by DGR News Service | Jan 20, 2023 | ACTION, The Problem: Civilization
Editor’s Note: Even when local governing units make decisions for the welfare of the environment, state laws are designed to crush them. The following story covers how a small town is getting sued for passing a local ordinance to prevent pollution from factory farms. The basis of the lawsuit is that the ordinance is against the state law of Wisconsin. This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.
This lawsuit is far from one of its kind. Similar lawsuits have been filed against a local government for trying to protect the environment against corporate interests. DGR News Service covered a series regarding the fight of Lake Eerie Bill of Rights in the state of Ohio. Read more about it here.
By John McCracken / Grist
The small community of Laketown, Wisconsin, home to just over 1,000 people and 18 lakes, is again at the center of a battle over how communities can regulate large, industrial farming operations in their backyards.
The town, which is half an hour from the Minnesota border, is the target of a lawsuit supported by the state’s largest business lobbying group, which claims the town board overstepped its role when it passed a local ordinance to prevent pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs*.
Filed in Polk County Circuit Court in October, the lawsuit pits local farmers against the municipality, where decisions are made by a single town chair and two supervisors. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, or WMC, a lobbying group that defines itself as the state’s “largest and most influential business association” is representing the residents suing the town through its litigation center.
Early this year, WMC sent a letter to the town board that they would see legal action if the ordinance was not repealed. The notice of claim, sent in April, argues the town passed an ordinance with various illegal provisions under state law. The Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Litigation Center, who have previously filed lawsuits to rollback state protections against water pollution, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
“They see this ordinance, if not challenged, as something that may become more the norm around the state,” Adam Voskuil, staff attorney for the nonprofit law office Midwest Environmental Advocates, told Grist. This law office has issued its support for Laketown’s ordinance in the past but is not representing the municipality in this ongoing litigation.
As the agricultural industry increasingly forces farmers to “get big or get out,” CAFOs have become plentiful across Wisconsin and the country at large, with more and more animals living on CAFO operations in recent years. The size of these farms varies within a state but generally are seen as operations with 2,000 or more pigs, 700 or more dairy cattle, or over 1,000 beef cattle.
The growth of these operations has been linked to public health problems like various cancers as well as infant death and miscarriages, caused by water contaminated with waste runoff from farms. On the other side of Wisconsin, residents in Kewaunee County have seen manure coming out of their faucets from one the largest CAFOs in the state, who sued the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource last year when they were denied a request to nearly double their size.
As more confined animal feeding operations, like the hog farm pictured, pop up across the country, towns and counties have attempted to regulate their growth. chayakorn lotongkum / Getty Images Grist
When communities try to respond with local-level enforcement, both industry interests and a lack of power at the local level cause townships to get creative with their responses.
Every state has some form of a “right-to-farm” law, which stops farms from being targeted for nuisances related to the daily operations of the industry, such as odor, noise, and effects on the environment. From there, each state has some form of a regulatory process that outlines how large farms are allowed to operate.
In Iowa, which leads the country in CAFOs, the state government sets all regulatory requirements and local towns and counties are out of luck when it comes to enforcement, according to John Robbins, Planning and Zoning Administrator for Cerro Gordo County, Iowa. He said the county once had a restrictive ordinance for CAFO zoning on the books, but after a state law took control, counties now have “very limited authority.”
Last year, when a Missouri hog farm spilled 300,000 gallons of waste into nearby waterways, two counties attempted to regulate CAFOs differently than the state government. Those counties had to sue to challenge state-level laws and are now awaiting trials in the state Supreme Court.
Further West, Gooding County, Idaho has seen the whole gambit of what Wisconsin towns could be facing. In 2007, the central Idaho county named after a famed state sheep rancher passed an ordinance regulating CAFOs in the county limits. A month later, industry groups Idaho Dairymen’s Association and Idaho Cattle Association started a court battle with the county that ended two years later, with the state supreme court ruling in the county’s favor. Gooding County’s legal representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Wisconsin’s Livestock Facility Siting Law generally restricts how local municipalities can stop or slow new CAFOs or expansions to current facilities. This law is at the crux of arguments in opposition to Laketown and other surrounding communities’ proposed or passed ordinances.
