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Monday, August 22, 2005

Environment - Two stories today on mega-farms

"Lawsuit challenges dairy farm plan" is the headline to this story today in the Evansville Courier& Press. Some quotes:

KENTLAND, Ind. - The town of Kentland and 13 individuals are going to court to fight a 4,200-head mega-dairy that has received approval from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and from local planners.

Gerrit Dekker of Oxford is planning the dairy for land near Kentland, about 100 miles northwest of Indianapolis along the Illinois border.

Kentland and the 13 individuals sued the Benton County Board of Zoning Appeals, claiming it violated Indiana's Open Door Law when it held an unadvertised executive session during a meeting in 2004. The closed-door session occurred during the board's regular meeting just before it voted to approve an exemption allowing the dairy farm.

The lawsuit is scheduled to be heard today in Circuit Court in neighboring White County.

"Hog farms booming in state: Company has plan to add barns, but critics raise stink" is the headline to this story today in the Louisville Courier Journal. Some quotes:
The corporate hog-farm revolution that pushed Iowa and North Carolina to tops in the nation is poised to enter Kentucky in a big way.

And as has happened elsewhere, hog farming in Kentucky has triggered a tug of war between farmers, residents and government officials over economic renewal, smell and waste disposal.

A Tennessee company, Tosh Farms, plans to open about 50 more barns in Western Kentucky, boosting the state hog population by nearly 38 percent over the next three years.

That would move Kentucky from 20th to 18th in state hog births.

An accompanying table shows Indiana as 8th in hog births. Later in the lengthy story:
With what were seen as friendly regulations and an abundance of feed and nearby slaughterhouses, North Carolina became a leading pork producer in the mid-1990s.

But lagoon failures and manure spills prompted the state to freeze permits for 10 years in 1997.

Most Kentucky regulations focus on setback distances for barns: at least 3,000 feet from a city line; 1,500 feet from houses, schools and parks; 300 feet from wells; and 150 feet from roads.

North Carolina has the same limits, but also requires barns or manure lagoons to be 500 feet from a property line. Kentucky has no property-line rule.

A 2004 study by University of Kentucky agricultural economist Ron Fleming and by Ernest Bazen, a farm economist at the University of Tennessee, concluded that setbacks from homes need to be tripled, to 4,600 feet.

The Kentucky Resources Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, has called for barn or manure-application setbacks to be at least 2,600 feet from a property line.

Most Western Kentucky counties rely on state regulations, but Graves County is an exception. It has set a 1,500-foot barrier for barns or lagoons from adjoining property lines, not just houses and other buildings.

Graves County Judge-Executive Tony Smith said no permits have been sought under its rules. "We did not want barns to be next to anyone's house and did not want someone buying a small tract of land to put barns on," Smith said.

Fulton County's experience with hog farming underscores its political and legal pitfalls. When Fulton residents began to object to plans for large hog farms in 1997, Judge-Executive Harold Garrison took a trip to North Carolina.

Garrison's reports of the mess and odors led to an ordinance to keep so-called factory hog barns out of the state's westernmost county. But then Garrison toured Thornsbrough's farm and said it didn't smell like he had feared.

So the Fiscal Court revised the ordinance, setting "permit conditions" for barns and dropping a required look at adverse effects on the "peaceful use and enjoyment" of land by abutters.

A day later, the county took in the first of five applications for 83,000 hogs a year. When opponents sued, county officials repealed the ordinance. Now only state regulations apply in Fulton.

"People were upset when chicken barns were built here, and now you don't hear people complaining about them anymore," Garrison said.

But Barry Sharp, the Fulton businessman who sued the county, said six proposed hog barns were within 2,600 feet of a home he is building and within 1,300 feet of his property line. "There have been environmental issues with these farms everywhere," Sharp said. "Why won't there be issues here?"

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 22, 2005 12:58 PM
Posted to Environment