7-city lecture tour targets hog farm

Buffalo River group fears large operation is just the fi rst

The Buffalo River Watershed Alliance is sponsoring a seven-city tour to spread the message that large-scale farming operations rarely show up alone.

Elva Kelly, a board member and spokesman for the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, said the guest speakers will appear in seven cities - Fayetteville, Yellville, Jasper, Eureka Springs, Harrison, Mountain Home and Little Rock.

Kelly said the goals of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance were, first, to fight for the closure of C&H Hog Farms, a large-scale concentrated animal-feeding operation in Mount Judea in Newton County. The group’s second objective is to preserve and protect the Buffalo National River and its surrounding watershed from environmental threats.

The watershed alliance is among the organizations and activists who have made several attempts to get the State Environmental Quality Department to revoke C&H Hog Farms’ operational permits over the past several months.

Rick Dove, a founding member of the Waterkeeper Alliance, is one of four speakers who will be presenting during the tour over the next week, beginning Friday in Fayetteville.

“For [the hog-farming] industry to make big dollars, they have to concentrate everything as tightly as possible,” said Dove, who was traveling Wednesday to Fayetteville from his home in North Carolina. “So when you get one factory farm, if you think that’s all you’re going to have, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. That’s not the way they operate. If they have their eye on one, expect hundreds or even thousands of operations to come.”

Dove was referring to C&H Hog Farms. Although hog farming in Arkansas is nothing new, C&H is the first such operation to receive a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit for water discharge from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.

The farm, which is permitted to house about 2,500 full-grown sows and as many as 4,000 piglets at one time, contracts with Cargill Inc., an international food production corporation.

The Waterkeeper Alliance is a nonprofit based in New York City, with the goal of championing “clean water and strong communities.”

“For the last 20 years, I’ve watched what factory farm swine operations have done to rivers, air, fish and wildlife,” Dove said. “It’s not a very pretty picture. In North Carolina, there’s a permanent ban on the waste lagoons and spray fields they use in these operations, so they’re going to other states.”

Although Dove said food producers like Cargill will likely begin trying to expand large-scale animal operations throughout the country, Katherine Benenati, a spokesman for the Environmental Quality Department, said Wednesday that the department hasn’t seen any evidence of such expansion in Arkansas.

“To date [C&H Hog Farms is] the only [such operation] in the state. We haven’t heard of any plans for additional notices of intent from other parties seeking coverage under the [concentrated-feeding] permit,” Benenati said in an email Wednesday.

Cargill spokesman Mike Martin has previously said that Cargill contracts with about 750 farms across the country, most of which are “finishing farms” that raise pigs until they reach an ideal slaughter weight of about 275 pounds. Mark Klein, a Cargill spokesman in Minneapolis, said Wednesday that Cargill currently contracts with 88 hog farms in Arkansas but has no plans to expand in the state.

The owners of C&H Hog Farms have agreements with nearby landowners to use approximately 630 acres of grasslands to apply waste from hogs as nutrient-rich fertilizer. This has raised concern among environmental activists because most of the underlying topography in Newton County is karst, which permits groundwater to flow freely through caves and rocky channels, and because some of the spray fields abut Big Creek, a major tributary to the Buffalo National River.

Calls to Jason Henson, co-owner and president of C&H, were not returned Wednesday.

Dove and the other speakers - Don Webb, a former owner of an animal-feeding operation in North Carolina; Larry Baldwin, the Waterkeeper Alliance’s coordinator on factory-farm matters in North Carolina; and Kelly Foster, an attorney with the alliance - were invited to speak in Arkansas by members of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, which organized earlier this year over concerns that pollution from C&H could damage not only the ecology of the Buffalo National River but also the economy that depends on it as well.

Groups including the watershed alliance, the Arkansas Canoe Club and the National Parks Conservation Association have argued that the original environmental assessment of the farm and the surrounding area, conducted by the Farm Service Agency’s Arkansas branch, was inadequate, and that the agency failed to coordinate with other agencies including the National Park Service and the Arkansas Fish and Game Commission on the hog farm’s permit, as required by law.

The watershed alliance also is party to a lawsuit filed in August against the federal government, claiming that both the Farm Service Agency and the Small Business Administration were negligent in providing loan guarantees for the construction of C&H Hog Farms.

Pete Nichols is director of the Waterkeeper Alliance. The current organization was founded in 1999, but traces its roots to 1966, when a coalition of New York fishermen, dismayed at the degraded state of the Hudson River, began looking for ways to reverse the industrial pollution. Using the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, the organization began collecting rewards from the federal government for turning in polluters, and used the proceeds to fund lawsuits against other, larger polluters. According to the website, the alliance connects more than 200 Waterkeeper organizations on six continents.

The tour’s first event is Friday at 6 p.m. at St. Paul’s Church, 224 N. East Ave. in Fayetteville. A fundraiser follows at the home of former Fayetteville Mayor Dan Coody.

Arkansas, Pages 11 on 10/24/2013

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