Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-by-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm

The authors of Empty Fields, Empty Promises have produced a great resource on a seemingly obscure legal topic. Right-to-farm (RTF) laws provide protections from nuisance lawsuits for agricultural operations. This book is thought-provoking, connecting to concerns about concentration in the farming and food sectors, fundamental issues like property rights and democracy, as well as the environment and the hollowing out of rural America. The authors establish the scope of their ambition early, explaining how statutes enacted with the intent to protect farmers from the cost and hassle of nuisance suits by new neighbors “began to fundamentally change the meaning of private property rights in the United States” with implications stretching far beyond the farm's gate (3).The middle section of the book provides a comprehensive resource for teachers, researchers, and students. The authors have compiled an impressive state-by-state survey of RTF laws, summarizing each and providing important context, such as court interpretations that benefit the largest, most sophisticated concentrated or vertically integrated operations with overwhelming legal protections. RTF laws are generally designed to provide protection to agricultural operations from nuisance lawsuits, such as for noise, smells, dust, or similar externalities of farming, that might be brought by neighboring property owners. RTF statutes provide immunity for those who have been in operation for at least a year, but without distinguishing types of operations or what happens if the farming operation undergoes substantial changes. The law makes no distinction between a small, diversified farm producing a variety of crops and livestock, on the one hand, and a concentrated animal-feeding operation (CAFO) with tens of thousands of animals under one or a few buildings producing massive amounts of waste, on the other. Moreover, protections intended for farmers have been expanded by courts to include meat processing facilities, paper production facilities, and timber processors. The result, as the authors detail, is that such nuisance protections have vastly overprotected business firms and facilitated further concentration in the sector, while also driving away other farmers and rural residents who do not want to live next to or near such facilities. Worse yet, the burdens fall even more disproportionately and disturbingly on the poorest residents, especially minorities in Southern states. Such residents are less able to move and even less able to take on concentrated, vertically integrated businesses, a result that adds further to troubling historical baggage.Beginning in Alabama in 1978, states codified common-law concepts known as “coming to the nuisance,” but the timing also roots these laws in the nearly decade-long economic and environmental crisis in American agriculture; based on the summary of state RTF laws, twenty-six states had enacted RTF laws by 1981, and forty states by 1982. The historical context also complicates the analysis and conclusions. The authors focus, for example, on the decline in the number of farms and the rise of large, concentrated, and businesslike farming operations, most notably CAFOs. One challenge is that, while these developments roughly correspond to the enactment of RTF laws, it is difficult to attribute causation. Given the history of agricultural development in the United States, the RTF laws may have suffered much the same fate as family farms: consumed and co-opted at the same time, laws meant to protect family farmers from changing circumstances in the area, such as suburban and exurban sprawl, became useful tools for operations to concentrate further. The book provides clear evidence that CAFOs and “business firms” have much more success in RTF lawsuits than small farmers and sole proprietor farmers.The authors’ contribution to this difficult and tangled history is an important one. The first and third sections provide a very challenging exploration of the issues, as well as attempting suggestions for reforms of the law to better protect both homes and family farms. They detail how this development impacts the health and well-being of rural residents and entire communities, from water quality to bacteria and antibiotic drug resistance. These are incredibly difficult and complex issues that are also of immense importance. One challenge is the book's tendency to drift from the core issue and lose focus by attempting to connect everything from federal farm subsidies to Farm Bureau insurance businesses and monopolies and oligopolies. The book also struggles to provide realistic and effective recommendations for reforming RTF laws that will also reform agriculture, protect the environment, and restore rural America. These are noble goals that should not be judged unfairly nor harshly critiqued; rather, they highlight the prevalent, pointed, and extraordinarily difficult challenges for reforms against entrenched powers that benefit from the status quo.