Buffalo River Watershed Alliance
August 24, 2016
Eureka Springs Independent
Three Northwest Arkansas women have banded together to appeal a recent decision that would allow EC Farms to spray hog waste from C&H Hog Farms, Inc., onto additional pastures within the Buffalo River watershed.
All three had independently attended a public comment hearing in Jasper last March to object to allowing the transfer of a modified permit that would expose more tributaries, springs and groundwater to potential pollutants in a sensitive ecosystem already showing signs of stress. The comments they made at that time give them standing to appeal the decision. Fifty-three comments were recorded, either online or at the hearing, against allowing even more widespread spraying of untreated swine sewage.
Now the three women, all grandmothers, have hired an attorney to guide them through the process.
“None of us has done anything like this before, but we met up afterwards and discovered that we share a common determination to fight for the Buffalo. Someone had to take a stand for the river and it seemed to each of us that it was our turn,” Carol Bitting explained.
Bitting lives on the Little Buffalo River, a tributary to the Buffalo National River in Newton County. For years she has volunteered her services as a biological technician for the Buffalo National Park, conducting field surveys and documenting karst features within the park. She’s also a member of the Arkansas Caves Association, cataloging and measuring numerous caves in the county. Her spare time is spent hiking, biking, paddling the river and enjoying the outdoors with her grandkids.
Dr. Nancy Haller also has a long history of public service. She is a medical doctor who formerly served as Public Health Officer for the Newton County Health Department. In the 1990s she spearheaded the effort to establish the county as an eco-tourism destination, and wrote numerous grant proposals that have helped improve the quality of life for residents of Jasper. Her concern for the Buffalo River stems from her understanding of the pathogens, bacteria, viruses and other substances known to leach into waterways and threaten human heath in areas where confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) dispose of waste by spreading it on the ground. “It already happened once, when too much chicken litter ruined the wells around Mount Judea. That’s when they had to pipe in water from the lake,” Haller points out. “This permit would allow in excess of 6.5 million gallons of untreated waste to be sprayed on fields and pastures south of Mount Judea. That’s crazy!”
Lin Wellford of Carroll County is an active member of one of the state’s first watershed partnership groups and has been involved in preserving and protecting Ozark waterways for more than a decade. An avid kayaker who frequently floats the Buffalo, she worries that spraying waste on additional fields within the river’s watershed will skew results of the Big Creek Research and Extension Team’s taxpayer-funded monitoring efforts on a major tributary to the Buffalo River. The new fields drain into different tributaries that are not currently being monitored.
“People had already started to question whether BCRET’s mission was compromised by the fact that the director of the team is so closely associated with the U of A School of Agriculture,” Wellford said. “Originally the study was supposed to focus on water monitoring to protect the Buffalo National River, but once it began, the title was quickly changed to ‘Proving the Sustainability of C&H Hog Farm.’”
According to the EPA, non-point source pollution associated with agriculture, mostly stemming from the rapid evolution of indoor feedlots known as CAFOs, is now the leading cause of impaired waterways within the US.
These grandmothers agree that agriculture is important to the state and they support the rights of independent farmers to make a living on their land. But they also think that the corporate takeover of farming is turning farms into factories and transforming farmers into contracted operators who have little say in decision-making. “We keep hearing how industrial-scale agricultural is the only way to feed a hungry world, but CAFOs have been shown to be hugely damaging to the environment. How long can we feed the world if we wreck our land and water resources in the process?” Wellford asked.
“And if it turns out that we can’t protect a river that has been set aside as a national park, is any waterway in this country safe?” Dr. Haller added.
The hearing has been set for Dec. 4-5 at the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology building in North Little Rock
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By Bill Bowden
Posted: August 23, 2016 at 5:45 a.m.
The Buffalo National River is officially an Important Bird Area.
The announcement came Monday from the Arkansas Audubon Society.
The national park is home -- for at least part of the year -- to about 200 species of birds, including bald eagles, Northern bobwhites, cerulean warblers, Swainson's warblers and Louisiana waterthrushes.
A global initiative of BirdLife International, implemented by Audubon and its partners in the United States, the Important Bird Areas Program is an effort to identify and conserve areas that are vital to birds and other biodiversity, according to Audubon Arkansas' website, ar.audubon.org.
