Rural Neighbors and the Right to Farm
Before you build your dream house in the country, thoroughly investigate the surroundings.
During the last several decades, more and more city people have migrated to rural areas to pursue their modern American dreams. They seek a peaceful place in the country, away from the noise and crime of cities. Many choose homes in modest (or not so modest) subdivisions that press into formerly agricultural lands.
This intrusion of urban life into rural life results in an inevitable conflict. How surprised some neighbors are to wake up one spring morning to roaring machinery, buzzing flies, the stench of manure and a mist of pesticides in the air. And how angry many become when they learn that they can't do anything about it.
The Legal 'Right to Farm'
States now give farmers a basic "right to farm" without the fear of lawsuits brought by offended neighbors. As one judge remarked while dismissing a lawsuit against a hog farmer, "pork production generates odors which cannot be prevented, and so long as the human race consumes pork, someone must tolerate the smell."
Before the right-to-farm laws were enacted (most of them in the 1980s), courts shut down many a farmer's operation because it was a nuisance to the neighbors. For example, a group of annoyed neighbors, whose homes had sprung up around a Massachusetts hog farm, sued and closed it in 1963.
Some judges tried to strike a middle ground and ended up applying restrictions that would let the farming operation continue. A Florida court, for example, allowed a hog farm to stay in business but limited how many hogs the farmer could have. The judge also issued instructions on how to store and feed the garbage the hogs were accustomed to eating.
In another case, retirees at Sun City in Arizona discovered that they had traded their frigid climates for warm breezes laced with the odor of a cattle feedlot. A resulting lawsuit closed down the feedlot, but the judge ordered the developer of the community to pay the cost of relocating the cattle operation.
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