‘Shut down’ if it pollutes
 
By Mike Masterson
This article was published March 15, 2014

Gov. Mike Beebe told several members at a protest last week that the controversial hog factory (that his state agency wrongheadedly permitted in the Buffalo National River watershed) would be “shut down” if it pollutes the precious Ozark stream.

His remarks reportedly came in casual conversation with some of the estimated 150 Arkansans who rallied last Saturday at the John Q. Hammons Convention Center in Rogers to protest the home to as many as 6,500 swine in the watershed.

During two hours together (dozens also joined the crowd in protest of SWEPCO’s plan to run a 52-mile-long high-voltage transmission line through the mountainous forests in Benton and Carroll counties), the gathering seemed appreciative that Beebe, at the request of former Fayetteville Mayor Dan Coody, stepped outside to speak encouragingly.

Lorel Hoffman of Mayfield said she even asked the governor to repeat that comment in front of several others, which he did. “I asked what the penalty would be if hog contamination was discovered in the river,” she said. “And that’s exactly what he said. It would be shut down.”

Well, then, I say hooray for the governor!

Beebe’s comment came shortly before he spoke at the annual Governor’s Conference on Tourism. Strangely, it wasn’t reported by the TV news crews on scene, nor did his remark make the news of the day.

It certainly was one significantly newsworthy statement in my faded journalism books. The only other remark I’ve seen coming from Beebe’s office (since his own Department of Environmental Quality quickly and quietly allowed this factory) came from his aide who told me last summer that if Beebe “had his druthers,” he wouldn’t have issued the permit.

So just to make sure I still have this continually twisting saga straight, let’s recap my opinions of this nationally publicized mess together: The Department of Environmental Quality, which operates with a gubernatorial-appointed director, permitted a large hog factory, without allowing sufficient advance public notification or hearings, in the worst possible location without requiring preliminary water-quality tests paid for by those seeking to profit from the venture (multinational Cargill Inc. and C&H Hog Farms).

Neither the U.S. National Park Service nor the Department of Environmental Quality’s own office in Newton County say they were informed that this permit was approved until after the fact. The state agency’s director, Teresa Marks, told me that even she didn’t know her folks had issued the factory’s permit until it was a done deal.

After finally reviewing the permit, the Park Service complained long and loud, saying about 40 flaws were discovered in its pages. Other agencies and state and national associations were none too pleased with the way the permit glided through without sufficient notification or warning.

It’s important to remember that this pristine river in “God’s Country” accounts for about 40 million tourism dollars to the state annually. And since becoming the country’s first National River in 1972 it’s become a very popular recreational spot for so many people and their families across Arkansas. I’d guess the planet holds at least 190 billion spots more suitable for a mega-waste-producing hog factory.

When the state and national alarms finally were sounded after the fact, the Department of Environmental Quality threw up its hands and squealed Oops, too late! There was nothing that could stop this since the owners had jumped through all required hoops.

So former University of Arkansas geoscientist and professor John Van Brahana (bless the man) took it upon himself with fellow volunteers to quickly begin testing baseline water quality in and around this factory and Big Creek, a tributary of the Buffalo. Brahana shamefully has received no support or funding from the state or the university.

Meanwhile, the governor did see to it that $340,000 was appropriated for the University of Arkansas (more state institutions) to conduct water-quality testing. But it turned out the factory owners and managers didn’t even have legal authority to list three of the waste-distribution fields cited in the permit. And apparently the Department of Environmental Quality had known that. Many then wondered (with that erroneous information confirmed) why the permit hasn’t been withdrawn.

The Cargill-supported factory now had one of its many swine-feeder factories owned by a local family with a federally insured loan (being questioned in an ongoing federal civil suit) and regulated by a state agency that issued its permit, even though the governor said he wouldn’t have done that given his druthers and that the factory will be shut down if it fouls the water. What a mess.

Moreover, taxpayers are footing a further bill for the study by our state institution of higher education to detect whether this state-approved hog factory has contaminated our only national river. What a great country where taxpayers back private hog factories supported by multibillion-dollar multinational private corporations using private family operators in grossly inappropriate tourism locations.

One reader admirably summarized the feelings of (probably most) Arkansans this way: “I can’t think of an issue which is a larger embarrassment to the state’s regulators, and suddenly, a group from the university is there to accept the Legislature’s money, show their technological sophistication, and divert the attention.”

