The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality’s decision to grant a permit for an industrial hog farm in Newton County is being met with increasing grass-roots opposition in the form of online petitions.
The most popular of the petitions, which is addressed to the President of the United States, is titled “Keep America’s First National River, the Buffalo River, Clean and Pristine!” As of Wednesday afternoon, the petition had about 5,000 online responses, drawing interest not only from Arkansas but also from states including Florida, Virginia and California.
The petition, and others like it, are in reaction to a permit issued for C&H Farms, which will be Newton County’s first confined animal-feeding operation. Located along the banks of Big Creek near Mount Judea, the 670-acre farm is permitted to hold as many as 6,500 hogs. Big Creek is a major tributary to the Buffalo National River.
Attempts to contact the unnamed originator of the petition were unsuccessful.Messages to the petition’s Facebook page (originally named “Keep the Buffalo National River Crap Free”) were returned by an individual who declined to be identified and denied being responsible for starting the petition. The individual declined to offer comment on the goal of the petition drive.
Christopher Clayborn, an Arkansas State University student in the Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management program, said once he found the petition online, he did everything he could to spread awareness of it.
Clayborn, who said he has spent much of his free time throughout his adult life on the Buffalo River, said his recent studies in water quality and disaster response made him especially anxious about the possibility of animal waste from the new industrial farm polluting the waterways in the event of a heavy rain or a failure of the farm’s manure-storage measures.
“I don’t care how complex the system is for managing the waste, it’s going to fail,” Clayborn said. “They’re notorious for doing that.”
Much of the public outcry stems from the perception that Environmental Quality Department did nothing to alert local residents that a confined animal-feeding-operation permit was being considered throughout 2012. Although the department did run two advertisements in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for public-comment sessions for all such permits being considered throughout Arkansas, nothing in the ads mentioned the Mount Judea site or Newton County specifically. A department spokesman confirmed that the agency did not contact Newton County officials or the National Park Service directly, nor did it run any advertisements in local newspapers.
While Newton County has historically been home to a wide array of farmers, the capacity of C&H Farms would likely dwarf other hog farms currently permitted in the county, each of which is permitted for fewer than 1,000 hogs.
Another online petition titled “Stop Hog Farm in Buffalo National River Watershed Area” was created Feb. 27 by Liz Lottman, an administrative assistant living in Bella Vista who owns a vacation rental property in Mount Judea. As of Wednesday afternoon, Lottman’s petition had about 160online signatures.
“We were a little late to the ballgame,” Lottman said with a laugh, comparing her petition’s numbers to those of the similar petition posted on the change. org website. But she said all the petitions connected with the issue of placing a large hog farm near the Buffalo National River seemed to be working toward the same cause.
Lottman said her goal in posting the petition was primarily to protect the river, as well as the tourism trade that depends on it.
“If the Buffalo is protected, everybody is protected in that area,” Lottman said.
Lottman said she was worried that the odor produced by an operation like C&H Farms could be so intense that it would affect the ability of real-estate owners in the area to rent their properties.
Caven Clark, chief of resources and education for the Buffalo National River, said that while the park service had not initiated any petitions, he was enthusiastic about the rising level of public interest.
“We’re pretty glad that private stakeholders are taking an active interest in looking at the permitting procedures,” Clark said.
Although Buffalo National River Superintendent Kevin Cheri voiced concerns in official correspondence to the Environmental Quality Department in December, and subsequently challenged the findings of the Arkansas Farm Services Agency’s environmental-assessment report on the potential effect of C&H Farms on the local ecology, Clark said Wednesday that he was unsure if or how his office would be able to intervene in the construction of the farm.
On March 4, the Newton County Quorum Court allowed more than an hour for public comment at its monthly meeting at the courthouse in Jasper. Although members of the court had no power themselves to intervene in the matter, County Judge Warren Campbell said then that he had allotted the time for comment so that local residents could have an opportunity to voice their concerns.
One remaining venue for public discussion of the farm’s permit is the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, which is the state’s environmental policymaking body.
Stan Jorgensen, chairman of the commission, said that although he didn’t know if the commission was in a position to affect past department permitting decisions, the matter would likely appear before the commission at its March 22 meeting in Little Rock.
“Usually, if things are in the media, there’s a good chance they’ll come up at the commission meeting,” Jorgensen said.
The 13-member commission was established in 1949 as part of the Arkansas Water Pollution Control Act and is required by law to hold all open meetings, meaning members are not permitted to meet in private executive meetings.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 13 on 03/14/2013