Progress 06/01/21 to 03/31/24
Outputs
Target Audience:Our project most formatively intended to reach farmers. Yet reaching farmers -- particularly helping to build a path forward for small and medium sized farmers to thrive -- requires working with non-profits, the academy, and the public directly. The analysis and dissemination of results as regards to Right-to-Farm laws has always been the stipulated purpose of this project. To meet that purpose most successfully, we took a three-pronged approach: reach the public and farmers directly through the web; write an accessible book and guide to the national and state specific impacts of these laws and their potential alternatives; and last, share with the academy a cutting edge approach to merging national and state level analyses. Largely, I think we achieved all of these aims. I worked with college staff to create the One Rural website to feature our state specific summaries of the Right-to-Farm laws. As of April 2024, we had a recorded 71,360 views, with a total of 56,214 visitors on the One Rural website. As I visited various states, I found either through the audience or directly googling myself that our state-level Right-to-Farm summaries were often a top hit in that state. This meets a crucial need to simply get accessible and reasonable summaries of these laws out to the public. Further, I have fielded emails from farmers who have read the summaries online and then reached out for help. Thus, in addition to making this information publicly accessible via the web generally, farmers have found it of use. Second, our book Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A Guide to Understanding and Reforming the Right to Farm (UNC 2023) came out. With the grant's support and the incredible work by Co-PI Aaron Shier, we were able to distribute the book for free to farmers at the National Farmers Union 2024 convention and in spring 2024 to the National Young Farmers Coalition at a meeting in Kentucky. Probably the most gratifying moment of the work was having our breakout panel at the National Farmers Union 2024 convention packed with what an organizer estimated to be over 100 people, and having the privilege of signing books for farmers (and thanking them for their work). Lindsay Kuehn, our main collaborator from Farmers Legal Action group, delivered succinct examples as to the impact of these laws. My sense was that we built some important bridges. Last, the book has received some attention from our peers in the academy. I was invited to give presentations on the book at the University of Michigan as part of the Planning, Law and Property Rights Association; we had an author meets critics session at the Rural Sociological Society's annual meetings in August 2023; I presented at Cornell University's Global Development Series, which now features an online talk on the book (further promoting its accessibility). Dani Diamond's lead authored paper based on our research was a winner of the 2023 Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review Award. Our Right-to-Farm research was included in Science Friday and covered by NPR via Harvest Public Media. Further, our numbers from the book that show the decline in the number of farm operations by sector was featured in Investigate TV's nationally syndicated broadcast, "Secret Acres: Boom or Bubble? High Farmland Prices Encourage Investors, Concern Farmers." The book was also featured on Barn Raiser and a podcast on the New Books Network. The book was reviewed by Library Journal and H-Net. I was proud to give the Keynote at the Agroecology Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison based on our right-to-farm work. Likewise in 2023, I discussed the Right-to-Farm project at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting, as their keynote speaker on growing just and democratic rural communities to open generative dialogue. Before that, and over the course of the project, we also presented on Right-to-Farm laws virtually at the University of Nebraska School of Law (2022), the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society (2022), Yale's Big Ag & Antitrust Conference (2021), and the Rural Sociological Society (2019). We interfaced with thousands of people who attended the Farm Aid festival in 2023, as we hosted a book on the Right-to-Farm laws and shared a QR code to acecss the book for free online. This was an incredible opportunity to talk directly with farmers and the public about the implications of these laws. Farm Aid, as well as the Center for Justice and Health Equity at the University of Kentucky, provided a subvention to help the book be available online for free. This also helped ensure the broad dissemination of our research beyond the academy. Changes/Problems:The major challenge we experienced over the course of the grant project were disruptions due to the COVID-19 panemic. Another disruption was the transfer of the grant from Auburn University to the University of Kentucky. We went for a over a year without grant funding, but despite that, my team continued to work on state summaries and also to get the One Rural website live. We did this often in isolation, and communicated with each other as we were in some cases isolated in our homes. But we did it it. A notable change was that we asked for specific permission to use the grant funds to purchase books that we disseminated to farmers at the National Farmers Union national convention as well as the National Young Farmers Coalition meeting in spring 2024. We did not originally intend to write a book based on this project, but we quickly learned that the vast amount of data we had, as well as state specific variability, was particularly conducive to this form of deliver. We received approval to purchase books to distribute to farmers and non-profits by Shatorya A. Wallace, Senior Grants Management Specialist, the Awards Management Division. This really enabled us to increase our outreach by disseminating directly hard copies of the book, especially for farmers who may not have good online connectivity to read the free version. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This grant project spanned two universities (Auburn University and Univeristy of Kentucky) as well as the COVID-19 panemic. When housed at Auburn University until 2020, the grant played a pivitol role in the education and professional development of three Rural Sociology Masters students: Dalton Richardson, Crystal Boutwell, and Karl Galloway. Dalton Richardson and Crystal Boutwell researched Right-to-Farm laws in North Carolina and Missouri, respectively, and Karl Galloway researched Right-to-Farm laws in Alabama. The grant funded them to present in front of professional societies. In addition to these graduate students, during the time at Auburn University the grant funded training in NVivo for three lawyers on the project, myself, as well as graduate students. This training helped us work through our disciplinary and practical differences (namely the law and sociology) to come up with a bridging codebook. This training has really helped paved the way for further training in regards to this project and the capacity to link socio-economic and legal studies in the context of farming and the environment. After the grant transferred to the University of Kentucky, multiple PhD students had the opportunity for training in NVivo, public dissemination of data, writing legal briefs, learning about case-law, and integrating U.S. Census of Agriculture Statistics into legal analyses. I perhaps am most proud of this latter piece, as I had the honor of working with Aime Imlay who was funded through a research assistantship to be part of this project. Aimee has exceptional skills with time series analysis, and took her training within our Sociology program and leveraged it into the analysis of Right-to-Farm laws. Because of this, we were able to do more advanced statistical analyses by integrating U.S. Census of Agriculture data into our NVivo analysis, the latter of which was largely completed by the time she joined the project. Additionally, a series of other graduate students helped do outreach pertaining to the project: Margaux Crider, Jimmy Robinson, and Abe Neis-Eldridge. This included disseminating the results at the Farm Aid meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, where we again directly interfaced with the project. These were important networking opportunities that bridged the academy into the non-profit and public spheres, which I believe have been important opportunities for all students involved. A series of undergraduate students also were involved on the project and helped take our state-specific summaries and enter them into the online platform. One high school student, Gavin Johnson, also volunteered to help on the project after reaching out about it, and ended up going to Dartmouth University. He helped with social media around the project and created a Facebook page to help promote the work. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?My sense is that we have worked hard to ensure that the results have been disseminated to farmers, farm organizations, communities, the public, and the academy. In addition to the target audiences that we have reached (see our description under targeted audiences for a more detailed explination of public, farmer and academic outreach), the book was also disseminated in hard copy to a series of leading non-profits: Socially Responsible Agricultural Project, Missouri Rural Crisis Center, NOPE, North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, Farm Aid, National Family Farm Coalition, Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Alabama Field Office, Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Mississippi Field Office, Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Louisiana Field Office, Federation of Souther Cooperatives, Texas Field Office, Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Georgia Field Office, Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Rural Coalition, Farm Commons, WORC, Intertribal Ag Council, RAFI-USA, Farm Action, Farm Action, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, NAMATI, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Health, Earthjustice, Family Farm Defenders, Common Ground, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Working Group, and Public Justice. Most important for us have been the moments when we have direclty intefaced and helped farmers, which has mainly been facilitated by our Co-PI, the National Farmers Union. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
We have reached every goal, with a few caveats, explained below: (1) We have captured the change and national variation in current Right-to-Farm or Preservation laws by collecting and analyzing all current and original statutes. For this project, original and current right-to-farm statutes for all fifty states were gathered using both Westlaw and LexisNexis. In some states where RTF provisions are found in related statutes, these statutes were also gathered from Westlaw and LexisNexis. For our quantitative work, we analyzed all publicly available cases from judicial courts that we could acquire through Westlaw and LexisNexis until the end of 2021. We found these cases through keyword searches pertaining to agricultural nuisance and right to farm. Settlements out of court are not publicly available and thus were not part of our analysis. We analyzed the highest-level court cases, meaning we did not analyze lower-level court outcomes. We made this decision to identify, to the best of our ability, ultimate