From the Log Cabin Democrat, Conway, AR:

The Opinion Pages 

The Unhealthy Meat Market
MARCH 12, 2014
 
Nicholas Kristof
 
Where does our food come from? Often the answer is Tyson Foods, America’s meat factory.

Tyson, one of the nation’s 100 biggest companies, slaughters 135,000 head of cattle a week, along with 391,000 hogs and an astonishing 41 million chickens. Nearly all Americans regularly eat Tyson meat undefined at home, at McDonalds, at a cafeteria, at a nursing home.

“Even if Tyson did not produce a given piece of meat, the consumer is really only picking between different versions of the same commoditized beef, chicken, and pork that is produced through a system Tyson pioneered,” says Christopher Leonard, a longtime agribusiness journalist, in his new book about Tyson called “The Meat Racket.”

Leonard’s book argues that a handful of companies, led by Tyson, control our meat industry in ways that raise concerns about the impact on animals and humans alike, while tearing at the fabric of rural America. Many chicken farmers don’t even own the chickens they raise or know what’s in the feed. They just raise the poultry on contract for Tyson, and many struggle to make a living.

Concerned by the meat oligopoly’s dominance of rural America, President Obama undertook a push beginning in 2010 to strengthen antitrust oversight of the meat industry and make it easier for farmers to sue meatpackers. The aim was grand: to create a “new rural economy” to empower individual farmers.

Big Meat’s lobbyists used its friends in Congress to crush the Obama administration’s regulatory effort, which collapsed in “spectacular failure,” Leonard writes.

Factory farming has plenty of devastating consequences, but it’s only fair to acknowledge that it has benefited our pocketbooks. When President Herbert Hoover dreamed of putting “a chicken in every pot,” chicken was a luxury dish more expensive than beef. In 1930, whole dressed chicken retailed for $6.48 a pound in today’s currency, according to the National Chicken Council. By last year, partly because of Tyson, chicken retailed for an average price of $1.57 per pound undefined much less than beef.

Costs came down partly because scientific breeding reduced the length of time needed to raise a chicken to slaughter by more than half since 1925, even as a chicken’s weight doubled. The amount of feed required to produce a pound of chicken has also dropped sharply.

And yet.

This industrial agriculture system also has imposed enormous costs of three kinds.

First, it has been a catastrophe for animals. Chickens are bred to grow huge breasts so that as adults they topple forward and can barely breathe or stand.

“These birds are essentially bred to suffer,” says Laurie Beacham of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which argues that there’s an inherent cruelty in raising these “exploding chickens.”

 
Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human by the age of two months would weigh 660 pounds.

Second, factory farming endangers our health. Robert Martin of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health notes that a farm with 10,000 hogs produces as much fecal waste as a small city with 40,000 people, but the hog operation won’t have a waste treatment plant. Indeed, the hogs in a single county in North Carolina produce half as much waste as all the people in New York City, Martin says.

 


Another health concern is that antibiotics are routinely fed to animals and birds to help them grow quickly in crowded, dirty conditions. This can lead to antibiotic resistant infections, which strike two million Americans annually (overuse of antibiotics on human patients is also a factor, but four-fifths of antibiotics in America go to farm animals).

Third, this industrial model has led to a hollowing out of rural America. The heartland is left with a few tycoons and a large number of people struggling at the margins.
 
Leonard writes in his book that in 68 percent of the counties where Tyson operates, per capita income has grown more slowly over the last four decades than the average in that state. We may think of rural America as a halcyon pastoral of red barns and the Waltons, but today it’s also a land of unemployment, poverty, despair and methamphetamines.

It’s easy to criticize the current model of industrial agriculture, far harder to outline a viable alternative. Going back to the rural structure represented by the inefficient family farm on which I grew up in Oregon isn’t a solution; then we’d be back to $6.48-a-pound chicken.

But a starting point is to recognize bluntly that our industrial food system is unhealthy. It privatizes gains but socializes the health and environmental costs. It rewards shareholders undefined Tyson’s stock price has quadrupled since early 2009 undefined but can be ghastly for the animals and humans it touches. Industrial meat has an acrid aftertaste.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 13, 2014, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Unhealthy Meat Market. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

By JAIME ADAME ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Posted: March 12, 2014 at 6 a.m.
University of Arkansas researchers will use radar technology and work with outside experts to monitor any environmental effects of a large new hog farm on the “fairly pristine” Big Creek watershed, the group told a packed-house crowd Tuesday.