"Important Bird Areas are sites that provide essential habitat for breeding, wintering or migrating bird species," said Dan Scheiman, bird conservation director for Audubon Arkansas. "Protecting these places gives us the greatest bang for our conservation buck."
On Aug. 11, Audubon Arkansas' board unanimously voted to accept the recommendation of the IBA Technical Committee to recognize the site, Scheiman said. It was announced in a news release Monday.
The Buffalo National River became Arkansas' 33rd Important Bird Area and the third-largest in the state.
The Buffalo National River Important Bird Area designation includes 96,341 acres. That's larger than the park itself. It includes 140 acres of adjacent private property owned by Jack and Pam Stewart, who live near Jasper in Newton County.
Jack Stewart, a regional director for the National Audubon Society, said three sides of his property border the park. He's been surveying the birds on his property for several years and has been working for the past two years on the Important Bird Area designation.
"There's a lot of data that goes into establishing an IBA," Stewart said. "It's not just a token thing. It's got to have science behind it. So we will continue the surveys. If and when we sell the property, we would be very careful who we sell it to."
The state's largest Important Bird Area is the Shugart/Felsenthal Red-cockaded Woodpecker IBA in southeast Arkansas at 1,296,000 acres. The next largest is the Ozark National Forest at 1,056,752 acres.
Kevin Cheri, superintendent of the Buffalo National River, said the designation focuses attention on the role of national parks as laboratories for species diversity, which are barometers of environmental health and change.
The Buffalo National River connects lands owned by the Nature Conservancy, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and U.S. Forest Service, according to a news release from the national park.
"Taken as a whole, this public land provides the best opportunity to manage and protect a wide range of bird species, including many that are declining," said Joe Neal, field trip chair of the Northwestern Arkansas Audubon Society and co-author of Arkansas Birds.
While many of Arkansas' Important Bird Areas are located on public lands, some aren't.
"The IBA program is not a regulatory initiative and places no restriction on land use or activities," according to Audubon Arkansas' website. "Audubon staff work with managers of IBAs to support bird and habitat monitoring, habitat management and education and advocacy efforts focused on birds. Audubon recognizes that IBAs are priority sites for long-term protection."
The Buffalo National River -- which runs through Newton, Searcy and Marion counties before merging with the White River in Baxter County -- became the first national river in the United States on March 1, 1972. It is one of the few remaining free-flowing rivers in the lower 48 states.
Metro on 08/23/2016
By Mike Masterson
Posted: August 13, 2016 at 3:22 a.m.
The nightmare scenario many fear when it comes to hog waste polluting our Buffalo River watershed (the country's first national river) has been playing out in Illinois, where the Chicago Tribune reports swine factory waste polluted 67 miles of that state's waterways between 2005 and 2014.
Those who say a similar scenario can't happen from C&H Hog Farms, misplaced in Arkansas' sacred, karst-permeated watershed, clearly aren't paying attention.
In Illinois, David Jackson and Gary Marx last week reported that the once-clear Beaver Creek in Iroquois County has become a foul-smelling contaminated stream filled with dead fish.
"It looked like ink, the water. It had fish all over the place, dead. It wasn't fit for nothing," 75-year-old retired farmer Leland Ponton told the Tribune.
The story said government officials blamed the deadly discharge on a swine-waste spill from Hopkins Ridge Farms. Like our state's hog factory with some 6,500 swine that was quickly and quietly allowed into the Buffalo watershed by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (cough) in 2012, Hopkins Ridge Farms is a similar factory, raising more than 8,000 pigs.
"The July 2012 spill polluted more than 20 miles of Beaver Creek, wiping out 148,283 fish and 17,563 freshwater mussels, according to reports from state biologists. Four years later, the creek's aquatic life has only begun to recover," the story read.
Reporters said authorities had yet to collect penalties and cleanup costs from the confinement's agribusiness-executive owners, who deny responsibility.
"As hog confinements like Hopkins Ridge spring up across Illinois, producing massive amounts of manure," the story continued, "a new pollution threat has emerged: spills that blacken creeks and destroy fish, damaging the quality of life in rural communities."
