Dane Schumacher has come to the end of his farming days. He owns Wildfire Farm in Huntsville on the banks of Dry Fork Creek and said while he enjoys bucolic life, he is ready to pass his property on to a new generation.
“We're hoping to attract some young farmers who maybe one day want to just kind of step into a turnkey operation,” Schumacher said.” So we're very concerned– Even though we're not actively farming per se, we are concerned of our upstream and downstream neighbors who do farm and how we handle our land and manage the resources.”
Dry Fork Creek is part of the White River’s watershed. In the Ozarks, water tends to flow and mix underground because of the karst topography.
“Karst, by nature, is very porous,” he said. “It's kind of like Swiss cheese, if you can picture, you know, something at the very top of the Swiss cheese block, and if you the surface area is anything that would be applied has the potential to drop down into the subsurface, and it can trickle and go in through different, it can filtrate through fractures and voids. So something that may start at point A is not necessarily going to follow a straight line to point B.”
Schumacher is a founding member of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance. In 2012, the alliance's current president, Gordon Watkins, asked him to join in legal action against a hog farm that they said was polluting the watershed. Schumacher said his experience as a paralegal in corporate defense cases made him an asset to the alliance.
A former pig farmer, Watkins banded together concerned citizens, farmers and conservationists to oppose the Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality’s approval of a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (or NPDES) Regulation 6 Permit to C&H Hog Farm.
The Clean Water Act prohibits discharging pollutants like agricultural waste into a quote "water of the United States" unless they have an NPDES permit, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Once obtained, C&H could house more than 6,500 hogs and produce up to 2 million gallons of waste annually. Large-scale farms like this are typically called concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs– a term you’re going to hear a lot of.
Schumacher says in 2012, he believed there was a lack of notification to surrounding parties that would be affected by the new CAFO. These parties included the Department of the Interior and the Buffalo National River, home to several endangered species 6 miles downstream of C&H.
“There was no notification process by which the public could participate and provide comments, or at least even be aware that this something of this magnitude was going into the watershed, and that it might affect neighbors, wells or just or resident landowners, or even anybody that owned any of the tourism lodgings,” Schumacher said. “So Cargill was the integrator, and the permit just went through under the radar, and it was already being constructed before anybody knew about it. And it's it was allowed. I mean, it was a national pollution it was the NPDES permit. So the farm itself, or the facility, supposedly did everything that they were supposed to do under the current regulatory scheme.”
Six years later, ADEQ denied C&H Hog Farms' request for a new permit to continue operations after their original permit expired, citing concerns about potential pollution risks and inadequate waste management practices. Then, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson partnered with The Nature Conservancy to offer a buyout agreement to the owners of C&H, who eventually accepted the $6.2 million offer and ceased operations in 2020.
As part of the agreement, Hutchinson also placed a temporary moratorium on all new CAFOs on the watershed, but it expired once C&H closed. ADEQ has kept it in place since then, but a law passed by the state legislature in 2023 transferred liquid animal waste permitting power from the ADEQ to the Arkansas Department of Agriculture.
The legislature didn’t make the moratorium permanent and left the door open for someone to remove it altogether. BRWA president Gordon Watkins said that in 2023, one Arkansas lawmaker made all of these new changes possible.
“They had a champion in the legislature, Deann Vaught,” Watkins said. “And then, it's one of those things that's kind of esoteric unless you really are following it closely. We knew it was happening. We saw it coming, but we didn't react fast enough. I wish now, looking back, that we had gone to the legislature and testified for subcommittees that were taking it up and at least made our voices heard.”
Representative DeAnn Vaught of Arkansas’ 87th district sponsored Act 1706 and 1707. She didn’t respond to Ozarks at Large’s request for an interview, but according to the documents, Act 1706 transitions permitting power, and 1707 eliminates nutrient management plans from the public record- meaning the number of animals on a farm and how much manure they produce is now exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Additionally, the proposed change to regulation removes public notices from newspapers and to adjoining landowners, county judges, school superintendents and mayors. Schumacher said access to this information has been invaluable as a farmer.
