Lin Wellford, who lives near Berryville, said that while efforts to shut down the C&H Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) hog factory in the Buffalo River Watershed were a huge victory for protecting the nation’s first national river, it takes continued vigilance by citizens to protect the environment in this region characterized by fragile karst geology.
Wellford recalls first learning about the dangers of hog CAFOs when the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance held a whistle-stop tour that included a meeting in Eureka Springs in 2012 to hear representatives of the Waterkeeper Alliance from North Carolina testify to the massive algae blooms, fish kills, and human illnesses caused by pollution from hog CAFOs in that state.
“With aerial maps you can see hog CAFOs along every stream and tributary of some regions of North Carolina,” Wellford said. “Once they get established in an area, they proliferate. To produce millions of animals at a time, they need water to flush away the waste. But excess nutrients can destroy the water quality. The ‘solution to pollution is dilution’ probably worked well when there were not so many humans, but it is not working well now. The Waterkeeper’s talk is what woke a lot of us up.”
Wellford and allies documented deterioration of the Buffalo River believed to have been caused by nutrient pollution from the hog factory. Wellford said they took photos of miles and miles of algae clogging the river that is one of the top tourism attractions in the state.
“We sent pictures everywhere,” Wellford said. “The Farm Bureau, which supported C&H, could say whatever it wanted, but the Buffalo said it was getting too many nutrients. It shouldn’t be that we have to wait until there is that much damage to do anything.”
North Carolina Waterkeeper warned that once a CAFO starts operating, it almost never closes down. But a massive grassroots campaign to save the Buffalo River was successful in 2019 when the State of Arkansas paid $6.2 million to buy out the CAFO.
“One of the things I learned from fighting for the Buffalo is that the people have to rise up in force in order to make change,” Wellford said. “The money pressures coming from the other directions are constant. When you push too far and do damage that is very obvious, people rise up. The CAFO in Newton County thought we would give up and go away. The nerve of them to threaten a national river. You could hardly pick a more sensitive area than the wilds of Newton County and the Buffalo River. If they had succeeded, CAFOS would have proliferated. Now Arkansas has a reputation for not being such easy pickings.”
When the C&H operation was shut down, activists initially thought their work was done.
“No, it is never done,” she said. “Things come out of left field. The White River Waterkeeper organization was launched because being part of an international scientifically based alliance makes it possible to tap into a big database of information and legal advice.
“Initially the White River Waterkeepers covered a very large area all the way into eastern Arkansas and had a paid employee. But Covid was hard on non-profits, and we are now a volunteer organization. We decided to reorganize as Arkansas Ozark Waterkeeper, Inc., with a smaller jurisdiction based on karst because karst is what makes our area so fragile. Karst geology looks solid, but it is really like Swiss cheese underneath, and what happens on the ground can be easily transmitted to underground and surface waters.”
While hog poop smells bad and can cause major pollution, Wellford said poultry litter is worse.
“Carroll County is loaded with poultry CAFOs,” she said. “The Illinois River was coming into Arkansas fairly clean and leaving dirty, and a lawsuit over this forced Arkansas to come up with nutrient surplus areas where use of poultry litter is regulated. The Osage and the Kings River are cleaner now because farmers can no longer spread more poultry litter than is needed.”
Wellford has lived in Carroll County 40 years, often visiting the Osage River. She saw it go from crystal clear to scummy, smelly and often choked with algae when the poultry CAFOs proliferated. But since farmers have been required to develop nutrient management plans to prevent too much nutrient pollution, the water quality has dramatically improved.
“I now live on the Osage and it is crystal clear,” Wellford said. “If we will take care of keeping things in balance, Mother Nature will do her work and you will see things move in the other direction. I have continued to be involved in water quality because challenges to water quality will never stop. There are always individuals and industries who want to get rid of things in ways that harm the environment. Everyone has to be watching. Water is a community-shared resource. Clean water is an asset to a community for recreation, tourism and esthetics.”
Arkansas Ozark Waterkeeper is enlisting Ozark residents to keep vigilant and report when they see something happening that may harm the environment.
“It behooves us as Ozark residents when we see changes to investigate,” she said. “Why is there so much algae in this area? What is being dumped at the end of a dirt road in the county? Regulations mean nothing if not enforced. That is what we learned when we worked to save the Buffalo River. We learned the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality has all these processes that make it look good on the books. But there are ways industry can get people who work at ADEQ to look the other way.”
Currently Arkansas Ozark Waterkeeper is working to get grants and raise funds to hire a full-time waterkeeper and developing a network of people willing to keep an eye on their favorite waterway.
“Someone told us about plans to set up a slaughterhouse on a tributary of Crooked Creek,” Wellford said. “Alarmed about this, we wrote letters and asked some questions and that was enough to make them rethink that location. We are not anti-business, but we are very much concerned with what people do on the land that might impact our area’s rivers. We just can’t do things like the wild west. Our resources can and will be impacted if we don’t watch over them.
“A lot of people are concerned about all the development going on in the Kings River,” Wellford said. “Removing trees and shrubs within the riparian zone is so unhelpful. People chop down trees to have a view of the river and when the river comes and takes out their front yard, they say, ‘I had no idea.’ So, they need to have an idea. The Kings River Partnership has a free publication called the Guide to Streamside Living available at IQ Optical at the Williams Shopping Center in Berryville. We would love to get copies into the hands of landowners.”