Other Wisconsin communities have enacted local level ordinances to regulate these large farms. In 2016, northern Bayfield County enacted a CAFO ordinance that imposed a one-time fee and required operators to have increased manure storage options. After a large hog farm estimated to produce over 9 million gallons of manure a year was proposed in Polk County a few years ago, the county attempted a moratorium on CAFOs, but the measure did not pass.
Since then, at least five neighboring towns of Laketown have passed similar ordinances.
“This is one of the first times I’ve seen a town refuse to back down to some of these letters.”
Adam Voskuil, Midwest Environmental Advocates staff attorney
The Laketown ordinance that sparked the lawsuit is an operations ordinance, unlike Bayfield’s ordinance which focused on zoning. Laketown CAFO operators are asked to file a one-time fee equal to a dollar for every animal unit as well as give detailed plans of how they will prevent ground and air pollution stemming from their facilities. Passed in 2021, the ordinance states it is based upon Laketown’s obligation to “protect the health, safety and general welfare of the public.”
All along the way, industry groups Venture Dairy Cooperative and the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance, its website features the slogan “Fighting for CAFOs Every Day,” have sent threatening letters to towns that passed ordinances or moratoriums, with the help of WMC.
“This is standard operating procedure for the Big Ag boys,” said Lisa Doerr, a Laketown resident of over 20 years who raises horses and commercially farms hay and alfalfa with her husband.
Doerr has been involved at the local level in opposition to CAFO since Polk County learned of a proposed 26,000-hog farm. Doerr, who worked with the Large Livestock Town Partnership, a multi-town committee that examines the environmental impact of CAFOs, said she worried that the landscape of the town and county would change if local action wasn’t taken.
“The name of our town is Laketown because we’ve got lakes everywhere,” she said. “We still have a middle class farming community. We haven’t had corporate ag take over everything.”
In its recently filed response letter, Laketown’s attorney said WMC’s argument falls flat as it is based solely on the state-level zoning law, while the town’s ordinance regulates the operations and conduct of a facility. They also noted that since the ordinance passed, no facilities have applied for a permit, which means the town has not yet enforced any actions WMC says are unlawful. Laketown board chair Daniel King declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuit.
Midwest Environmental Advocates attorney Voskuil said he was heartened to see that Laketown has been holding its ground. “This is one of the first times I’ve seen a town refuse to back down to some of these letters,” he said.
Farther south in Wisconsin, another county is reeling from letters threatening legal action. Crawford County, which borders Iowa, enacted a CAFO moratorium in 2019 but did not renew the moratorium after studying the issue for a year. Forest Jahnke, a coordinator with the Crawford Stewardship Project, said the decision to not renew the moratorium was highly influenced by the deluge of similar threats of litigation and backlash, which had a “chilling effect” on efforts to move forward.
“The fear of litigation is a very strong and deep one in our local municipalities and county governments,” Jahnke, who was a member of the committee studying the CAFO moratorium in Crawford County, said.
Since the moratorium rolled back, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources greenlit a Crawford County hog farm, home to 8,000 pigs and expected to generate 9.4 million gallons of manure each year
Featured Image: Hog farm by via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 6, 2012 | Agriculture, Repression at Home
By Tom Philpott
On Friday, Iowa governor Terry Branstad signed a bill that will make it much more difficult for animal-welfare advocates to sneak cameras into Iowa’s factory livestock farms. The bill’s fate is being watched nationwide, because Iowa’s factory farms grow more hogs and keep more egg-laying hens than those of any other state.
The news got me to thinking of my own attempt, years ago, to peer inside of an animal factory.
I was on a tour of a rural Iowa county, given by some farmers who were angry that massive hog-raising facilities had been plunked down in their community (I wrote about it here). At one point, we got out of the van so I could gape at two rows of such low-slung buildings, each holding thousands of hogs. A vast manure cesspool separated the two rows.
