OPINION - Guest writer

Argument flawed

Cherry-picking data won’t help

The great Mark Twain once said, "Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself ..." Columnist Mike Masterson is guilty of this sort of number-fumbling and fudging as well, though it appears he's unwilling to at least call himself out on it as Twain did.

Masterson carelessly and continually reveals this personal blind spot when writing about water-quality "figures" collected by the respected University of Arkansas Big Creek Research and Extension Team's scientists studying the Buffalo River and its tributaries. It happened again in his Aug. 18 online column.

Scientific research is mostly slow and boring. It takes years. And it's often frustrating to those wanting quick answers to prove their point of view. Cherry-picking scientific data to make it fit a point of view is damaging to good scientific research. It's also lazy journalism. Masterson couldn't help himself, again, when he blamed hog waste from C&H Hog Farms spread on fields as the reason for the proposed listing of Big Creek and part of the Buffalo River as being "impaired."

He claims his deep sleuthing into the 2015 data records uncovered "... numbers that might well point to the obvious primary cause." His faulty data interpretation comes from the spring 2018 quarterly report of the Big Creek Research and Extension Team. He claims page 83 of the report "showed Field 5a near Big Creek, where raw swine waste is regularly spread" lost 77.3 percent of applied phosphorus to runoff and 52.9 percent of nitrogen. Masterson specifically blames the runoff on hog-waste slurry from C&H spread on that field, but there's a flaw in this argument.

It never happened.

If he'd bothered to read page 63 before cherry-picking numbers and jumping to conclusions, Masterson would have read "Field 5a is not permitted to receive, nor has received swine slurry to date."

In other words, it's definitely not hog waste behind the runoff numbers for phosphorus and nitrogen from that field. In fact, the irony is that the amount of nutrients coming off the field that does not receive any hog waste fertilizer is actually higher than the ones that do.

If I had the regular forum provided to and exploited by Mr. Masterson, I would use it to say the field proves the phosphorous and nitrogen runoff has nothing to do with C&H Hog Farms. And the data that we have currently shows that it isn't C&H that's causing water quality degradation in Big Creek or the Buffalo River.

This is what we know right now, anyway, and it comes straight from renowned experts on the actual science, not newspaper columnists or propagandists. Mr. Masterson is certainly welcome to his opinions, of course, but to quote Twain again (from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), "How empty is theory in the presence of fact!"

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Jack Boles is president of the Newton County Farm Bureau.

Editorial on 08/30/2018

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