About 150 attended the information session, with several intent on asking prickly questions of researchers at the Fayetteville campus presentation. Some attendees asked how consultants were chosen for the project and questioned the intent of the Big Creek Research Team, whose work is being paid for with $340,000 in public funds approved by the state Legislature after a public outcry over the C&H Hog Farms site in Newton County.

The farm, described previously as a 6,500-pig operation, received approval from state environmental regulators in August 2012. Despite the farm’s state-approved waste management plans, critics last year began to voice concerns that manure from the Mount Judea farm might contaminate streams or other water sources. Big Creek is a tributary to the Buffalo National River, whose wildlife and outdoor recreation opportunities draw tourists.

“We’re not a regulatory agency,” Andrew Sharpley, research team leader, told the crowd near the beginning of an approximately hour-long presentation filled with detailed charts and maps. “We are here doing this research and this monitoring as part of finding the science, and the science will dictate what goes from here.”

Sharpley, a soils and water quality professor, went on to emphasize how researchers over the past several months carefully decided where and how to take measurements. For example, laser technology driven around the fields near the farm help researchers precisely measure changes in elevation. This lets them know where to put stations measuring soil and water conditions, because “water’s going to go downhill,” he said.

Because researchers wanted to avoid disturbing private property and directly changing natural land features, radar provided a peek beneath the land’s surface. Sharpley said data from the radar generally confirmed karst characteristics, or patchy limestone areas where water flows more easily.

“It looks like nice, flat green pasture from when you’re standing there, but obviously below the surface it’s quite complicated,” Sharpley said.

The study involves taking detailed measurements in three fields, two of which will be spread with manure from C&H Hog Farms. One of the fields is near Big Creek, while the other is at a higher elevation away from the creek, with a different type of soil formation and more prominent karst characteristics. The third field was originally meant to be used for manure spreading, but a mistake involving maps submitted with the farm’s permit application now leaves the field as a place for researchers to gather baseline data.

Manure will also be spread on areas not being directly studied by the research team.

Before farm operations kick into high gear, researchers have been taking quality samples, some of which go back to October.

“The levels of nutrients that we see here are typical of these fairly pristine type of watersheds,” Sharpley said. He told the crowd that he believed the farm spread the first manure at the end of December. However, Sharpley said in an interview after the presentation that the manure spreading has yet to take place in the fields being closely monitored.

Water samples will be taken “from above and below the farm on Big Creek,” Sharpley said, adding that the group will also monitor other water sources like springs and ephemeral streams.

Officials with the United States Geological Survey will also assist with the research, Sharpley said.

In describing the origins of the project, Sharpley stressed the amicable relationship between farm operators and state agriculturalagents.

“The first thing was that the owner of that farm went over to our county extension agent over in Newton County and asked for help,” Sharpley said.

Also under study are manure treatments at the farm to more easily export it as a resource to other farmers.

“Obviously, we won’t solve this, we’re not that naive. But we hope we will provide some science to go a little further on this pathway to get sustainability,” Sharpley said.

However, some in the crowd expressed displeasure with all or part of the research team’s efforts during a 25 minute question-and-answer session.

One topic of criticism came after Sharpley said some consultants will come from outside the state. Someone asked whether anyone associated with Cargill - the ultimate buyer of the farm’s pigs - will be a project consultant, but Sharpley said the people involved will eventually all be named publiclyand that they are affiliated with universities.

Sharpley said Cargill met with researchers early on. However, he stressed that the team made its decisions on the study independently.

“I chose to not consider what they suggested because I didn’t think it was sound science,” Sharpley said.

Organic farmer Dane Schumacher expressed concern about the researchers’ talk about studying farm sustainability solutions.

“That seems different than a group independent and unbiased to find how this hog farm might contaminate the river,” Schumacher said.

Sharpley replied that three-quarters of the research effort involves “assessing water quality impact.”

