parthenon, sat with other protesters in the cafe’s large secondary dining area, only feet away from Lenderman and the event’s organizer, Rep. David Branscum, R-Marshall.
Watkins said he found the mixture of events connected with the tour confusing.
“I’m not really clear what the goal was,” Watkins said. “If it was to expose members of the [Agricultural] Committee to the Buffalo River area, I didn’t see how the hog farm fit into that.”
Watkins also said that bringing in organic farmers to speak to the legislators might cause some lawmakers to conflate organic farming with the concentrated animal-feeding operation, an idea Watkins said is patently false.
Watkins said that although none of the legislators crossed the street to speak with him or any of his fellow protesters, he felt it was a good opportunity to let the lawmakers know that many of the state’s residents were concerned about the farm’s operation.
“We were here to let these folks know, loud and clear, that there are folks really concerned about the Buffalo River, and we think this hog farm is risky business,” Watkins said. “Not everybody thinks this is the greatest thing since a pocket on a shirt.”

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PRESS RELEASE
	FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date:	May 21, 2013
Contact:	Perry Wheeler, National Parks Conservation Association,  P: 202-419-3712

Groups Urge Continued Focus on Faulty Permitting Process for Factory Hog Farm Near Buffalo National River