Favoring Common Sense

Favoring Common Sense. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Many years ago our family lived in a small Midwest town with a fairly large livestock operation several miles outside of town. At certain times the odor from the feedlot would drift in and was the cause for many conversations. Now a Missouri appeals court has overturned a county judge's ruling that blocked a farmer from expanding his hog farm within two miles of Arrow Rock State Park. CHINN: He was looking to expand his farming operation so that he could bring his children back home to the farm. People decided that they didn't want more hog barns close to arrow rock and they started to press the legislature to do something about it and when that didn't work they tried to contact DNR and when that didn't work they decided to sue the state of Missouri for granting him the permit that would allow him to build his hog barns. Missouri hog farmer Chris Chinn says it's not the court's place to regulate farms and ranches. CHINN: The Department of Natural Resources would have never granted this farmer a facility permit if they were not within the guidelines. Government agencies that have studied the situation, who have done research, knew that it was safe and that there were enough regulations upon agriculture to make sure that there was no detriment to the area. And so it was very disturbing to farmers that a judge who maybe didn't have the knowledge and the information or the experience in agriculture was ruling and prohibiting farmers from using their land. Chinn says the original ruling points to the fact that most Americans no longer have any idea what it takes to grow their food or about all the rules that are already in place to regulate farms and ranches. CHINN: People are three to four generations removed from the farm today and so when they think about a farm, they think about what a farm looked like in the 1940s or the 1950s. They don't understand the changes that have taken place. You know there's a lot of science that goes into any technique that we use on our family farm. We don't do it just because it looks like it's the neat thing to do. We are better able to protect the environment today by housing our animals inside. We're protecting them from predatory attacks. We're preventing diseases from being spread by wildlife and we're preventing our animals from the elements of the weather. And people don't think about how overburdening farmers and ranchers might eventually affect them. CHINN: If some of the rules and regulations that are trying to be passed right now do pass in agriculture, we're going to see livestock leaving the United States and going to countries like Argentina and Brazil. There will be fewer American farmers feeding this country today. People don't like being dependent on foreign oil. I don't know that they're going to like being dependent on foreign soil to produce their food. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.