Researchers said they have funding for one year of study, agreeing with a questioner that funding to extend the study over more time will be needed to best assess any environmental impacts of the farm.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 03/12/2014

	Governor’s Conference on Tourism Should Address C & H Hog Farms Impacts on Buffalo National River, Local Economy Coalition Opposed to Factory Hog Farm to Join Rally Outside Conference
	On March 11, Arkansas’ Governor Beebe will speak at the annual Governor’s Conference on Tourism. Simultaneously, outside the conference, individuals from across the state plan to rally in support of the preservation of Buffalo National River and the tourism the river supports throughout Arkansas. The Buffalo River Coalition – which includes the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, Ozark Society, National Parks Conservation Association, and Arkansas Canoe Club – plans to attend in support of the Buffalo with information on the C & H Hog Farms threat and media availability with coalition spokespeople. The Buffalo National River is consistently ranked as the #2 tourist destination in Arkansas and is an economic engine for the Ozarks, where it supports $44 million in spending and 610 jobs annually. C & H, located a few miles upstream on one of the largest tributaries of the Buffalo, threatens that important source of income. Teresa Marks, director of Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ), has publicly stated that waste from this concentrated animal feeding operation will likely reach Buffalo National River. When that happens, tourism will suffer.  Tourism brings in approximately $6 billion dollars and employs almost 60,000 people in Arkansas. It generates $1.1 billion in salaries. C & H Hog Farms supports 6 jobs. The coalition urges members of the media to ask the difficult questions that need to be addressed around C & H Hog Farms, including: ·       Why was this massive hog factory permitted with little to no public input, and why won’t the state reopen the permitting process to allow the public to weigh in given the outcry on threats to the river and region? ·       Why is Arkansas so willing to jeopardize 610 tourism-related jobs for the six jobs produced by C & H Hog Farms? ·       Why was the University of Arkansas instructed to use taxpayer money to monitor some manure spray fields that were not included in C & H’s nutrient management plan and general permit? The Buffalo River Coalition was formed to protect the Buffalo National River from this urgent factory hog farm threat. The coalition filed a lawsuit in August of 2013 challenging the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency (FSA) and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) for their inadequate review and improper authorization of loan guarantee assistance to C&H. More recently, the coalition pointed out additional misrepresentations around the permitting of C & H Hog Farms and called on ADEQ to reopen the permitting process. Those calls have been ignored by the state.
	Members of the National Parks Conservation Association, the Ozark Society, the Arkansas Canoe Club, and the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, along with concerned citizens and business owners. Media availability from coalition members, including: ·       Gordon Watkins, Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, 870-446-5783 ·       Jack Stewart, Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, 870-715-0260 ·       Dane Schumacher, Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, 870-545-3120 ·       Robert Cross, Ozark Society, 479-466-3077 ***For interview requests, please check in at the Buffalo River Coalition information table located near the rally.***
	Tuesday, March 11th, 11:30-1:00CT
	Governor’s Conference on Tourism Embassy Suites and John Q. Hammons Convention Center 3303 Pinnacle Hills Parkway – Rogers, AR 72758 ###

Posted on: March 3 2014

Addendum issued for Big Creek first quarterly report
 Newton County Times

Posted: Tuesday, March 4, 2014 11:00 am
 
FAYETTEVILLE  The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture's Big Creek Research and Extension Team has issued an addendum to the first quarterly report on its study of a hog farm in the Buffalo River Watershed.


The addendum correctly identifies the fields sampled by the team. The addendum, available at http://arkansasagnews.uark.edu/bigcreekreport.quarter1addendum.pdf, addresses maps in the original report issued Jan. 31, that contained fields that were incorrectly identified in the original management plan for the C&H Hog Farm in Mount Judea.

Is it profiling?
By Mike Masterson
Posted: March 4, 2014 at 2:26 a.m.

Questions for candidates
In the ongoing campaign for governor between Republican Asa Hutchinson and Democrat Mike Ross, I believe each candidate during their statewide campaign stops should be asked some simple yet hardball questions about the state’s wrongheaded permitting of that hog factory in our treasured Buffalo National River watershed. Below are six I feel they each should answer honestly rather than in typical political doublespeak.
In fact, they are welcome to respond in this space at my email address and I will gladly tell the state.
What legislation would you support to protect our land and rivers in karst areas of north Arkansas from factory hog farms?
What’s your specific position on the role of the state Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, the Department of Environmental Quality, and the governor’s office toward adequately protecting Arkansas’ precious groundwater and surface waters from agricultural pollution?
Which is more significant to you, protecting the business of the Cargill-sponsored hog factory or the state’s tourism business of the Buffalo River?
What would you specifically do to resolve the ongoing matter of this hog factory versus the pollution of the Buffalo River?
Would you take whatever actions are necessary to reinstate the moratorium on factory hog farms in the state’s ultra-sensitive karst regions, in particular, for the Buffalo National River watershed?
Would you appoint members to the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission with ties to the agricultural industry, or those with scientific/ environmental backgrounds?