In Arkansas, C&H is beside the rural hamlet of Mount Judea with spray fields along Big Creek, a major tributary of the Buffalo.
The Tribune report noted: "The lagoons that hold pig manure until farms can use it as fertilizer sometimes crumble or overflow. Leaks gush from hoses and pipes that carry waste to the fields. And in some instances, state investigators found polluting was simply 'willful' as confinement operators dumped thousands of gallons of manure they couldn't use or sell as fertilizer."
In examining reports from Illinois and federal agencies, the Tribune found pollution incidents from hog confinements killed some 492,000 fish between 2005 through 2014, and said no other industry came close to causing the same amount of damage.
"Fish kills are an imperfect measure of the damage caused by businesses, as some Illinois waterways already are so contaminated that little if any aquatic life remains," the story said, "and some pollution sources degrade rivers without sending multiple fish to their deaths on a single day. Still, the fish kills do provide a gauge of the environmental impact of the modern pig-raising facilities that helped make Illinois the fourth-largest pork producer in the U.S."
While we rely upon our Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission and the Department of Environmental Quality to properly approve hog-factory permits and protect places as precious as our national river's watershed, Illinois' livestock factories are permitted by its Department of Agriculture, whose mission is to promote and regulate livestock agriculture, the story said.
Such large animal factories with multimillion-dollar annual revenue often pay only a few thousand dollars in fines after causing massive fish kills. Many go to court to challenge authorities. Since 2005, the Tribune reported, the Illinois attorney general filed or resolved at least 26 pollution lawsuits against such businesses. Some operators polluted repeatedly and multistate pork suppliers only rarely are held accountable, reporters also found.
Hopkins Ridge isn't the only hog factory accused of causing serious pollution, the Tribune reported. In 2009, the story said, "some 200,000 gallons of swine waste drained from a breach below the surface of one of the [4,500-hog R3E LLC] facility's massive earthen holding ponds. State biologists counted 110,436 dead fish along 19 miles of Spring Creek." That same facility in 2003 pumped manure onto fields through leaky pipes, killing all aquatic life along a one-mile stretch of Spring Creek.
This cautionary tale is told as Arkansans, who seek to protect their treasured Buffalo, wait to see how well our Department of Environmental Quality carries out its plan with a private contractor to drill for truths deep beneath one lagoon at C&H.
I know many people expect an honest, thorough testing from Director Becky Keogh's department to determine just what is the wet stuff pooling 120 feet underground that one Oklahoma geologist believes is likely hog waste.
Folks also expect this testing to be conducted as transparently as Keogh and her department publicly promised and I want to believe Gov. Asa Hutchinson would demand.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.
Editorial on 08/13/2016
By: Walter Wright
Download PDF
The United States Department of Interior National Park Service (“Park Service”) filed a July 29th appeal before the Arkansas Pollution Control & Ecology Commission (“Commission”) of a permit modification related to C & H Hog Farms, Inc. (“C & H”).
C & H operates a concentrated animal feeding operation in the Buffalo River Watershed pursuant to a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System General Permit.
The Park Service Appeal addresses a permit modification request. The appeal, in letter form, is authored by Kevin G. Cheri. Mr. Cheri is Park Service Superintendent of the Buffalo National River.
Mr. Cheri initially states in the appeal that:
We continue to be concerned that approval of this modification would serve to exacerbate the potential damage to the Buffalo River, the Little Buffalo River, and Big Creek.
He references previously filed Park Service comments regarding a possible permit modification for EC Farms and states in part:
. . .We feel that permitting EC Farms to spread manure generated by the C & H Hog Farms is premature and has failed to adequately take into account several significant factors. This is a highly controversial subject potentially affecting both area residents and more than one million visitors to Buffalo National River. Many of these local residents own or are employed by businesses that rely on visitation to support their livelihoods.
The National Park Service states what it characterizes as continuing concern that the “permit itself” should be reviewed “given that the areas underlain with karst terrain and the potential for significant affects to the watershed remain”. Also referenced are “due consideration” of real and potential impacts citing discoveries/interpretations of hydrogeological data suggesting waste conductivity in the underlying karst system beneath many of the proposed spreading fields. The Park Service contends that such action constitutes modification in the operation of C & H with the potential to introduce more waste into an “already stressed ecosystem”.
