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http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2014/07/07/hutchinson-backs-existing-hog-operation-in-buffalo-watershed

Hutchinson wouldn't push to shut hog operation in Buffalo watershed

Posted By Max Brantley on Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 7:00 AM


Asa Hutchinson, the Republican candidate for governor, talked with Roby Brock at Talk Business about tax, business and education issues. He covered familiar ground, but his resistance to doing anything about an existing hog feeder operation in the Buffalo River watershed is worthy of note.

He said he supports efforts to protect Arkansas’ natural streams and has concerns about how a controversial large-scale hog farm permit was issued in north Arkansas near the Buffalo River. Hutchinson said he wouldn’t push to shut down the current hog farm operation that was approved in the area, but he wants to see the permitting process “tightened up” in the future.

“Obviously, it is a regulation that is important to protect our streams and our water quality that we value in our state. I grew up on the Spavinaw Creek drinking out of the stream,” he said. “But the farmers didn’t do anything wrong. The farmers went through the permit process, so don’t penalize the farmer. But first of all, my commitment is to protect the [Buffalo] river, and then secondly, you’ve got to make sure you tighten up the permitting process so that everyone has the notice – all the stakeholders, which they seemed not to have the last time, not adequate notice out there. So the farmers did absolutely nothing wrong. They followed the rules, so don’t penalize them. But let’s protect the Buffalo River and the quality of life that we so value in this state.”

For now, it is possible to have it both ways. But I wonder what candidates straddling this line will say if the pending lawsuit and/or pressure over concerns about pollution produce what many believe to be inevitable - either a failure to renew the farm's existing permit or a court holding that a proper environmental impact statement wasn't done. Would he cheer regulation then? Demand that the requirement for impact studies be eliminated? What?

The core question: Should hog feeder operations with tons of hog manure effluent be allowed in the Buffalo watershed, with its porous underlying geology?

 

Designer hog sees, hears better
Couple propagates, trademarks breed over 8 years
By Ryan McGeeney
Posted: July 6, 2014 at 2:27 a.m.

Ryan McGeeney
 
FAYETTEVILLE --When Rose Konold, co-owner of Mason Creek Farm in Fayetteville, roams the farm's pastures in the early afternoon to check on her hogs, she knows her star sow will recognize her instantly.

She knows Ruby can hear her when she calls and can see Konold a good ways off -- and that's by design.

Ruby is one of the farm's Boston Mountain Hogs, a unique breed that Konold and her husband, Glenn Woelk, have worked nearly eight years to perfect.

While most pigs have panoramic vision of more than 300 degrees, they typically have very poor eyesight. Combined with ears that flop down, making it difficult to hear, and layers of thick neck fat making it difficult to even look up at the horizon, pigs are often prone to startling, making them both anxious and stubborn. When Konold and her husband decided to breed their own trait-specific hogs, they took that into account.

"We have minimal equipment on the farm," Konold said. "We move everything by hand. Them being able to see us and recognize us in the pasture is really important. It makes them very easy to deal with."

The fact that the hogs have better sensory perception of their surroundings means they're startled less often, ultimately making the hogs -- the sows, in particular -- less stressed, Konold said.

"If she's an easygoing, nice, happy, fat sow, she's going to have a lot of babies."

After years of work, Konold and Woelk are trying to propagate the Boston Mountain Hog throughout the region through the creation of a breeders association -- one of the requirements of getting a U.S. Department of Agriculture trademark on the pig.

Beginning in 2006 with several Tamworth and Berkshire hogs -- two of the most popular breeds in North America -- Konold and Woelk began selectively breeding hogs with the intention of producing the most consistently substantial flanks and loins, along with a high degree of fatty "marbling."

Konold said the Tamworth breed is known as "the bacon hog," with deep sides and lack of fat.

"The downside of that is that it's not a naturally marbled breed, so the loin is just meat with no marbling," Konold said. "People tend to overcook pork, so what we were finding with the Tamworths was, they were complaining that their pork was too dry, especially if they like a thick cut or chop."

Charles Maxwell, a professor of animal science at the University of Arkansas' Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, said that specified traits are typically bred into, or out of, animals using the same theory of genetics developed by Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century.

While some traits, known as "single gene" traits, are relatively simple to breed in or out using the Mendelian method, other traits are more complex, Maxwell said, relying on a scale of "heritability." He said breeders run experiments to see what traits people want to be passed on to succeeding generations.

