The farm industry is pushing for tighter right-to-farm laws across the country

And in at least three states, right-to-farm expansions have already passed. West Virginia’s governor signed that state’s right-to-farm bill into law on March 27. The state senator who sponsored the legislation was clear that nuisance lawsuits “in other states” were what motivated him to bring the bill.

Oklahoma’s governor signed that state’s right-to-farm expansion into law on April 1. The bill’s sponsor explicitly linked the bill to the North Carolina verdicts. Oklahomans defeated a ballot initiative to expand the state’s right-to-farm law in 2016.

North Carolina also changed its law soon after the first cases against Smithfield went to a jury. In 2017 and 2018, the legislature twice overrode the governor’s veto to pass laws that capped the damages plaintiffs can receive from a nuisance suit and restricted the conditions in which a plaintiff can bring such a suit.

Those two laws fit the profile of right-to-farm bills that have been proposed in other states. In West Virginia, the new right-to-farm law restricts who can bring a nuisance suit to residents living within a half-mile of the farm—despite the fact that the effects of air and water pollution from large-scale farms are evident in a much wider radius. Utah’s bill similarly restricts potential plaintiffs to a half-mile radius, while Georgia’s bill limits them to a five-mile radius.

And some of the bills cap plaintiffs’ potential damages as well. The West Virginia law prohibits punitive damages altogether, restricting damages to compensation for diminished property value. This change is yet another callback to the North Carolina verdicts: The major damages awarded to the plaintiffs in the North Carolina cases were punitive.

Restricting or eliminating punitive damages can make it more difficult for plaintiffs to bring nuisance lawsuits, given that damages awarded may not even cover their legal fees. In one North Carolina verdict, compensatory damages awarded to plaintiffs totaled less than $13,000 per plaintiff. Critics say that eliminating punitive damages is a particular concern in the case of farm nuisance lawsuits, given that those affected by the environmental fallout from large-scale animal farming are disproportionately low-income people of color.

The outcome of North Carolina’s changes to its right-to-farm law will be to “deprive affected neighbors of a meaningful legal recourse” when faced with the odors and pollution associated with large-scale animal farming, says Will Hendrick, a staff attorney at the Waterkeeper Alliance who is based in North Carolina. The ability to bring nuisance lawsuits was “a protection afforded under common law, it was a protection that predated our statehood, and it was a protection pursued effectively,” Hendrick says. “That same measure of justice will, as a result of this recent legislation, no longer be available to similarly situated North Carolinians.”

These right-to-farm expansions could also be difficult to challenge, says Robert Hensley, legal advocacy senior counsel at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). “The remedy is probably in the legislature, which is the same place that’s passing these laws,” he says.

When asked why the industry is taking such an aggressive approach in so many states on right-to-farm this year, Kara Shannon, manager of farm animal welfare campaigns at the ASPCA, says that more rural communities are speaking out about the environmental and quality-of-life problems related to large-scale animal agriculture.

“Across the country, we’re seeing more rural communities—the people who are actually living next to these CAFOs—really starting to organize,” she says. In some cases, those communities are “pass[ing] local ordinances and permitting and trying to get a handle on how this waste is being managed, or what the process looks like to build a new CAFO.”

Rural communities have had several high-profile victories against new industrial farms in recent years, including the efforts of several Kansas communities to stop construction of a Tyson poultry processing plant in the state. Nebraska residents have repeatedly challenged the introduction of large-scale poultry farming in that state that was brought about by Costco’s new plant there.

Neighbors of large-scale animal farms, which can house tens of thousands of animals, often complain of odors so powerful they can’t use their property, polluted well water, and asthma. The agriculture industry, meanwhile, has pushed for state and federal deregulation of air emissions from such farms, and in some states, runoff from farm manure is subject to only limited oversight.

This story was first published by the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Read the original article here.