The letter concludes by requesting a hearing by the Commission on the merits of the permit modification.
A copy of the appeal letter can be downloaded here.
The Pork Network
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Arkansasonline
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality is reviewing a request by opponents of C&H Hog Farms in Newton County to reconsider who is allowed to observe a drilling project at the facility to determine whether hog manure ponds are leaking.
Richard Mays, a Heber Springs attorney representing the Buffalo River Coalition, sent a letter Thursday to Bob Blanz, air division manager at the Department of Environmental Quality, asking that the department either allow a coalition-requested geologist to observe the drilling, or disallow the two geologists with the Big Creek Research and Extension Team from observing.
“Members of [Big Creek Research] were not listed in the original list of participants, and we are extremely disturbed by this addition,” Mays wrote. “As you well know, it was the original work of [Big Creek Research], and its failure to follow up on evidence of a release … that has led to their investigation.”
The Big Creek Research and Extension Team has maintained that drilling was not needed because the data that suggested a possible leak was accompanied by contrasting clean data in nearby areas that team members said would have been affected by a leak.
The department elected to proceed with drilling in June after the Buffalo River Coalition asked the department to do so. C&H owners gave the department permission to conduct the research on the facility’s property, with co-owner Jason Henson saying that researchers wouldn’t find the pollution that hog farm opponents were looking for.
Earlier this year, a contractor doing electrical resistivity imaging for the Big Creek Research and Extension Team found what he believed to be higher than expected moisture levels below one of the ponds, which could indicate a leak. He said the problem could be addressed by drilling to discover what was causing the higher moisture levels or by installing plastic liners under the hog manure.
C&H has received a permit to install plastic liners but has not installed them yet.
The dispute over who can observe the research is the latest tussle between opponents of the hog farm and the Big Creek Research and Extension Team over perceived bias in the myriad studies taking place at C&H Hog Farms.
The Big Creek team maintains that it is impartial, while Buffalo River Coalition members insist that the team is biased in favor of C&H because of its affiliation with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Henson has argued that the research being conducted by hog farm opponents near the facility is biased.
The environmental department has permitted the drilling contractor, Harbor Environmental, to have geologist Tai Hubbard of Hydrogeology Inc. observe the proceedings as a third party, along with two researchers from the Big Creek Research and Extension Team. But the department denied the coalition’s earlier request to have a coalition hydrogeologist —University of Tulsa geology professor Bert Fisher — present for the drilling. The department has not responded to Thursday’s request.
“Regarding the inquiry from the Buffalo River Coalition, it is currently under review and we have not yet responded,” department spokesman Kelly Robinson said.
Why the department initially denied the coalition’s request was unclear Friday.
The Big Creek team declined to comment Friday through a spokesman, saying it was the Department of Environmental Quality’s decision.
The Department of Environmental Quality informed the coalition on Friday that drilling would begin no sooner than Aug. 15, as opposed to the previously announced Aug. 8, because of a scheduling conflict with Harbor Environmental’s subcontractor, Mays said.
C&H is permitted to hold up to 2,503 sows and 4,000 piglets. It has been opposed for the entirety of its three-year existence by environmental and recreation groups concerned about its potential to pollute the Buffalo National River. The farm is near Big Creek, about 6 miles from where the creek enters the Buffalo River.
The Department of Environmental Quality signed a contract with Little Rockbased Harbor Environmental for $75,000 to do the drilling and lab work, which was higher than the $20,000 to $30,000 estimate the department made before putting the work out for bids.
In June, the department said it had about $50,000 set aside in environmental settlement funds received for water studies for the project. Some additional funds would be provided by the department’s general operating budget, Robinson said.
Harbor Environmental will study the integrity of the manure pond liners by extracting samples of the ground through drilling.
The Buffalo River, the first national river, had 1.46 million visitors last year, the third-highest total since it became a national river and the highest since a record visitors count of 1.55 million was set in 2009. That year, visitors spent an estimated $62.2 million at local businesses, directly supporting 750 jobs and secondarily supporting 219 jobs.
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