Friends of Rural New York

a Guest Editorial Submitted by: Thomas Linzey, Esq. Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)

If only it was just about bad smells.

True, hog and chicken factory farms emit noxious odors so bad that most people who count themselves unlucky enough to live next to one can’t even enjoy their own air.

But if it were only about smells, and properly managing the millions of gallons of liquid manure that ferment in massive factory farm lagoons, solutions - while expensive - would be easy to envision.

If only it were that simple. If only the real harms inflicted on rural communities by corporate farming could be “regulated” away.

The Rendell Administration believes they can be. Their recent proposal would trade away the rights of rural communities to control corporate factory farms in return for increasing the power (and budgets) of State agencies to manage manure disposal and odor.

How will the Administration eliminate local control? Part of Rendell’s recent ACRE proposal would create a Board of political appointees with the power of a Court to overturn laws adopted by local communities. The appointees? The Secretaries of the DEP and Department of Agriculture, and the Dean of Penn State’s School of Agricultural Sciences.

Does anyone believe that those appointees - many of whom have publicly announced their opposition to any local control over corporate farming - would ever side with a rural community over an agribusiness corporation?

With proposals like these, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the Administration and the corporate farming apologists led by the Farm Bureau. Or between the legislators who have been pushing a corporate farming agenda for the past decade and Dennis Wolff, Rendell’s own Secretary of Agriculture.

Of course, the Rendell Administration has never represented that it has an interest in actually stopping the proliferation of corporate factory farms across the Commonwealth. Indeed, by his own words in a veto message delivered last year, Governor Rendell agreed with several environmental groups that corporate farming was somehow inevitable. He even stated that he actually favored stripping away local control - as long as State agencies could regulate the harms caused by corporate farming a little bit better.

That just isn’t good enough for rural communities and Township governments across Pennsylvania. Instead of merely seeking to make corporate factory farms cause a little less harm, many of those communities have decided that their rural quality of life shouldn’t be sacrificed to the economic and environmental damage wreaked by corporate factory farms.

Those communities have simply said “no” to corporate farming.

They’ve done what governments are supposed to do - protect the rights of the people that they represent. In doing so, they’ve followed the lead of nine Midwestern States that produce over 30% of the nation’s entire agricultural output - adopting local laws that ban corporate farming.

When four agribusiness corporations control over 60% of hog production in the United States, it’s no surprise that over 4,000 independent family hog producers in Pennsylvania have been eliminated since 1990. Nor is it a surprise that death by suicide for farmers across the country surpassed equipment related deaths as the number one cause of death for farmers in 2001.

It’s because the agribusiness corporate boys are not just eliminating competitors, they’re ripping out the cultural heart of rural America.

It’s nothing personal. And it’s eerily similar to the hatchet job pulled by Wal-Mart on Main Street downtowns across the country.

When the DEP “regulates” corporate farming, it places the authority of the State behind the corporate agribusiness war with rural Pennsylvania communities and family farmers.

It’s not called “permitting” for nothing.

Communities that say “no” to corporate farming are bravely rejecting an agricultural model that grinds up rural communities, quality of life, and family farmers. In the process, they’re rejecting the notion that agribusiness corporations - and their trade associations like the Farm Bureau - run their community, and not them.

At its essence, what the Rendell Administration seeks to trade away is something they lack the authority to trade at all - local control and democracy.

Over the past three years - as rural communities have battled it out with corporate farming legislators - it’s been about nothing less: the ability of “we the people” to be the ultimate decisionmakers about the future of our families, our communities, and our natural environment.

Many have begun to realize that when a small handful of corporations and their apologists make those decisions for us, that maybe this isn’t the democracy that we once believed it was.

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