FAYETTEVILLE -- On the second day of a conference that has centered on "wicked problems" across the state, water quality experts spent Wednesday morning discussing the relatively recent addition of a controversial hog farm within the Buffalo National River Watershed.
After an introduction from Brian Haggard, director of the Arkansas Water Resources Center and the center's annual conference, three experts spoke in turns about efforts to establish "baseline data" on existing levels of nutrients, bacteria and pathogens in the river near its confluence with Big Creek, a major tributary to the river. The data will be used to determine whether manure from C&H Hog Farms, a large-scale swine concentrated animal feeding operation in Mount Judea, is finding its way into local surface or ground waters.
The farm is permitted to house about 2,500 full-grown sows, and as many as 4,000 piglets, at any one time. The waste from the animals is initially held in a pair of open-air lagoons, then either spread over about 630 acres of grasslands surrounding the facility or transported off site for sale. Several of the farm's fields abut Big Creek.
Faron Usrey, an aquatic ecologist with the Buffalo National River, spoke about challenges his research team face in trying to establish baseline data for levels of dissolved oxygen and the presence of E. coli in Big Creek, and its confluence with the Buffalo National River.
Usrey said that his research team began gathering water samples from several sites in March 2013, which was not given enough time prior to the farm's operation to accumulate enough data to establish "normal" amounts of either dissolved oxygen or E. coli bacteria in the area. According to inspection reports from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, operators at C&H Hog Farms began spreading manure on some fields in December 2013.
Usrey said that levels of dissolved oxygen, which are essential to many forms of aquatic life, including fish and plankton, were found to be very low in Big Creek during the summer of 2013, but have risen somewhat this year.
"In terms of dissolved oxygen, there's definitely something stressed in Big Creek," Usrey said. "We need two or three good years of differing hydrologies, to come up with a good feel for what was normal pre-CAFO. We just didn't quite get that."
Van Brahana, a retired professor of hydrology at the University of Arkansas and a vocal critic of the Environmental Quality Department's decision to grant an operational permit to C&H Hog Farms in the first place, spoke about his own efforts to partially map the karst terrain of the area surrounding the farm.
Most of the Buffalo National River watershed sits on limestone karst, a permeable and porous rock through which groundwater flows in often unpredictable ways. Because soil in the area tends to be only about one meter deep, critics of the farm, including Brahana, have voiced concern that if either of the operation's waste lagoons should rupture, massive amounts of raw manure could be introduced into the ground water very quickly. Despite the Environmental Quality Department having no record of any waste lagoon failing in such a manner in Arkansas, Brahana doesn't dismiss the danger posed by such a scenario.
In 2013, Brahana and a team of volunteers began gathering water samples throughout the area to test for nutrients and pathogens, and also began conducting dye trace studies, in which non-toxic dye is placed into ground water at a specified site, and recorded by radiological monitors when it resurfaces.
Brahana said two of the three dye traces his team has conducted showed that ground water in the area moves extremely fast; the third batch of dye never resurfaced.
"It went to Marti Gras, for all I know," Brahana said.
Andrew Sharpley, a professor of soils and water quality at the University of Arkansas, updated those in attendance on the Big Creek Research Team's efforts to both assess current levels of nutrients and bacteria in soil and water surrounding the farm, and to begin devising ways to treat the farm's manure to make it inert in the event of a run-off or leakage event.
"We know there are possibilities, we know they work from research, but none of them have worked on a farm before, because they're just too expensive," Sharpley said.
Sharpley said that the focus of both aspects of his research was to head off any damage to the Buffalo National River and other water bodies in the area.
"Once those nutrients get into the creek, we've got a problem," Sharpley said. "So one of the things we really wanted to focus on is those land application fields, and if there is a build-up [of nutrients and bacteria], to identify that before it actually gets to the creek."
"It's fine and well to measure it in the stream, but, as the saying goes, this horse has already gone out the barn by then," Sharpley said.
NW News on 07/17/2014