In Defense of Local Control

Editors (OP-ED page)

NYTimes.com

1/7/2004

Near the end of their legislative session in mid-December, Pennsylvania lawmakers voted in favor of a bill about crime and the motor vehicle code. But that bill also carried an unexpected provision: a law that would have prevented municipalities from having any control over local factory farms and their manure disposal. On New Year's Eve, Pennsylvania got a gift. Gov. Edward Rendell vetoed the bill, arguing that the state needed to address the question of manure disposal ‹ euphemistically called "nutrient management" ‹ in a more coherent manner than in a last-minute vote on a last-minute insertion into an unrelated bill.

This is an important victory for Pennsylvania, which has a rich history of small farms but, like much of the country, has been seeing an increase in hog and poultry operations that crowd huge numbers of animals into confinement. All across the country, municipalities have found themselves in a losing battle with factory farms and their statehouse supporters. In fact, the spread of factory farms, which are technically called concentrated animal feeding operations, has essentially been shaped by the industry's search for regions of the country where local control is weak.

Sometimes that means choosing to do business in a state's poorest areas, which may lack the resources to fight back. Sometimes it means finding states and counties that lack zoning regulations or exploiting laws, like those in Iowa, that prohibit local control of farming. The factory hog farms in North Carolina, for instance, were given a strong boost in their early days by a state law, eventually overturned, that prohibited counties from using zoning authority to restrict factory farms. Almost without exception, the effort to control this noxious industry and its deleterious effects is being fought town by town, county by county.

Supporters of the bill that Governor Rendell vetoed argue that it would have protected farmers from illegal local ordinances. And, indeed, small farms do deserve this protection. This is one of the critical questions dividing American farmers and their neighbors. How do you protect a farmer's right to farm and at the same time give a municipality the power to block factory farms? It is not impossible to solve this problem, if only because a real farm bears virtually no resemblance to an animal factory, where pigs and poultry are concentrated in the thousands and tens of thousands, often polluting air and water alike. So far the best defense against these operations is the outrage of the very people who are forced to live downwind from them, people who need the right to exercise local control.