New study to require drilling at hog farm

State-hired scientists continued to state Friday that research shows no evidence that C&H Hog Farms is polluting its surrounding environment in the Buffalo River watershed, and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality announced it would commission a study of the facility as requested by opponents of the hog farm.

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With permission from C&H ownership, the Department of Environmental Quality will contract with a new research team within the next 60 days to assess the clay liners on hog manure storage ponds at C&H in Mount Judea after opponents of the facility expressed concern they were leaking.

The department set aside $50,000 for the study but expects to spend between $20,000 and $30,000 for it. The study will consist of drilling in a single spot on C&H grounds to extract samples. The money will come from environmental settlement funds received for water studies and will be used at the discretion of department Director Becky Keogh with permission from Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

Keogh said Friday that the research would be conducted in an "open and transparent manner" to supplement and investigate existing research.

The announcement by the department comes as C&H opponents question whether researchers hired by the state are biased and as C&H ownership questions whether volunteer researchers working with opponents of the hog farm are biased.

On Friday, the Big Creek Research and Extension Team presented its findings so far in its nearly three years of weekly testing and its most recent research on electroresistivity imaging, which in April prompted opponents of the hog farm to again call for the Environmental Quality Department to shut down the facility.

"We don't see any scientific evidence at the moment that those ponds are leaking," said Andrew Sharpley, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville environmental sciences professor who is the team's lead researcher. Sharpley said researchers would increase their level of monitoring.

The new research team, which is yet to be selected, will study the integrity of the manure pond liners by extracting samples of the ground through drilling. Earlier this year, a contractor doing electroresistivity imaging for the Big Creek Research and Extension Team found what he believed to be higher-than-expected moisture levels below one of the ponds that could indicate a leak. He said the problem could be addressed by drilling to discover what was causing the higher moisture levels or by installing plastic liners under the hog manure.

C&H has received a permit to install plastic liners but has not installed them yet.

Members of the Big Creek Research and Extension Team, which operates out of the University of Arkansas System's Division of Agriculture and will monitor C&H's affect on the environment for five years for the state, said the findings did not alarm them because no other research conducted on the site has shown any patterns of pollution. Further, they said, the moisture levels detected likely were related to the already moist layers of clay and limestone in the ground.

But the Buffalo River Coalition, composed of four groups opposed to C&H, has asked the department to halt operations at the hog farm until more research can be conducted at the site. Members of the coalition expressed a desire Friday for "unbiased" researchers to drill in multiple spots and vowed to keep fighting.

Richard Mays, a Heber Springs attorney who has represented the Buffalo River Coalition as a spokesman before the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, said the coalition was pleased by the Environmental Quality Department's decision to drill at C&H.

But he stressed that "transparency," according to him and coalition members, would include stakeholder input before the research begins and to keep people informed of developments and results during the research.

"Transparency is especially important in this case, because of its history, and it is to everybody's advantage that the coalition and other interested parties be given full opportunity to collaborate," he told the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission.

Mays and others noted after Friday's meeting that the Big Creek Research and Extension Team conducts its work through the University of Arkansas Extension Service, which regularly provides assistance to farmers. That association would disqualify team members as independent researchers, Mays said.

"That's not what we need in this particular case," he said.

C&H co-owner Jason Henson said Friday that he believed that research done by the Big Creek Research and Extension Team was "sound science" and argued that its researchers had nothing to gain from the results of their testing.

Henson noted that other research being conducted by retired University of Arkansas professor Van Brahana has sought to shut down the farm rather than be unbiased and has used C&H opponents to help conduct the research. Brahana's research is frequently cited by C&H's opponents.

"It would be like me pulling the samples [for research]," Henson said.

Henson said he hoped and believed the new research would continue to show that his hog farm is not harming the surrounding environment. He said research had already shown his own house water well near a manure pond to be clean, with contaminant levels far below U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's safe-drinking-water standards.

Henson, a ninth-generation Mount Judea resident, co-owns C&H with his cousins Phillip and Richard Campbell. The facility is permitted to house up to 2,503 sows and 4,000 piglets at a site on Big Creek, just 6 miles from where it meets the Buffalo River.

The Buffalo River, the first national river, had 1.46 million visitors last year, the third-highest total since it became a national river and the highest since a record number of 1.55 million was set in 2009. That year, visitors spent an estimated $62.2 million at local businesses, directly supporting 750 jobs and secondarily supporting 219 jobs.

During a public comment period at Friday's meeting, several people expressed a desire to further investigate the electroresistivity imaging research for the sake of the Buffalo River.

If the river is at risk and pollution is occurring, the state could be squandering a natural resource, said Garry Lilley, who regularly fishes in the river with his twin brother, Larry. The two commented together at the meeting, wearing matching red button-up shirts, denim overalls and blue-and-green pins in support of the Buffalo River.

"If we don't address this, it's not only a national treasure that's up in the air," Garry Lilley said. "We're going to lose a big revenue source."

In the more than three years since C&H received a permit from the Environmental Quality Department, ownership has endured criticism and proposed measures intended to assuage the fears of environmental, tourism and outdoors groups that the facility will pollute the Buffalo River.

Meanwhile, Henson said, Big Creek Research and Extension Team findings haven't discovered any pollution.

"I don't know what else a farmer can do to farm," he said.

Metro on 06/25/2016

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