"How rapid a progress you can make toward getting a specific trait enhanced in the breed you're producing would depend upon the heritability of the trait, and the variability of that trait within the population of animals you're working with," Maxwell said. Most fertile sows typically produce two litters in an average year.

After eight years, Konold said she and her husband have now propagated three separate genetic lines, and are hoping to add a fourth, to continue propagating the breed indefinitely without risking the consequences of inbreeding.

Konold said the three existing lines were created using a "line breeding" technique, in which a boar is bred back to a daughter gilt, a young female pig that hasn't been bred, and again to a granddaughter gilt.

Further research led to a rotational breeding method popularized in Britain for the production of the Gloucester Old Spot breed of pig, which substantially reduces the probability of inbreeding depression, Konold said.

Earlier this year, Konold and Woelk applied to the USDA for a trademark on the Boston Mountain Hog. One requirement for trademarking a breed is establishing a breeders association, a 501(c)5 organization. While not tax-exempt, the incorporated association's structure allows it to be made up entirely of "managing members" without having to appoint a president, treasurer or other officers.

Konold held the first meeting of the Boston Mountain Hog Breeders Association on June 18 at the Pauline Whitaker Animal Science Center in Fayetteville. About 30 small-farm owners, including Katie Short, owner of Farm Girl Meats in Conway, attended to elect seven members to the board of directors.

Nicole Civita, a professor of law at UA specializing in food-related issues, said forming a breeders association helps producers of trademarked animal breeds maintain the quality of their brand.

"Trademarking a breed is obviously quite a bit different than trademarking your fast-food franchise, or another business, because what you're looking at is really a particular line of genetics that are going to be replicated, and are quite capable of being changed and altered through breeding," Civita said.

Most of Mason Creek Farm's 60 acres is pasture, consisting of fescue grass and clover, along with several moderately wooded areas. Although adult and adolescent hogs are separated by sex, they all have vast areas to roam, fenced in by single-strand low-voltage, electrified fences.

The pigs graze throughout the day and receive twice-daily feedings of grains and minerals from Konold. This differs significantly from feeding practices in concentrated animal feeding operations, in which animals are relatively confined and typically fed a steady diet of grain from weening to slaughter.

Over the past several years, Mason Creek has been selling Boston Mountain Hog pork to restaurants and other retailers throughout Arkansas and neighboring states. In 2013, Konold and Woelk began reaching out to other small farmers interested in propagating their own lines of the unique hog.

Short began working with Konold in late 2012, and is now propagating Ozark Mountain Hogs on her property.

Short said the Boston Mountain Hogs reach a target slaughter weight of 275-280 pounds within six months, putting them squarely between a Tamworth hog, which matures at about 5 months, and a Berkshire hog, which matures at 7 months. She said she looks for sows capable of raising large litters in relatively rugged environments.

"I jumped at the opportunity. They're fantastic pigs," Short said. "I favor a very naturalistic approach to farming in general, and especially with the pigs."

SundayMonday Business on 07/06/2014

Feeding Operations A Threat To Watershed
Posted: July 4, 2014 at 1:30 a.m.

I support the proposed ban of medium and large concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, in the Buffalo River watershed. This action would be a step in the right direction to protect our state from the well-documented harm a proliferation of swine CAFOs can cause to the water, air and public health of our state, especially the sensitive and highly porous karst terrain of our Buffalo River watershed.

I offer as support to this comment the American Public Health Association's Policy statement No. 20037, in which the APHA urges "federal, state and local governments and public health agencies to impose a moratorium on new concentrated animal feed operations until additional scientific data on the attendant risks to public health have been collected and uncertainties resolved" and to "initiate and support research to quantify more precisely the exposures to pollutants in air, water and soil emissions of CAFOs experienced by communities surrounding CAFOs, as well as to investigate the greater vulnerability of infants and children to harm from such pollutants, deriving from either greater exposure or increased toxicity."

Our state would do well to heed such warning statements and the numerous and growing concerns garnered from the proliferation of other swine industrialized farms in other states.

A project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health has reviewed 40 years' worth of peer-reviewed empirical studies on effects of industrial livestock production, including work by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, Ohio State University and the University of Missouri.

The evidence is abundant and clear. Until the unintended, but nevertheless real, problems of industrialized farming are squarely addressed, it would be wise to consider the growing evidence of harm to the environment and to public health as our state considers a ban of medium and large CAFOs in the sensitive karst terrain of the Buffalo River watershed.