“So in Arkansas, we have a lot of poultry CAFOs,” Schumacher said. “And I just happened to learn of a poultry CAFO being going to be situated about three-quarters of a mile from my home, upstream. And I found out about it through the newspaper notification process. And that's another whole story that has to do with the National Environmental Policy Act, which allowed, whenever there's a federal action, it triggers the National Environmental Policy, which is called NEPA. They're required if they're going to get any kind of federal assistance and funding. It has to go through– I guess they have to take a hard look, and what they have to do is make sure that there's nothing that's going to harm the environment or the public. And in this situation, because it was a NEPA, this particular CAFO, that was applying for some loan assistance, I FOIA’d the FSA and the fellow that I worked with it was extremely helpful and more than willing to provide me the data that I requested, as long as it wasn't proprietary information.”
Under Arkansas’ Poultry Act, dry chicken litter management plans are exempt from FOIA, and under the new rules, liquid animal waste plans fall within the same restrictions. However, Schumacher said he was able to gain an up-close look at the proposed chicken farm.
He got together with a geologist and conducted surveys on the land. Turns out, the proposed farm was atop karst topography, and their nutrient management plan contained more phosphorus than the landscape could handle.
“I would have never known that had we not gone through that process,” Schumacher said. “And so the alarming thing for me is that there is already an opaque nature surrounding these facilities and these types of animal feeding operations. And it's unfortunate because I think the put the people who are trying to own these, or who own these things, are trying to do the right thing, they need to make a living. I have friends who own some poultry operations. They're doing the best they can. They're trying to make a living. And the people we all live together, we're all trying to take care of our land, take care of our waters, trying to get along.”
Schumacher said he thinks certain legislative bodies are using regulatory structure to spin a false narrative surrounding farmers operating in the Buffalo River Watershed.
“And it's really at Arkansans, it's at the residents’ expense,” he said. “And I just don't buy the argument that in any way, anybody who's a water quality advocate or anybody who's really wanting to understand where these things are being cited. This is not against anyone. This is really more for our landscape and our water, and it's really dividing ordinary Arkansans.”
Evan Teague is the vice president of environmental issues for the Arkansas Farm Bureau federation, an agricultural advocacy organization that supports lifting the moratorium on swine production along the watershed. In public comments to the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, Teague said, "The ‘right to farm’ is a foundational principle that supports the continuation of agricultural operations without unreasonable interference."
He went on to say that permitting, now under the department of agriculture, on a case-by-case basis, already ensures environmental quality.
Teague declined a request for an interview but provided Ozarks at Large with statements and public comment to both the Department of Environmental Quality and the state Division of Livestock and Poultry regarding regulations 5 and 6.
Teague said a permanent moratorium on swine farming in the Buffalo River watershed would also have a chilling effect on agricultural operations around the state and place tighter restrictions on farmers. Latest numbers from the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture show animal agriculture contributes some $5.4 million dollars to the state's GDP.
Tourism, by comparison, contributes 9.9 million dollars to the state’s economy, and a study from the National Parks Service reported that some 1.3 million people visited the Buffalo River last year.
Here’s Gordon Watkins again.
“That's the attraction,” Watkins said. “That's how people know about this part of the Ozarks, is because of the Buffalo National River. So they come to canoe in the spring, they come to hike in the winter, and they fish and swim and take the kids there. And so that's our lunch ticket.”
He said the pollution threat that these changes pose puts that sector in danger.
A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Agriculture declined an interview request but said in an email that the department "has a long history of successfully working with Arkansas producers as well as dealing with environmental issues across the state."
Public comment on the changes closed last month, and the department must offer a recommendation on the moratorium to the Arkansas Legislative Council for approval.
Update: The Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission will give final recommendations on the rule change that would make a swine farm moratorium along the Buffalo River permanent, during its regular October meeting Friday Oct. 25. If the commission votes in favor, the rule change would go before state Legislative Council in December.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
