Perspective on Legal Challenges to CAFO’s
Marty Lucas over at Big Eastern has a piece up about the current path available to property owners faced with a CAFO in the neighborhood. Definitely worth heading over for a read:
At common law, a landowner could protect his neighborhood by a nuisance action against a problem causing landuse. A recent amendment to Indiana law has stripped us of our rights to object to a factory farm for nuisance. [See Ind.Code 32-30-6]
If you’re concerned about CAFOs, I strongly suggest you lobby your legislator to return to you your common law rights to object to nuisances from neighboring landowners. Right now there’s not much of a viable option for people to object to a CAFO that’s stinking them out of house and home. Until this becomes a political issue that results in individual rights to take real action, it’s only going to get worse.
A key problem with the CAFO permitting process is that persons opposing the issuance of a permit can’t really prove that the CAFO will harm them, because the harm hasn’t happened yet. Once the CAFOs in operation, IDEM’s not likely to revoke their permit, and the fact the property values are trashed by the odor is ‘outside their jurisdiction’.
Marty reflects on the common thread in this CAFO issue: The state government has worked diligently, and largely without major media coverage, to pave the way for Indiana to become the nation’s CAFO capital. This despite the experience of North Carolina, and northern Texas, where community leaders were ultimately forced to call a time out, after the overabundance CAFO waste caused too much contamination of the waterways.
The way was paved first by turning the state’s administrative agencies into CAFO promoters, then by limiting people’s ability to hold factory farms accountable once problems arise. Although there may be a lawsuit under the federal Clean Water Act that determine’s that IDEM’s permitting process is not sufficient to attain compliance, I think Marty is right in that the most viable solution is political action, both at the state house, and in local ordinances to control CAFO growth.
Of course, the local approach is limited when it comes to water quality. There is nothing, for example, that Wayne County can do about the fact that its upstream neighbor to the north, Randolph County, has been selected as the epicenter for large hog producers.