Ginny Masullo

Fayetteville

Virus Plagues the Pork Industry, and Environmentalists
By STEPHANIE STROM  JULY 4, 2014
 

A deadly virus, porcine epidemic diarrhea, or PEDv, is estimated to have killed, on average, more than 100,000 piglets and young hogs each week since it first showed up in Iowa in May 2013, wreaking havoc on the pork industry.

The number of hogs slaughtered this year is down 4.2 percent, according to the United States Agriculture Department, to roughly 50 million from more than 52 million in the same period in 2013.

That drop drove up the price of bacon and center-cut pork chops sold in the United States by more than 12 percent in May, compared with the same period a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices for bacon rose more than 15 percent, and pork chops were up almost 13 percent.

“I’ve been a vet since 1981, and there is no precedent for this,” said Paul Sundberg, vice president for science and technology at the National Pork Board. “It is devastatingly virulent.”

A swine virus appeared in the United States last spring in Ohio and in weeks had spread to four more states. How it entered the country is unknown.Hog Farms Battling to Contain Deadly VirusAUG. 4, 2013
The fatality numbers are so staggering that environmentalists have grown worried about the effects of state laws requiring the burial of so many carcasses, and what that will do to the groundwater.


A farm in North Carolina with a sign warning of the presence of porcine epidemic diarrhea. Credit Rick Dove/Waterkeeper Alliance
“We know there is a lot of mortality from this disease, and we’re seeing evidence of burial in areas with shallow groundwater that a lot of people rely on for drinking water and recreation,” said Kelly Foster, senior lawyer at the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group.

Waterkeeper has asked the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to put a mass disposal plan into effect, and wants it to declare a state of emergency. On its website and YouTube, the organization has posted photos of dead piglets barely covered with earth and boxes overflowing with the bodies of young pigs, although it is unclear whether all were victims of the virus.

Steven W. Troxler, the state’s agricultural commissioner, has so far declined to seek an emergency declaration, saying in a letter to Waterkeeper that he thought existing disposal systems, including composting and the shipping of carcasses to rendering facilities, were up to the challenge. “We are not aware of any published scientific data that indicates any groundwater contamination as a result of PEDv,” according to the letter, which Mr. Troxler wrote in March.

Some of the huge hog operations in North Carolina have become ensnared in disputes over aerial photographing of farms, some of it unrelated to the spread of the virus, and industry officials have expressed concerns about the practice as well.

Three state lawmakers had proposed a bill that effectively would require state agencies to keep under lock and key any aerial photographs of agricultural operations that include global positioning coordinates. The move echoed an effort by United States Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, to impose a yearlong moratorium on the Environmental Protection Agency’s taking of aerial photographs of cattle feedlots and farming operations to monitor compliance with the Clean Water Act.

Mr. Johanns’s amendment, attached to a recent appropriations bill, was altered to require the E.P.A. to give the Senate more information about its aerial photography program.

Last summer, George Steinmetz, a photographer working for National Geographic, was arrested in Kansas under the state’s “ag gag” law after using a paraglider to take photographs of cattle feedlots and other agricultural operations for an article on the food industry.

Precisely how many pigs have died from the virus, which causes acute diarrhea that is virtually 100 percent lethal for piglets two to three weeks old, is unknown. The Agriculture Department did not require reporting of the disease until June 5, and it does not collect data on how many pigs the virus has killed, instead referring the question to the hog industry undefined which does not like to talk about it.


An aerial photograph taken in February showing hog carcasses at a farm in North Carolina. Credit Rick Dove/Waterkeeper Alliance

The National Pork Producers Council does not have a figure of its own but said it had heard that about eight million pigs had died of PEDv so far.

The U.S.D.A. said that as of May 28, nearly 7,000 samples submitted from 30 states to labs tested positive for the virus. Since May, there have been reports of pigs afflicted with the virus in a 31st state. “We do know that it is a particularly persistent virus, and it can survive long periods in less-than-ideal environments,” Joelle Hayden, a department spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently pledged $26.2 million for a variety of efforts to fight the virus, including development of a vaccine. The largest amount, $11.1 million, is to be allocated to helping hog producers with infected herds enhance their biosecurity practices.

The money is badly needed. In an illustration of how indiscriminate the disease is, the virus was found in Vermont in March on a traditional farm with a small drift of pigs raised largely on pasture. “I was not as surprised as one might think,” said Dr. Kristin Haas, the state veterinarian. “Even though in Vermont and most of the Northeast we don’t have the same type of commercial swine operations that you find in Iowa and North Carolina, there is still a tremendous amount of livestock moving in and out of the state.”

