Panel’s OK enacts ban on Buffalo hog farms

Watershed rule due review in 5 years

New medium or large hog farms are now banned for the next five years in the Buffalo National River’s watershed, under an Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission vote approving the ban Friday.

No commissioners opposed the ban, which was a compromise from a proposal for a permanent ban that most commissioners initially allowed to proceed last year.

“It’s a victory. It’s not the final victory,” said Alan Nye, president of the Ozark Society, which, along with the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, petitioned the commission for the permanent ban.

After running into problems getting legislative committees to agree to review the rule, the groups agreed to work with Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s office on a compromise.

The ban is now only for five years and requires the state Department of Environmental Quality director to initiate a rule-making process to either delete the ban or make it permanent five years after it goes into effect, based on a review of research on C&H Hog

Farms’ impact on the watershed. Initiating a rule-making process would require it go through the commission, public comments, the state Legislature and Hutchinson’s office, should he remain governor.

The ban will go into effect 10 days after the commission secretary files it with the Arkansas secretary of state’s office. It does not affect the only existing medium or large hog facility in the watershed, C&H Hog Farms in Mount Judea, although that facility was the inspiration for the moratorium.

C&H Hog Farms received a permit from the Department of Environmental Quality in late 2012 through a new, expedited permitting process.

Afterward, environmental groups and people near the C&H site on Big Creek, about 6 miles from where it meets the Buffalo River, began contesting the permit and asking that it be withdrawn. They argued that runoff from hog feces applied as manure on the rough karst terrain would pose a risk to the water surrounding the facility, as would any failure of its lagoons holding hog feces.

The Buffalo National River — the country’s first national river — is a popular tourist spot, with more than 1.3 million visitors in 2014, who spent about $56.5 million at area businesses, according to National Park Service data.

Small hog farms have existed in the watershed for years, but C&H is the first large-scale hog facility in the watershed. C&H Hog Farms is permitted to hold up to 2,500 sows and 4,000 piglets at a time.

Department officials have maintained that the facility met the requirements it needed to receive a permit.

The facility opened in May 2013 and has been since then the subject of a study by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture on its impact on the river.

That study will conclude about one year before the end of the five-year ban, and officials plan to consult that study before determining how to proceed.

Environmental groups believe that the study is flawed and look instead to another study being done by a former University of Arkansas at Fayetteville professor, Van Brahana. So far, that study has traced the flow of water in the area around the facility, showing potential impact for runoff from the facility.

As recently as this month, however, the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance — a group created in response to C&H’s permit approval and dedicated to shutting the facility down — used the UA study to file a complaint against C&H.

On Aug. 12, the Watershed Alliance argued that elevated E. coli levels in the area were evidence that C&H had been violating its no-discharge permit.

Last week, in a letter signed by Department of Environmental Quality Director Becky Keogh, the department dismissed the complaint, saying that the levels of E. coli were not too high for the facility’s permit and that data did not show “persistent contamination” of the groundwater.

On Friday, Pollution Control and Ecology Commissioner Chris Gardner, a Jonesboro attorney, asked whether the ban handicapped the director of the Department of Environmental Quality from choosing a path other than ending the ban or making it permanent.

“That seems like two extremes,” Gardner said. “What discretion is left to the director to do something different?”

Sam Ledbetter, a McMath Woods attorney representing the Ozark Society and Arkansas Public Policy Panel, said, “If director comes to commission, says, ‘We looked at it, 100 [hog farms] would be too many but five would be OK,’ I don’t see this as limiting the director’s discretion to do something.”

“Ultimately, the director

just brings a rule to you guys, and you decide,” he continued.

There were few comments Friday about the ban, and no one spoke against it.

The Arkansas Farm Bureau and the Arkansas Pork Producer’s Association have previously argued that a moratorium was unnecessary because Cargill —the producer and supplier of 90 percent of the state’s pork — had self-imposed a ban on future hog

facilities in the Buffalo River watershed. Brazil-based JBS recently agreed to purchase the company’s pork division.

The groups added that negative publicity would discourage anyone from applying to start a facility there.

The Department of Environmental Quality has not received any requests for new hog facility permits since C&H started operations in the watershed.