Bad Policy

Apparently, under Michigan law, ten thousand pigs are exactly the same as ten pigs.

We have a law called the Right-to-Farm Act. It was a good idea to start with, and was conceived to keep new residents in a rural area from suing a farmer because his livestock smells like livestock. I'm in favor of this. The new folks knew they were moving to the country; they should have been prepared to smell a few cows, or hear an occasional rooster in the morning.

The problem is that, under the law, if a farm operates "using generally accepted agricultural and management practices," they can't be sued for polluting.

Further, there has been at least one ruling that "All evidence says that modern agriculture must grow to be competitive and economically viable."

Must it? A small farm cannot be economically viable? I bet some of LVL's suppliers would disagree.

And of course, modern "generally accepted agriculture" includes CAFOs and toxic manure lagoons.

So unfortunately, a law that was created to protect the small farmer from nuisance lawsuits now also grants immunity to giant industrial CAFOs.

Don't get me wrong: I think it's a Good Thing to protect farmers from annoying lawsuits when they get a new neighbor who doesn't like the smell of horses. But at the same time, the law makes no distinction between a family farm with a hundred hogs and an industrial operation with two or three thousand hogs. If you think there's no difference, you've never spent a week downwind of a hog confinement.

Here is an excellent article, with many linked end-notes, that explains the situation in much greater detail than I can.

So what's to be done? Not sure. I think this law should keep protecting small farms and stop protecting industrial-scale ones, but messing with it might do more harm than good. I'd love to hear what the growers who supply LVL have to say about this issue.