Michael Yezzi, proprietor of Flying Pigs Farm just across the border in New York State, said farmers suspected that the virus arrived on a truck from Pennsylvania. “It’s a very big concern because we have young stock on the farm, piglets born on the farm and piglets brought in from regional breeders,” Mr. Yezzi said. “We have to make sure the farms we’re working with don’t have it, because it’s going to kill everything under a certain age.

“Nobody wants to lose 10 to 20 percent of their yearly supply of pigs, whether that would be 150 for someone like me or 15,000 for someone in Iowa.”

Prevention is no mean feat. At the Hord Livestock Company in north-central Ohio, for instance, trucks returning from feed deliveries are cleaned and disinfected and then the trailers are baked to 160 degrees for 10 minutes. Drivers wear disposable bootees, and farm supervisors are not allowed to travel between Hord’s farms.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
And yet the company has just finished the four- to five-month process of eliminating the virus from one of its farms and is working to disinfect another and build up its sows’ immunity so they can pass it on to their piglets in their colostrum. The two farms had different strains of the virus, one more deadly than the other.


On average, more than 100,000 piglets and young hogs have been killed each week by the virus, which first showed up in Iowa in 2013. Credit Lane Hickenbottom/Reuters

Pat Hord, whose family owns the business, would not say how many of its animals died from PEDv. “Even though the economic hit is definitely significant, it’s probably the emotional side that’s the worst of it for me and my family and the team here,” Mr. Hord said. “All we do every day is take care of the animals the best that we can, but there’s nothing you can do for them when this disease hits undefined it’s out of your control.”

The Hords, who also raise cattle, use composting to dispose of animal carcasses, laying dead animals on a concrete slab, mixing in sawdust and rotating the mixture as it decomposes to aerate it. Mr. Hord said disposal of the increased number of dead pigs had not been a particular problem. “The good news, if there is any in this,” he said, “is that baby pigs are very small.”

Waterkeeper, however, says that the sheer volume of dead animals poses an environmental threat.

“They’re very secretive about how many pigs have died in North Carolina, but we estimate that it’s about two million over the last year or so,” said Rick Dove, a retired Marine Corps lawyer who has taken aerial photos of pig farms for Waterkeeper’s North Carolina affiliate. “They can’t move those pigs off the farm because it will spread disease, so they’re being buried in ground along the coastal waterways where the groundwater level is high.”

State regulation requires the bodies to be buried at least two feet underground, which in many places means the dead pigs come into contact with groundwater, Mr. Dove said.

The virus does not infect humans. As the corpses decompose, however, they can become hosts for bacteria and other pathogens.

Each state has its own requirements for the disposal of carcasses. Iowa, one of the largest hog-producing states, has a set of disposal methods for use during emergency disease outbreaks. They range from burial and rendering to use of alkaline hydrolysis, a highly specialized process using chemicals and heat to break down tissues.

An Iowa State University publication describing various processes for disposing of carcasses during an epidemic estimated that it would take a pit six feet deep, 300 feet long and 10 feet wide to hold 2,100 pigs, and the pit would need to be covered with three to six feet of dirt in a site marked by GPS coordinates and regularly inspected.

North Carolina issued a warning to a pig operation for having an open burial pit on its property, Ms. Foster, the Waterkeeper lawyer, said. The organization brought the issue, which it documented with aerial photos of the farm, to the attention of the state agriculture department.

The North Carolina Farm Bureau contends that such photographs create unnecessary expenses for its members. “Third parties are making complaints to environmental regulators, and using aerial photography to document what they say are violations,” said Paul Sherman, director of the farm bureau’s air and energy programs. “The vast majority of those cases are unfounded, but farmers still have to deal with it, it eats up a good part of a day or two and often the same complaints come up multiple times.”

Honolulu Star Advertiser

Industrial food complex hastening climate change

By Gary Hooser and Simon Russell

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Jul 02, 2014

In Hawaii, the debate over the safety of GMO products often centers around eating the food or being exposed to chemicals used in its production.

Both are important, even urgent, concerns. But there is another that may be just as urgent: the impact of industrial food systems on climate change.

Most experts agree that warning bells should sound when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels reach 350 parts per million (ppm). But according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, CO2 levels last year exceeded 400 ppm and are rising. Climate change is real and its impacts are far-reaching, especially for island communities such as ours.

