Farmers and the Conservative Rural Voters Got What they Wished for, Business Friendly Regulations. Who's sorry now?

Fact: Rural area's are generally conservative. These are self made individuals, like small family owned farms, who just want to make a living without all those suffocating regulations. It's a real world stereotype on full display during the election season, when billboard sized campaign signs dot the rural farm fields.

So why are farmers so angry now in Wisconsin? Their business friendly conservative values have come back to bite them, big time. In the investigative Wisconsin State Journal series on "Who's watching the Farm?," the lobby group Dairy Business Association has been successful at speeding up the permitting process, by their "unprecedented influence over the permitting and regulation of the giant farms — in some cases, crafting the law itself."

Forget about pesky environmental and aesthetic concerns, Republican politicians have been pushing for years to "streamline" the permitting process, to become more business friendly. Now conservative rural voters are angry with those free market regulations, complaining that the rules "largely block challenges by local communities to factory farms." Big surprise!

Under the headline "Losing Local Control," the investigative report draws this conclusion, that "The problem is that the state regulations are weak…" How weak?

The law also doesn't regulate construction of the farms in areas where groundwater is especially susceptible to pollution because the underlying rock is highly fractured. Nor does it address lights - which at most factory farms remain on all night - noise, truck traffic or potential decreases in neighboring property values. And it does not set any limits on a farm's use of high-capacity wells, which pump millions of gallons of water a day and can affect nearby private wells.

The result, when town officials sought to challenge the factory farm site:

"If you choose to pursue local requirements beyond the scope of the state siting law, the town will expose itself to unnecessary legal challenges from applicants and other interested parties that the town may not be able to defend," the letter (from the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection said).

The result:

1. No permit requests have been turned down by the DNR, nor have any permits been pulled when farms violate the terms of the permits. (In Illinois), a quarter of all permit requests have been turned down.

2. No ground water monitoring.

3. Many of the farms are inspected once every five years … DNR inspection staff has not grown along with the number of big farms.

I could go on about this revealing report, and about how it doesn't pinpoint who the politicians were that stripped local communities of their ability to save their quality of life, but instead, I thought this ironic observation pretty much said it best:

Matt Urch, who owns a small grass-fed livestock operation in Vernon County and has been involved in efforts to prevent construction of a nearby factory farm on the outskirts of Viroqua. "I am outraged that the state of Wisconsin deemed it necessary to pass a law designed to protect the economic interests of factory farms by stripping away the ability of local citizens to pass common-sense measures to protect the health and safety of both people and the environment," said Urch.