OPINION

MIKE MASTERSON: Another view

The C&H debacle

The executive vice president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau recently wrote a guest essay on this page defending his support for C&H Hog Farms and its misplaced location deep within the environmentally fragile and precious Buffalo National River watershed.

After discussions with those in the know and self-reflection, I have some related thoughts. Imagine that.

To me, Warren Carter embraced a largely unreasonable and overly simplistic position about this large concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO).

First, he mistakenly interpreted the state's latest effort to terminate C&H's operations at its unacceptable location as a war on farmers and agriculture in general, while flatly ignoring other highly relevant aspects of reality. Hogwash.

The widespread public outcry is by no means a war on farmers or agriculture. It is simply tens of thousands of Arkansans and others wanting to prevent one meat-producing factory from destroying an invaluable natural asset for which our state and country are responsible.

Certainly no one entirely faults the C&H families who raise swine for Brazilian meat processor JBS for the situation, although they do have a hog (or 6,500) in this hunt. Jason Henson, (the H in C&H) has conceded that, in selecting the site, he and his partners completed no studies nor provided other documented consideration to the factory's location in relation to the river.

Seems to me it would have been reasonable and prudent to have considered those factors before purchasing and leasing property for a large swine factory above a major tributary of the Buffalo.

I and others also find fault in this avoidable fiasco with the University of Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service, which either failed to recognize this karst-riddled property as a problem site in initial consultations with C&H, or failed to discuss obvious potential problems. The Extension Service and its offshoot, the Big Creek Research and Extension Team, to me also has been willing to overlook shortcomings at C&H, choosing to defend its unacceptable location.

Finally comes our Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (cough), which should have been alert enough to determine at the time C&H submitted the application for its general permit in 2012 that this was likely the worst location in Arkansas to allow such a hog factory.

For whatever reasons, the agency spectacularly failed to do its due diligence. Why didn't that agency insist on the geologic and geoscience studies before ever considering a permit in this location, the same inappropriate region it once restricted for this use?

The department thankfully has since attempted to rectify that blunder, or whatever it was, by denying C&H's application for an individual permit. That in itself has now proven difficult because C&H is entitled under the law to due process by appealing the permit denial, and has a sympathetic judge in Newton County.

In his treatise Carter argues that C&H has gotten no citations or notices of violations over its operation. I see that as very much a red herring, since most experts agree a major source of contamination of the Buffalo from C&H results from the sustained application of millions of gallons of hog-waste slurry from its sediment ponds (i.e., phosphorus and nitrogen) onto spray fields in the Big Creek/Buffalo River watershed.

It's clear that land beneath the spray fields has thin, if any, top soil. It is underlain by fractured karst geology. Much of the raw waste applied to that land is easily transported to Big Creek by storm water, or permeates through the subterranean fractured rock and soil to invariably make its way down into the national river. To the state this sustained mess is generally considered permissible "agricultural runoff" and difficult to prove as a "violation."

In addition, it appears to me that Carter may not be aware that C&H's waste sediment ponds, containing about 1.8 million gallons of hog waste, can lawfully leak that waste into the karst beneath the ponds at a rate of approximately 3,000 to 5,000 gallons per day. Simple physics says much of that eventually seeps its way to Big Creek and/or the Buffalo, both down-gradient from the hog farm.

Carter concedes in his essay that he has a deeply "personal" attachment toward supporting C&H, farming and farmers. I understand and respect that. However, I also believe he has allowed that attachment to cloud his perspective and consideration of the full and complex circumstances surrounding this serious C&H problem.

Strikes me, if he and the Farm Bureau wanted to help resolve this matter for the benefit not only of the C&H owners but also the citizens of Arkansas who greatly value the economic and aesthetic attraction of the country's first national river, they would work cooperatively with the environmental organizations, the Department of Environmental Quality, and state and private parties in attempting to negotiate a way in which C&H could receive financial assistance in closing and relocating to a vastly more suitable location.

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Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist. Email him at [email protected].

Editorial on 05/26/2019

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