Who Put The Phosphorus In The River?

Phosphorus pollution in the Illinois River continues to fester. Recently, the Northwest Arkansas Council, a regional business group, asked Washington and Benton counties and five cities to finance yet another study of the problem. A new scientifically objective study might help. But if it’s merely a lobbying effort arising from fear that the federal Environmental Protection Agency will “come in and tell us what to do,” as one Washington County Quorum Court member put it, it will do more harm than good.

If you’re concerned about the environment, or about federal regulation, or about our region’s economy, you should be concerned about this issue. First, a little background.

Streams are enormously sensitive to excess phosphorus, which causes algae that turn the water green, suffocates fish and creates putrid deadzones. The Illinois River winds through Northwest Arkansas before crossing into Oklahoma. Thus, phosphorus from our region’s chicken litter - chicken manure mixed with straw and put on fields as fertilizer - wastewater treatment plants and residential fertilizers, has created problems for Oklahoma’s stretch of the river. The two states have argued about this for decades.

In 2002, Oklahoma established 0.037 milligrams per liter of water as the maximum safe amount of phosphorus in its rivers.

This is a well-founded but conservative standard, as you can learn from the first of mysix previous columns about this issue, available at my website.

Being the highest level with any chance of maintaining healthy rivers, the 0.037 limit leans over backward to industry. For example, the phosphorus level of Lake Teneycomo in Missouri was lowered to 0.040 years ago, but the lake remained clogged with algae. This is not an arbitrary number.

But phosphorus in the Illinois ran at monstrous 0.100 to 0.400 levels for years when in 2007 Oklahoma became impatient with the lack of cooperation from Arkansas and asked a federal judge to restrict farmers from spreading so much litter in the watershed. This lawsuit continues, as the chicken industry fights to prevent new regulations based on the 0.037 standard. The industry agreed to useful reforms, employing many best practices and shipping some litter out of the Illinois watershed. These measureshelped, but not nearly enough.

The problem’s urgency is demonstrated by Tulsa’s successful 2005 lawsuit against six poultry companies for phosphorus runoff that fouled Tulsa’s Tenkiller Lake water supply.

It’s noteworthy that the U.S.

Geological Survey found most of the phosphorus came from farm and suburban runoff. Also, a 2006 Oklahoma State University study concluded that most phosphorus getting into the Illinois comes from poultry litter.

The chicken industry, which piled chicken litter on farmlands for decades, appears to be the main problem. Soil samples show massive phosphorus buildup, sometimes a ton per acre, on poultry farms.

A 2007 University of Arkansas study showed as much as 85 percent of the phosphorous in the Illinois comes from nonpoint sources - farms andresidences. In the federal lawsuit, an Oklahoma attorney testified 76 percent of the phosphorus in the watershed comes from poultry waste, a fact he said was uncontested by the defense. John Sampier, executive director of the Northwest Arkansas regional wastewater plant, states that “wastewater plants aren’t the problem; runoff from pastures is how the majority of phosphorus gets into the rivers.” Even a defense attorney for the chicken industry stated “There’s no question that there has been an over-application of litter on some or many farms.”

The toughest part is by the time the poultry industry began to improve its performance phosphorus had built up all over our region. Today, it’s not easy to prevent it from running off into our rivers.

The EPA is considering reducing, by a factor of 10, the permitted discharge of phosphorus from regionalwater treatment plants. But each plant has already spent tens of millions of dollars to reduce discharges to levels that are among the lowest in the nation. Further reductions would be very expensive, and it’s doubtful they would help the rivers because the bulk of the problem apparently comes from chicken litter.

Any new regionallysponsored study should not be a short-sighted lobbying effort to simply keep the EPA off our backs, or to weaken the 0.037 standard. On the other side, EPA action should not aim simply at water treatment plants, which appear to be insignificant polluters but convenient scapegoats. Instead, both the EPA and the new study need to look realistically at the sources of the problem, especially the elephant in the room: the chicken industry.

ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.