Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Research group on its own testing water near hog farm
2 scientists fear analysis shorted on area around operation
FAYETTEVILLE — Two Arkansas scientists are working to document water quality near the C&H Hog Farms in Newton County.
Van Brahana, a hydrologist and recently retired University of Arkansas geo-sciences professor, and Joe Nix, a retired distinguished professor of chemistry at Ouachita Baptist University, are working with a small team to collect and analyze water samples from a growing number of sites near the hog operation in Mount Judea.
“The reason I got into this was I perceived a gross miscarriage of characterizing a site,” Brahana said.
Like several critics of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality’s decision to grant a water-discharge permit to C&H Hog Farms, Brahana’s main concern is with the karst geology that defines much of the area. The porous limestone substrate contains an unknown number of caves, underground springs and other waterways.
The farm is the first and only operation in Arkansas to hold a federal concentrated animal-feeding operation permit under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. The farm is permitted to house about 2,500 full-grown sows and as many as 4,000 piglets at any given time, and is permitted to spread waste from the hogs over about 630 acres of surrounding grasslands, some of which abut Big Creek, a tributary to the Buffalo National River.
Brahana said he has questions about the farm’s nutrient-management plan, which outlines how operators dispose of the animal waste so
that nearby waterways won’t be polluted. Brahana said he was also upset about the Farm Service Agency’s perceived failure to conduct a study of the karst structures during its environmental assessment of the farm and surrounding areas in 2012.
“I’m talking about the one they didn’t do,” Brahana said. “There was no preliminary study. They did nothing.”
In May, state Rep. David Branscum, R-Marshall, invited legislators from around the state to tour C&H Hog Farms, canoe the Buffalo National River, and hear several presentations from farmers and park Superintendent Kevin Cheri. Although Branscum said Friday that he had chosen to invite neither “pro-farm” nor “anti-farm” speakers because he wished to avoid a shouting match, Brahana said he was left with the distinct feeling of being “disinvited.”
“I think I’m perceived as a rogue tree-hugger,” Brahana said. “But I balance my approach. I am not always environmental; I am not always pro-development. I collect data, and the data I collect answer a question. If there’s an implication there will be problems, I say so.”
Shortly after Branscum’s meeting in Newton County, Brahana and his research assistants applied for and received sampling permits from the Buffalo National River administrators and the U.S. Forest Service, and in July began collecting water samples from about two dozen sites in the Big Creek Basin, the area in which the hog operation and the confluence of Big Creek and the Buffalo National River sit. Brahana said he is testing for bacteria, including E. coli and fecal coliform, as well as a spectrum of nutrients including nitrate, phosphorus, chlorides and about a dozen others.
Brahana said his team analyzes bacteria samples at the UA Water Resources Laboratory in Fayetteville, because the bacteria die quickly in sampling. The other samples are sent overnight to Nix, Brahana’s primary research partner, in Arkadelphia.
Nix founded the lab at Ouachita Baptist University in 1966, and subsequently attracted millions of dollars in research funding over the decades. Nix was also the second president of the Ozark Society, accepting the post after the organization’s founder, Neal Compton, stepped down.
Nix said the primary importance of the research project was to establish background data for water quality in the area, so that if pollutants are later found, the change can be detected.
“The truth of the matter is, [the Environmental Quality Department] should have had background data up there. They should be doing what Brahana is doing right now, but they’re not,” Nix said. “When you have something like this that stands to change everything, you have to have good background data. You need to know it particularly because it’s a karst area — it’s terribly important that you know what’s there now.”
Nix and Brahana said the quarterly analysis the Environmental Quality Department does with samples taken along the Buffalo National River are inadequate, both in their frequency and in their timing.
“When things move, they don’t move on a calendar schedule geared to humans,” Brahana said. “They move in response to storm events and low-flow events.”
Brahana said that all the principal researchers on his team have been working without pay, but that technical material and equipment costs to complete the baseline research are beyond what the researchers can afford to pay.
Some of the testing Brahana hopes to do, including a dye test, in which a chemically unique dye is traced through groundwater pathways, will amount to tens of thousands of dollars. In an Aug. 31 letter to Gov. Mike Beebe, Brahana outlined his research and estimated total costs to be about $69,000.
The fact that the state Legislature recently allocated more than $340,000 for the UA Agriculture Division to perform water and soil testing in the area does not dissuade Brahana and Nix from the belief that their research is necessary.
“I saw allusions to the idea that [the university’s] study will answer all those questions,” Brahana said. “I don’t believe it’s designed to answer those. I think it’s focused on the farm itself. It’s not focused on the regional basin. It only focuses on the farm, and three of the 17 fields surrounding the farm, using wells instead of springs and other sites that are important to evaluate.”
Brahana said he was considering applying to the Arkansas Natural Resources Council for funding, but would likely avoid funding from environmental-activist organizations to avoid the appearance of tampering or impropriety. The Environmental Quality Department’s director, Teresa Marks, said her department isn’t able to fund outside research such as Brahana’s but that her agency would take Brahana’s research into account when considering permit applications and renewals in the basin area.
Brahana said his goal with the project was to affect permitting regulations in ecologically fragile areas of the state.
“My main concern, looking long-range, is to establish state regulations that would be protective of environments that are more fragile, like a karst region,” Brahana said. “I don’t think the state has an effective set of regulations now.”