The global food system is responsible for about half of greenhouse gases (GHG), according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Worldwide food production is generally put into two categories:

» The "industrial food complex," characterized by large-scale commodity crops (corn, soy, wheat, canola, sugar beet), concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) fed by those commodity crops, and the processed food industry which uses these two sources for raw materials.

» The "traditional food web," small-to-medium family farms, which do not grow commodity crops for industrial food. This includes pasture-fed animal operations, sustainable fish harvesting and organic farms.

According to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development's (IAASTD) Global Report undefined a joint program of the World Bank, World Health Organization and United Nations undefined traditional food produces 70 percent of what the world's human population eats but taxes resources only 30 percent. Conversely, industrial food provides 30 percent of the world's food and uses 70 percent of resources. This means industrial food is putting 5.4 times the GHG into the atmosphere for every calorie of food it produces compared to traditional food.

In the U.S., over 75 percent of food on chain grocery store shelves is from industrial food. The impacts on our planet:

» Industrial agriculture uses 26 times as much fossil fuel today to produce one calorie of food as it did in 1940.

» It takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of CAFO meat.

» CAFOs create effluent lagoons the size of lakes that emit enormous amounts of methane. Methane is 21 times more potent of a GHG than CO2.

» Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used in industrial farming off-gas nitrous oxide, which is 310 times stronger than CO2 as a GHG.

» As oceans become more acidic from GHG retention, a life-sustaining planet needs to rely increasingly on soil to function as its "kidneys," sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere. Industrial food, with its heavy reliance on herbicides, changes the microbial balance of soil, and mono-cropping doesn't allow soil to replenish.

How do we slow down this runaway train?

The first step is to restrict and regulate the actions of large corporations through the political process. Industrial food consists of the world's largest companies driven to further their profit agenda through international trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership while externalizing their costs onto the communities in which they operate.

The industrial food complex claims the mantra of "feeding the world." But according to the IAASTD, the traditional food web feeds the 2 billion people at the bottom of the economic ladder almost exclusively with no help from industrial food.

Bottom line: We need to counteract the misinformation put out by the multinational corporations, weed out the politicians working for industrial food, and elect leaders who will implement the more resource-conscious policies of traditional food systems.

Experts estimate it will take 50 years to restore natural soil content to pre-industrial farming levels, thus reducing GHG emissions by 23-30 percent.

It will take bold community action to start this reversal and reinvigorate inspired political leadership. We are hopeful. We believe Hawaii has already begun to turn the tide in that direction. And, like many people across these islands, we believe that if any community is up for this challenge, it is ours.

Click on link to read entire story.

EPA study of CAFO emissions grinds on with no end in sight U.S. EPA's nine-year effort to document air pollution at livestock operations is likely still many years from completion and unlikely to be as useful as industry and environmental groups had hoped.

Still incomplete is what EPA promised to do under a 2005 deal cut with livestock producers to identify air emissions for different types of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. The agency has said little about when the work will be done or when it will start three related regulatory tasks, according to sources outside EPA who track the issue closely.

The long wait for results is excruciating and frustrating for stakeholders.

"We just want them to come up with something," said Michael Formica, environmental counsel at the National Pork Producers Council.

CAFOs for dairy cattle, swine, poultry and other food animals hold thousands of large animals or hundreds of thousands of smaller animals.

Most of the regulatory focus has been on CAFOs' water pollution. But the CAFOs' barns, feedlots and manure storage areas also foul the air with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and other contaminants.

Animal waste accounts for about half of total natural and man-made ammonia in the United States, according to a 2003 National Research Council report. Those emissions are associated with health effects that range from throat irritation to major cardiovascular diseases and increased rates of morbidity. Many are also precursors to other air quality problems, such as smog and acid rain.

Environmentalists have long called on EPA to put in place Clean Air Act requirements subjecting CAFOs to the same air standards that apply to coal-fired power plants and other big industrial emitters.

"Without question they are a stationary source, they emit a lot of pollutants, and they should be getting permits," said Brent Newell, general counsel at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, a California nonprofit that has battled the livestock industry over pollution in court in California.

But livestock producers say agricultural operations are more complicated than smokestack industries and more difficult to regulate. And even those pressing for strict CAFO regulation acknowledge that measuring exactly how much pollution is being caused by an individual operation and how that is affecting neighboring communities is a difficult task.

