Farming sure has changed since I was a kid.

The typical Wisconsin farm like the one I grew up on had 120 or 160 acres of land, give or take, we milked 40-50 cows, sometimes more, sometimes less, and raised a few hogs and or chickens. There was farm after farm like this but today there is just a few large farms left and the small family farm is hard to find.

This model probably came from our European ancestors that came here to settle the land. It was a labor intensive model that meant one person or one family was limited in size by the number of animals you could take care of and the number of crops you could produce to feed them. The amount of animals you kept and milked depended on the amount of crops you could raise and harvest and vice versa. The waste produced by those animals was easily returned to the soil because there was a proportional amount of cropland to the animals you kept. This was essentially a closed system and there was natural balance to the equation.

Today, whether you consider it good or bad, farm policies and economies of scale have pushed farm operations to bigger and bigger proportions. Due to mechanization and modern machinery one person, or one person owning a corporation with employees, can run several thousand acres and raise thousands of animals. The farm has gone the way of other businesses and the driving principles are now efficiency and profit. You may agree or disagree with that trend but there is little doubt that unless you get bigger in agriculture today it is very difficult, not impossible, but difficult, to survive.

Farming at this level is a business. It is no longer the simple pastoral life that I knew as a kid. At the same time there have been more and more people moving to the country that are not farmers. Residential and recreational land use has increased along with the increased farm size and that has led to more and more conflicts between those interests.

Farming organizations seemed to recognize that these conflicts would inevitably increase over time and in the 1980s lobbied to implement laws that would protect farmers from the city folks who moved to the country. These groups wanted to protect farming from the newcomer that got the bright idea to sue the local farmer for doing things they had been doing since before that city slicker was even born.

Wisconsin adopted its “right to farm” legislation in 1982 when a grade school sued a chicken farm that produced eggs because the farmer decided to place 140,000 chickens next to the grade school. The state of Wisconsin sued the farm because of the horrible odor that children and staff at the grade school had to endure and won the case. Shortly after that ruling the state adopted its “right to farm” legislation that, according to the Wisconsin Bar, essentially strips anyone who opposes the operations from suing a farmer based on “nuisance” claims such as odor. Later amendments would further restrict the basis on which someone can sue a farmer and changed the statute so that even in situations where a farmer moved into a residential area, instead of the other way around, they were still protected.

The only remaining basis for someone to challenge even a large corporate farm is on the basis of “significant health and safety” threat. What this essentially means is a farm can move in, such as the case in Vernon County, adversely affect the quality of life of any number of neighbors, even drive property values down and there is very little legal recourse for neighbors. Even in those instances where residents can show a real health and safety risk, which is often expensive and time consuming, or negative financial impact, the only legal option left under the right to farm legislation is injunction. Even then the injunction can only be implemented if the farmer has access to state cost share funds to help take care of the “nuisance.”

The result has been these extremely high legal hurdles to challenge a farming operation that have given exclusive legal protection not given to any other industry. For some that might be OK, but for others the restrictions go too far.

Large confinement operations like the 2,400 head hog operation proposed for our county have to follow state and federal regulations for manure storage and spreading, but the right to farming legislation makes it impossible for residents of the county to challenge for anything other then health and safety issues. As one county resident pointed out at a recent land and water conservation committee meeting, one person’s right to make a living should not be more important than the interest of all of these people living around that person or in the rest of the county. That is the underlying effect of right to farm legislation.

I grew up on a small dairy farm and spent many Saturdays cleaning calf pens, baling hay and hoeing tobacco. This kind of farming has been the backbone of Wisconsin and much of the nation. If the intent of the right to farm legislation was to protect that kind of farming it was a good intent, but it appears to me that the farm organizations that were attempting to protect farming may have gone too far in stacking the deck against future conflicts. As a result they hurt the reputation of all farmers by creating an unlevel playing field that protects one industry and seems to say to the rest of their community “we don’t care what the impact is on your life we can do what we want.”

I have no sympathy for the urban dweller who moves to the country and complains about “country” smells, but the Wisconsin right to farm law goes well beyond that. The law puts the interest of one industry over the rights of the rest of the community.

We need this kind of farming to meet the growing demand for food production but it should face the same regulations as any industry and go through a process that allows public input on where it should be allowed.

Other states have begun to overturn their right to farm laws because the courts in those states have said it denies those around these operations their constitutional rights to due process. It is possible that the challenges to Wisconsin’s right to farming law are just beginning due to the influx of large confinement operations.

Perhaps the challenges that will come from this county or another will result in the overturning of a law that was well intentioned but has gone too far, and in the end hurts the traditional Wisconsin farmer.