T hank you, Governor Hutchinson, for stepping up for your state and our national river. It took real courage and commitment to go against the standard political grain and stalwart Farm Bureau to hammer out an agreement to close C&H Hog Farms.
As you noted in your announcement, this operation should never have been permitted in the first place. The original permit was flawed in numerous ways. The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality did not require nor review critical information that would have indicated this was just about the worst place in the state to locate a 2.5 million-gallon per year pollution-generating operation.
Among their oversights were karst-laden geology subject to sinkholes, fractured underground channels, and shallow, porous fields allowing for rapid movement of waste and nutrients. Also flawed environmental assessments that were rushed in order to get the CAFO built before the public could learn of it, fraudulent land leases and forged signatures submitted by C&H to make it appear more acreage was available for manure spreading, and a nutrient management plan which included an unaccounted-for 80 percent loss of phosphorus when the actual amount, according to expert witnesses, is zero percent.
The department should have caught these obvious problems and C&H should not have submitted inaccurate land leases nor hired a nutrient management planner who allegedly manipulated the numbers to make this operation appear environmentally acceptable under the Arkansas Phosphorus Index.
That fact alone, without considering any leakage from the lagoons, means 80 percent more nutrients were applied to the watershed and accounts for the alarming growth of algae and pervasive blooms that made it obvious that something was very wrong with the river within just a few years' time.
As farming has become industrialized and corporations have moved in, the scale of operations has changed dramatically, but the regulations placed on those operations have not changed. Old McDonald's Farm maintained a balance of nutrients produced and nutrients used. Growing thousands of large animals in enclosed buildings, importing feed from elsewhere and calling the waste produced "fertilizer" knocks the environment out of balance, contributing to the rapid decline in waterway health and to a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Farm Bureau claims to speak for American agriculture, but it is made up of paid lobbyists for corporate agriculture interests, leaving independent farmers to struggle. They may try to frame the closure of C&H as a "right to farm" issue, but it is actually a "right to harm" issue, where certain entities claim the right to damage shared resources for private profit, then stick the public with the bill for cleanup.
This is personal for the thousands of people who enjoy floating, hiking and swimming in the Buffalo National River, and for the businesses which depend on those visitors for their living. It is personal for Arkansans who take pride in being the first in something good instead of last place by most standards. It is personal because we all need clean water to drink and recreate. Why should one "farm" be able to muck up the first national river designated to be enjoyed by all?
A recent poll showed that 90 percent of Arkansans across the political spectrum want to preserve our healthy and beautiful water resources. Arkansas taxpayers are footing most of the bill to get C&H out of the watershed, and we will pay the price for years to come as excess nutrients continue to be flushed into the Buffalo River.
If anything helped move this effort, it is the passion of Arkansas citizens to protect the river they love. To save our river, we had to pay off the polluter. Let's make sure this never happens again by refusing to reward future bad behavior. Let's ensure Arkansas has strong and transparent protective laws, as well as effective and enforced environmental regulations.
Thank you, Governor Hutchinson, for taking back our river from the clutches of special interests!
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Lin Wellford and Teresa Turk are members of the Ozark River Stewards.
Editorial on 07/05/2019