Feeding Operations A Threat To Watershed

I support the proposed ban of medium and large concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, in the Buffalo River watershed. This action would be a step in the right direction to protect our state from the well-documented harm a proliferation of swine CAFOs can cause to the water, air and public health of our state, especially the sensitive and highly porous karst terrain of our Buffalo River watershed.

I offer as support to this comment the American Public Health Association’s Policy statement No. 20037, in which the APHA urges “federal, state and local governments and public health agencies to impose a moratorium on new concentrated animal feed operations until additional scientific data on the attendant risks to public health have been collected and uncertainties resolved” and to “initiate and support research to quantify more precisely the exposures to pollutants in air, water and soil emissions of CAFOs experienced by communities surrounding CAFOs, as well as to investigate the greater vulnerability of infants and children to harm from such pollutants, deriving from either greater exposure or increased toxicity.”

Our state would do well to heed such warning statements and the numerous and growing concerns garnered from the proliferation of other swine industrialized farms in other states.

A project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health has reviewed 40 years’ worth of peer-reviewed empirical studies on effects of industrial livestock production, including work by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, Ohio State University and the University of Missouri.

The evidence is abundant and clear. Until the unintended, but nevertheless real, problems of industrialized farming are squarely addressed, it would be wise to consider the growing evidence of harm to the environment and to public health as our state considers a ban of medium and large CAFOs in the sensitive karst terrain of the Buffalo River watershed.

Ginny Masullo

Fayetteville

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