NWAonline

Bill seeks to diminish oversight of hog farms

On Thursday, Senate Bill 550 passed the Arkansas Senate Agricultural Committee. A Farm Bureau agent sat next to the bill's sponsor.

This bill is meant to gut the regulations that got the C&H Hog Farm permit denied.

This bill weakens existing water and air quality regulations regarding liquid waste operations, which are primarily confined hog feeding operations (often known as CAFOs) such as the controversial swine C&H hog factory in the Buffalo River watershed.

Hog CAFOs oversight would be moved out of Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality's purview into the more lax Arkansas Natural Resource Commission.

SB550 undermines efforts to protect the Buffalo National River from degradation due to swine CAFOs.

There are numerous reasons to implore our governor and legislators to stop this highly ambiguous and vague legislation. Not small among them:

• Public participation and transparency is significantly weakened. It is unclear as to what the public notification and appeal processes would look like.

• The moratorium on swine CAFOs in the Buffalo River watershed could become moot. With the weaker oversight this bill proposes, we could have more and even dirtier CAFOs in the Buffalo's watershed. And, more and dirtier ones in the rest of the state.

• This purposefully weakened code of practice would have an impact on the state's drinking water sources as well. Imagine CAFOs going in near those sources.

• Enforcement is gutted, as inspections will require at least 72-hour notice before conducting a site visit. The bill even acknowledges that resources council does not have the technical ability to regulate when it says that ADEQ will be consulted for violations or modifications.

This is chaos, not efficiency, as the Farm Bureau claims. There's more, a lot more, that's wrong with SB550. It damages years of effort to protect the Buffalo River from swine factory farming and threatens all the waters of Arkansas.

SB550 will be on the Senate agenda Monday, March 18.

Ginny Masullo

Fayetteville