Even more repellent than the smell—which nearly dropped me to my knees—was the large man who came barreling out of one facility to demand to know what we were up to. When we informed him that we were citizens standing on a public road, he reminded us that just beyond that road lay private property, and we’d be well-advised not to set foot on it. I asked him if I could have a look inside one of the buildings. He shot me a glare and turned on his heel, barking into his cellphone as returned to his lair. I took the response as a “no,” and we moved on.
The scene neatly encapsulated the terms of factory meat farming. The industry insists on its right to impose its excesses on society—the unspeakable buildup of toxic manure, which pollutes air and streams—but refuses to let society peer in to see what’s going on behind the walls. We are forced to smell, in other words, but refused the right to see.
For several years now, animal-welfare groups like the Humane Society of the US and Mercy for Animals have pursued a kind of guerrilla watchdog strategy for combating this state of affairs. They plant undercover agents to seek jobs at the facilities, and when they’re hired, the agents eventually sneak in cameras and document the scene. As the regulatory agencies like USDA, EPA, and FDA have shown little appetite to inform the public about factory farm practices—much less rein them in—these groups have become our shadow regulators, our eyes on the factory-farm floor.
Read more from Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/will-agribiz-tied-governor-keep-iowas-factory-farms-shielded-view
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 24, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Tom Philpott / Mother Jones
The meat industry defends its reliance on routine antibiotic use by flatly denying the practice poses any public-health problem. The view is summed up by this 2010 National Pork Producers Council newsletter: “[T]here are no definitive studies linking the use of antibiotics in animal feed to changes in resistance in humans.” The claim, I guess, is that the drug-resistant bacteria that evolve on antibiotic-laden feedlots stay on those feedlots and don’t migrate out.
That contention is looking increasingly flimsy. My colleague Julia Whitty recently pointed to a new study showing that a particular antibiotic-resistant pathogen “likely originated as a harmless bacterium living in humans, which acquired antibiotic resistance only after it migrated into livestock.” In its new, harmful form, Julia reports, the bacterial strain “now causes skin infections and sepsis, mostly in farm workers.”
And humans aren’t the only creatures paying the price of routine antibiotic use. A research team from the Pacific Northwest has found that terrestrial pathogens, including strains if E. coli resistant to multiple antibiotics, are now infecting sea mammals. The researchers collected and performed autopsies on more than 1600 stranded seals and otters over 10 years. They found that infectious diseases accounted for 30 percent of 40 percent of the deaths. “Comparing the diseases found in marine mammals with terrestrial mammals has identified similar, and in many cases genetically identical disease agents,” the researchers report.
They recently presesnted their findings at a science conference in Vancouver, and the title they chose says it all: “Swimming in Sick Seas.”
Not all of the pathogens are related to factory farms—some are associated with cats and possums. But livestock play a role. “We’re finding similar pathology or abnormalities in marine mammals to what we’re seeing in our livestock cases,” one of the researchers told The Vancouver Sun. Some of the seals carried strains of E. coli and Enterococcus that are “resistant to eight different antibiotics used in livestock,” the Sun reports. The pathway from factory farm to sea is likely manure that runs off into streams and ends up in the ocean.
The gross part is that the E. coli-infected seals were found in coastal areas where people sometimes take the water. “These harbour seals are in similar areas to where humans would be,” one of the study’s resarchers told the Sun. “If clinical disease were to develop, it may be more difficult to treat with conventional antibiotics.”
He added: “Marine mammals recognize no borders, and neither do pathogens and parasites.” That’s not a message to comfort the meat industry, which wants us to believe that its antibiotic-resistant pathogens stay penned up on factory farms.
From Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/02/how-factory-farms-are-killing-seals
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 23, 2012 | Toxification
By David Ferguson / The Raw Story
Speculation has long abounded that overuse of antibiotics by factory farmers has been a major contributing factor in the development of so-called “superbugs” like MRSA or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Now, according to a report from Mother Jones, there is scientific proof.
