Members of the scientific research team monitoring environmental conditions around a Newton County hog farm will present their initial findings and discuss the project’s goals Tuesday at a public forum in Fayetteville.
University of Arkansas professor Andrew Sharpley, leader of the Big Creek Research Team, and several fellow researchers will conduct a seminar at the Hembree Auditorium in the Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences Building on the Fayetteville campus.
The presentation was originally scheduled for Tuesday but was postponed because of winter weather and icy roads.
The research team began a long-term study of soil, water and other environmental aspects around C&H Hog Farms, a large concentrated animal-feeding operation in Mount Judea. The farm, which is permitted to house approximately 2,500 adult sows and as many as 4,000 piglets at any one time, is the first and only such operation in Arkansas to receive a general operational permit under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. The farm owners have a contract with Cargill Inc. to provide weaned piglets for pork production at other facilities outside the state.
C&H Hog Farms, and the process by which the owners received permit approval from several state agencies, has been under public scrutiny since late 2012. The farm owners have leased approximately 630 acres of grassland on which they’re permitted to spread about 2 million gallons of hog waste annually, and portions of the land abut Big Creek, about 6 miles from its confluence with the Buffalo National River.
The farm’s proximity to the river, along with the karst (porous limestone) geology of most of Newton County and the Ozarks, has led to concerns by environmentalists throughout the state and beyond that phosphorous nutrients from the hog waste, and possibly the waste itself, may infiltrate area surface water or groundwater, polluting the Buffalo National River and damaging the ecology and the nearly $44 million tourism economy that depends on the river.
In September, state legislators appropriated about $340,000 from the state’s rainy day fund to pay for the first year of a soil and water study near the hog farm. Sharpley said Friday that although the study, which began gathering water and soil samples in late 2013, currently only has funding for one year, the standard length of such a study is five years.
“Our initial goal was five years, which is pretty much what [the Environmental Protection Agency] recommends to establish whether there’d be a lasting effect,” Sharpley said.
Rep. Warwick Sabin, D-Little Rock, who was instrumental in securing the initial funding for the study, said Friday that he was not aware of any current discussion of renewing funding for the study beyond the end of 2014.
“But I’m certainly interested in seeing the study continued, whether funded by the state, Cargill, or another appropriate private entity,” Sabin said. “It’s the least we can do, considering how this farm came about in the first place, and the questions that remain as to whether similar projects in protected watersheds should be allowed to happen.”
Matt DeCample, a spokesman for Gov. Mike Beebe, said the governor’s original intent, with respect to ongoing funding of the study, was that lawmakers would reassess in January 2015, and decide at that time whether to continue funding.
In February, the research team issued its first quarterly report, outlining data-collection locations and methods used in the study. According to the report, researchers had permission to gather data on three of the 17 leased grassland fields surrounding the farm.
According to the report, the research team used ground-penetrating radar to assess karst structures beneath several of the fields, conducted “fine grid” soil sampling and preliminary water-quality sampling in Big Creek, both upstream and downstream from the farm, all to establish “base-line data” for the study. Although the farm operators began spreading manure in late December, they have not yet applied manure to any of the fields being watched in the study, Sharpley said.
About a week after the quarterly report was published, a coalition of environmental activists lodged a complaint with the State Department of Environmental Quality, asserting that several fields in the farm’s nutrient-management plan, which outlines how farm operators will dispose of the hog waste, were either partially or completely misidentified in the document. Two of the three misidentified fields also were being used for testing by Sharpley’s team.
Teresa Marks, director of the Environmental Quality Department, said that although several areas in the document were misidentified, she did not believe the error was an intentional deception, and that because farm operators hadn’t yet spread any manure on the misidentified areas, they had not committed a serious violation of their permit.
Sharpley maintained that although the maps contained in his team’s quarterly report were incorrect, researchers were in fact collecting data in the proper areas. On March 3, the University of Arkansas’ Agriculture Division issued an addendum to the quarterly report, with redrawn maps correctly identifying the areas in which the researchers are gathering data.
Sharpley said Tuesday’s seminar will be an opportunity for him and his team to explain to the public several aspects of the study.
“We haven’t had the opportunity before to explain how we got involved, what we’re doing, what our mission is, what information we’ve already got, and to lay out our plans from here,” Sharpley said.
The presentation will begin at 3 p.m.
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 03/09/2014