From: Nancy Banta
Hope
The Right to Farm Act was adopted in the 1980s as a way to protect farmers from nuisance lawsuits, thereby promoting and perhaps resuscitating the family farm. In essence, Right to Farm exists to help protect traditional agricultural land, enabling farms to produce food for a growing population, without fear of losing income or wasting time dealing with litigation brought by neighbors for damages such as decreased home value, loss of quality of life, odor, flies and other vectors, or truck traffic as a result of a nearby farming operation.
The act states that if any nuisance action was brought against a farm or farm operation, and if the defendant farm or farm operation prevails, the farm or farm operation may recover from the plaintiff the actual amount of costs and expenses determined by the court to have been reasonable incurred by the farm or farm operation in connection with the defense of the action, together with reasonable and actual attorney fees. Understandably, neighboring rural residents will not risk financial well-being for the minute possibility to improve quality of life.
Unfortunately, Right to Farm laws, which were intended to preserve family farms, instead created a mechanism for the expansion of agri-conglomerations and the further industrialization of the agricultural sector, as well as the opportunity to transition livestock operations from small unregulated farms to confined feeding operations (CFOs) and then to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Just like many laws, this one has been manipulated to serve big-ag corporations, with the unintended consequence being that smaller family farms could no longer compete and were left with only one alternative: get bigger or get out of farming.
John Ikerd, a retired professor of agricultural economics spent the first half of his 30-year career believing CAFOs would make good food more affordable, but later discovered they wreaked havoc with the environment and rural America. As a community, we need to be awakened, as Ikerd, to the implications and the cost of this “affordable food.” Our communities have tainted water, noxious air, devaluation of homes and a poor quality of life. We are challenged as a population to consider Ikerd’s quote from the film “Right To Harm”: “The only question remaining is whether the economic rights of the agri-business corporation is more important than the basic human rights of people.”
I urge everyone to attend the free viewing of “Right to Harm,” playing at YES Cinema on Jackson Street in Columbus on Oct. 24 at 7:15 p.m. This film follows the lives of five rural families that have been exposed to the aftermath of the Right to Farm Act. It is the hope of our rural community residents and sponsors that these agribusinesses will one day be stripped of their Right to Harm, while still maintaining the Right to Farm for local farmers, as it was always intended.