"One piece of why it's so difficult to regulate them is that they don't fit neatly into the boxes of the statutes that apply to other industrial sectors, like the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act," Earthjustice attorney Eve Gartner said. "There's not a smokestack you can measure, they're not a pipe where you can see what kind of water is being discharged."

EPA has historically approached the regulation of CAFO air emissions through right-to-know laws that require the public reporting of potentially harmful air emissions but that don't punish facilities for exceeding limits.

To help make it easier for livestock industries to comply with those laws, EPA announced an unprecedented agreement in 2005 with pork, dairy and egg producers in which the agency agreed not to sue CAFO operators for violating air pollution laws in exchange for the CAFOs funding a two-year air emissions study.
...

http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2014/jun/21/epa-finds-no-issues-at-c-h-hog-farms-20/

EPA finds no issues at C&H Hog Farms
Mount Judea operation, area tested
By Ryan McGeeney

A recent report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said inspectors found no areas of concern on or around C&H Hog Farms, the concentrated animal feeding operation raising swine in Newton County.
The report, signed June 12, is based on an unannounced three-day inspection of the facility conducted April 15-17. The inspection was conducted by EPA Region 6 inspectors Carl Wills and Chris Lister. EPA Region 6 is headquartered in Dallas.

C&H Hog Farms, located in Mount Judea, holds the state's first and only Regulation 6 general permit for animal liquid waste. The farm is permitted to house approximately 2,500 sows and as many as 4,000 piglets at one time.
The production facility where the piglets are birthed and weened sits on a 40-acre parcel, and is surrounded by an additional 630 acres of grassland upon which the farm's owners are permitted to spread an estimated 2 million gallons of manure generated annually by the hogs. Several of the fields associated with the farm abut Big Creek, about six miles from the stream's confluence with the Buffalo National River.

The farm's owners, Jason Henson and his cousins Richard and Philip Campbell, are contract growers for Cargill Inc.

Water samples were collected from more than a dozen sites in the area and were tested for nutrients as well as E. coli and other pathogens. E. coli levels ranged from 18 to 500 colonies per 100 milliliters of water, according to the report. Acceptable limits of E. coli in "extraordinary resource waters" such as the Buffalo National River are set at 298 colonies per 100 milliliters of water, according to the commission's Regulation 2, which governs water quality standards in Arkansas.

Evan Teague, environmental regulation specialist coordinator for the Arkansas Farm Bureau, said elevated levels of E. coli in single-instance "grab samples" like those used in the EPA inspection are not unusual.
"You're always going to have some numbers that are higher than others; that's just the nature of E. coli in the environment," Teague sad. "Even in completely natural settings, you'll have high numbers that exceed water quality standards; that's just the nature of natural watersheds, particularly when you have wildlife in them."

Katherine Benenati, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, said that EPA inspections of sites aren't unusual, even on sites that have been repeatedly visited by state inspectors. She also said that results of the recent inspection wouldn't necessarily change the department's posture regarding its own inspections of C&H Hog Farms.
"The EPA inspection wouldn't automatically have a bearing on the frequency of our own inspections," Benenati said in an email Friday. "Keep in mind, we do respond to all complaints and would follow up on any involving the facility."

The chief concern voiced by Bob Cross, president of the Ozark Society, and others has consistently been the potential pollution of both surface and ground water from the farm's hog waste. The waste is held in two outdoor lagoons that have a combined operational capacity of about 3.5 million gallons, with additional capacity to prevent spillage in the event of severe, sustained rainfall.

Because the underlying geology of Newton County is karst limestone, a failure of lagoons' clay liners could send millions of gallons of hog waste into rapidly moving ground water, Cross has warned.

According to the April EPA inspection, the lagoons appeared to be in good order, as were other aspects of the production facility.

Cross and others have also cautioned that because of the farm's proximity to Big Creek, even normal amounts of rainfall could wash freshly applied manure into an open waterway and on to the Buffalo National River. Hog waste is both nutrient-rich, with phosphorous and nitrogen, and a common carrier of pathogens including E. coli.

Cross said that although inspections of C&H Hog Farm have not detected any major problems with the facility, he was still concerned about potential hazards posed by the farm's proximity to the Buffalo National River.
"While I don't see any red flags in the report, it does nothing to lessen my concerns about the farm," Cross said.

NW News on 06/21/2014

Note: The EPA Inspection Report may be found on the BRWA Documents page, immediately following the ADEQ Inspection Reports.