When it comes to protecting the Buffalo National River from raw waste generated by that controversial hog factory at Mount Judea, it will be interesting to see if the U.S. Farm Service Agency and the Small Business Administration have yet again fallen short after their second draft attempt to produce a credible court-ordered Environmental Assessment.

The agencies' original assessment, deemed unacceptable last year by U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall, led earlier this year to their offering an initial draft revision that drew 1,858 public comments. That reaction prompted them to request until March 2016 to complete this most recent draft. And somehow, they managed to complete and release it more than three months early and just before Christmas. How does one spell politically calculated?

The environmental assessment is a required segment of the federal loan guarantees the factory received from both agencies before it began operating in 2012 with the blessings of our state's Department of Environmental Quality (waaaait for it ... cough).

Yet again, as they had in their initially discredited draft and subsequent revision, the agencies in their final draft determined "no significant impact" to the watershed from the factory. In other words, all smells just great.

Initiated and supplied for two years by Cargill Inc., the factory confines 6,500 swine and continually spreads their raw waste across fields near Big Creek, a major tributary of the Buffalo flowing 6.8 miles downstream.

The latest draft findings failed to include the two years of in-depth studies and voluntary contributions of UA Professor Emeritus John Van Brahana and his team. He's a nationally respected expert of geosciences and the type of fractured karst terrain that underlies the Buffalo watershed.

A news account by reporter Emily Walkenhorst summarized the latest effort to justify support for the factory loan by saying the agencies cited current data and the restrictions placed on the factory's state permit to justify their draft conclusion.

This final draft version cites material gathered during a five-year study by the state-funded Big Creek Research and Extension Team from the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture and the National Park Service to argue there's no evidence of any impairment to the river or environment.

Not surprisingly, Gordon Watkins, director of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, said he was unimpressed with this latest attempt. As of last week, Watkins, Brahana and others involved in the federal lawsuit that originally contested the inadequate assessment in Marshall's courtroom were closely examining the contents. The early signals I was getting said they had a lot of problems. I'm sure I'll have lots more to say about that when they address specific matters within this latest draft.

As Judge Marshall has rightly assessed, this matter is far too critical for our state and nation to settle for a "you'll do" when it comes to protecting the country's first national river. It's a rare asset that records show routinely draws over one million visitors and 55 million tourism and recreational dollars to an economically deprived Ozarks region each year. The hog factory employs nine and pays about $7,000 in property taxes, the news story also reads.

In the latest story, I suppose I was most appalled that the state agency responsible for maintaining and ensuring environmental quality doesn't have numeric standards for nutrients in our streams and waters.

"To date, ADEQ does not have sufficient data to assess for nutrient impairment on Big Creek or the Buffalo River," is how Ellen Carpenter, chief of the agency's water division, explained it.

Suppose water-quality data assessment might be an ability that would serve our state well? The capacities necessary for the Department of Environmental Quality to be able to accurately assess the level of purity and contamination in our streams and lakes sounds reasonable enough to this layman. Anything less sounds like a hollow (perhaps politicized) excuse.

Meanwhile, everyone who reveres this national river as much as we do has until Jan. 18 to send along even more than 1,858 comments, opinions or suggestions about this latest draft assessment to CHHogFarmcomments@cardnogs.com or C&H Hog Farm Comments, c/o Cardno, 501 Butler Farm Road, Suite H, Hampton, Va. 23666. The draft is available online at the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance website.

I'm buying my stamps today. I'd suggest mentioning the credible work of Dr. John Van Brahana, who was the first on the scene to begin taking baseline measurements and has since been measuring water quality and subsurface water flow that transports rainfall from waste-laden spray fields through the many limestone openings that lead into Big Creek.

Any report that purposefully ignores these relevant findings in my view can't possibly be credible.

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