The room at the First United Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville was packed the other night with those who care about the welfare of the Buffalo National River.
Northwest Arkansas conservationist Duane Woltjen and his wife Judy were there because they, too, are concerned this national treasure could be contaminated with waste from the deeply controversial C&H Hog Farms.
Woltjen is an engineer and a director of the Ozark Society, one of four groups involved in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Farm Service Agency and the Small Business Administration over the questionable manner in which C&H received its loan guarantees without a complete and proper environmental assessment.
Former University of Arkansas geoscience professor Dr. John Van Brahana arranged the gathering to detail the findings of his team of fellow volunteers that has spent months documenting the water quality in and around Big Creek, a major tributary of the Buffalo that flows alongside the swine factory at Mount Judea. Despite Brahana’s well-intentioned offer to assist the state in this enormous monitoring task, the work has oddly been shunned by the agency that approved the factory of 6,500 swine.
The biggest revelation from Brahana (other than confirming the area he has studied around the swine factory is as karst-riddled as he’d initially suspected) is that he believes there’s at least a 90 percent chance the factory will wind up having to haul its tons of waste out of the watershed to keep from polluting the Buffalo. If contamination from hog waste is detected in the watershed, the consequences may well boil down to hauling or ceasing the operation altogether, he said.
For this scientist, that’s been the obvious answer to the problem from the time the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (cough) apparently took about 40 days to approve the permit from the day C&H applied for it June 25, 2012. It was covered under the General Permit on Aug. 3, 2012.
Woltjen said he was pleased to hear Brahana state that all but one local landowner had been cooperative with his research efforts. However, C&H has yet to open its property to his studies. Brahana remains hopeful those owners (supplied and supported by Cargill Inc. of Minnesota) eventually will invite him in.
The motivated crowd came from across Arkansas and educational institutions such as John Brown University, the University of Arkansas and Northwest Arkansas Community College as well as the League of Women Voters to hear the respected geologist who specializes in the fractured and porous limestone karst formations of the Ozarks.
Woltjen said he’d never seen such a motivated turnout by “so many of the brightest and best-educated activists in the area.”
Thus far, Brahana has conducted the studies with other volunteers, working for months on his own dime and with contributed assistance from two respected laboratories, one in Fayetteville, the other in Arkadelphia. Although the governor has announced that, backed by just over $340,000 in taxpayer money, the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture will begin its own study of potential pollution from this concentrated animal feeding operation, there’s been no mention of Brahana’s participation or even another geologist included in the state’s monitoring.
And that to me also is just plain wrong. Shouldn’t Cargill and the factory’s owners bear those expenses rather than the taxpayers who also support the very state agency that created the unnecessary mess?
Why, if I were a cynical sort, I’d start to think there’s even more politics involved in the university’s coming study.
After all, this would involve a state university’s agricultural education division investigating state agriculture along with the state environmental agency’s woeful mishandling of the matter without insisting on geologic testing and without asking Arkansas’ most experienced karst geologist to participate despite his offer to help.
Thankfully, Brahana has cared enough to do what he’s been doing and keep the state informed. Also thankfully, the Ozark Society handed Brahana a check for $4,000 to help cover his personal expenses.
Woltjen said that “after Arkansas refused [Brahana’s] participation in the governor’s study plan staffed by ag science people and not one geologist,” the Ozark Society stepped up. “He is pursing a facility to identify animal species-specific bacteria in samples, and a former UA student Brahana knew spoke up with connections to a project in Minnesota to economically do just that.”
Other than Brahana’s admirable efforts on behalf of our state and its people, Woltjen said progress is being made on documenting the specific role the Department of Environmental Quality played in the C&H permitting. If I were these folks, I’d be visiting with the state Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, which oversees the agency, to convince its members to quench the flames of this controversy that should never have even ignited.
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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 10/01/2013