According to a paper in the American Society of Microbiology’s newsletter mBio, researchers have sequenced the genomes of 88 closely-related strains of Staphylococcus aureus. They have concluded that one “particularly nasty” strain, CC398, began as a fairly harmless human bacterium known as MSSA, but evolved after colonizing the systems of pigs, chickens and other livestock.
Inside the animals, the bacterial strain was bombarded by an array of broad-spectrum antibiotics, drugs commonly used by factory farmers to reduce infections and disease in animals kept in close quarters. According to mBio, this allowed the germs to become resistant to antibiotics like tetracycline and methicillin, as well as allowing the microorganisms to become “bidirectional,” meaning that they can freely be transmitted between humans and livestock.
The resistant CC398 strain first appeared in livestock in 2003, but is now widespread among U.S. farm animals and has been causing sepsis and skin infections, mostly in farm workers. So far, the infection has not been able to transmit from human to human.
The Food and Drug Administration announced in January that it is placing new restrictions on the wholesale use of some antibiotics in farm animals. Mother Jones reports, however, that according to the journal New Science, these regulations cover a paltry .02 percent of the drugs commonly used on animals.
From The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/23/factory-farms-breeding-superbugs-says-study/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 18, 2012 | Repression at Home
By Will Potter / Green is the New Red
Utah is the latest state to consider new laws targeting undercover investigators who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms. A new bill would make photographing animal abuse on par with assaulting a police officer.
Rep. John Mathis calls undercover investigators “animal rights terrorists,” and says video recordings that have brought national attention to systemic animal welfare abuses are “propaganda” and fundraising efforts.
The bill, HB187, targets anyone who videotapes or takes photograph on a farmer’s property without permission. It creates the crime of “agricultural operation interference,” a class A misdemeanor which is elevated to a third-degree felony on the second offense.
It comes at at time when the FBI has considered “terrorism” charges against undercover investigators.
Rep. Mathis’ opening remarks at a hearing by the Utah House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee on February 14th are indicative of the good ol’ boy network that is attempting to pass this legislation:
“It’s fun to see my good ag friends in this committee,” Mathis said. “… all my good friends are here.”
Mathis, the sponsor of the bill, said animal protection groups are solely using their investigations as “propaganda” efforts for fundraising drives. He went on to claim that animal welfare reforms, such as allowing chickens to spread their wings, are actually “detrimental to the welfare of animals.”
Exposing animal abuse is hurting animal welfare? Photography is terrorism? What Mathis leaves out is that these investigations have led to criminal charges against farm workers. Just this week, undercover video shot by Mercy for Animals at a Butterball farm resulted in six workers being charged with misdemeanors and felonies.
And a recent investigation by Compassion Over Killing (in Iowa, another state considering “Ag Gag” legislation) showed workers pushing herniated intestines back inside injured piglets, then covering the wound with tape.
Only token gestures of opposition were made during the hearing, such as one representative voicing concerns that the bill could target people who take “pretty barn pictures.”
But this bill isn’t about pretty pictures.
This bill, and similar attempts in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota and New York, is to criminalize anyone who exposes abuses on factory farms.
These disproportionate penalties are solely motivated by the corporate interests affected by animal welfare reforms. As Rep. Craig Frank, a Republican, noted: this bill makes taking a photograph of a factory farm in Utah a third-degree felony on the second offense, the same as assaulting a police officer.
He called it a “Blank Angus Ops” bill and questioned the need for new laws when trespassing is already a crime, but outside of making jokes he and the others on the committee offered no opposition.
In light of the recent criminal charges and systemic animal welfare violations, it’s startling to hear Mathis and supporters say the bill is the same as punishing someone who leaves a video recorder “under you and your wife’s bed.”
This isn’t about personal privacy.
It’s about corporations attempting to hide their criminal activity, deceive consumers, and deflect public scrutiny onto those who are dragging these abuses into the sunlight.
The committee voted 10-3 to move the measure as originally written to the full House. You can contact Utah representatives about HB 187 here.
From Green is the New Red