wins. However, this did leave out lower court rulings, specifically the burden of litigation on certain parties due to appeal. We excluded cases from administrative courts unless they were appealed to a judicial court. We also included two cases in Illinois that appeared before the Illinois Pollution Control Board, because the state or any person can bring a nuisance case either to court or to the board (in other words, these cases were not simply agency ones). The oldest case in our data set is from 1971 and the most recent 2021-- a total of fifty years. Within this initial set of 297 cases, we identified 197 that made dispositive use of RTF laws, meaning cases where the RTF law was used to determine the merits and outcomes of the case, not those that simply referenced RTF law in passing. NVivo utilizes two key methods for analysis: codes and attributes. We utilized NVivo to code, apply attributes to, and run queries on our data set. Our team consisted of five coders: three coders trained in sociology and two practicing lawyers. We continued to refine our codebook until our kappa score, which measures continuity between coders, was above .9. We ended up with codes we utilized to identify trends in the statutes and the case law. All statutes were coded for immunity provisions, definitions, commodities, limitations on damages and relief, legal mechanisms, power of local governance, responsible stewardship, timing of operation, and protection of related hazardous industries. Statutory attributes were used to analyze historical trends in RTF laws. Cross-coding matrices identified the number of states with similar RTF provisions, as displayed in the individual state and national tables. (2) We then identified the benficiaries of such statutes, but not only -- we took it a step further and helped explain these benfitiaries through the political economy of regions and states. Case-law codes identified the outcome of the case, the use of specific statutory provisions, the interests at stake, the commodities at hand, and the key statutes utilized. Case law was assigned attributes corresponding to region, party types, court level, hearing type, whether the case was dispositive, and whether the case was a class action suit. Cross-coding matrices using both attributes and codes tracked national and regional trends in court outcomes, as laid out further in Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (UNC 2023). The state tables draw on the same case-law and statutory data set developed in NVivo, which is current up until 2021. Each state was a "case," in NVivo's terms, which enabled us to do more complicated queries based on attributes and codes. We also created static sets of different outcomes and descriptors-- for example, static sets of dispositive cases based on winning party types. We then identified a series of attributes for case law and states. Data describing the percentage of racial minorities at the state level were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 2020 five-year estimates. Rural racial minority thresholds in figure 1.4 are drawn from the percentage of a state's rural population by race, where "racial minority" was defined as race or ethnicity other than white alone. We utilized five regions in our analysis: Southeast, West, Southwest, Northeast, and Midwest. The Southeast includes twelve states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. (3) Based on our findings, we were able to case-study extreme examples of RTF laws to show how these forementioned factors shaped different outcomes. For example, in Indiana, where CAFOs are winning the most, no governmental entity has yet to even be a party in an RTF case, let alone win one. In contrast, governmental entities have won most cases they have been party to in Massachusetts. Indiana cases have heavily drawn on a suite of provisions that expanded the protection for operations that have been in existence continually for more than one year. For example, Indiana protects such operations if their boundaries or size changes; if the locality around them changes; if they use a new technology; if they change the product they produce; and if there is a change in the operation's ownership. Indiana's law also extends these protections to industrial and mining operations more generally, in essence deflating the capacity to differentiate between food and industry at large. Massachusetts, while providing the same one-year immunity provision, does not include any accompanying protections like those in Indiana when an operation changes. Further, the one-year provision-- which benefits firms and CAFOs the most-- has yet to be used as a defense by any party in Massachusetts RTF cases, reflecting the prevalence of smaller farms and the absence of larger operations. (4) We suggest a series of pathways forward -- at the people's discretion -- to potentially reform Right-to-Farm laws to be more conducive to small and medium sized farmers. We focus on three areas ready for transformation: market power and the government, RTF amendments and repeal, and the U.S. and state constitutions. In terms of changing RTF specific language, we suggest a series of provisions that could be repealed, as we find in the book that they benefit CAFOs and business firms the most. This includes immunity once operations are up and running for a year; immunity if they use a new technology; immunity if the product or activities change; immunity if operations are interrupted or stop; immunity if ownership changes; or court costs awarded only to the defendent. In contrast, we also suggest a series of provisions that could be added to RTF laws, such as the requirements tha toperations be there first. That there are no unique limits to compensatory or punative damages; that local laws and ordinaces supersede RTF laws, or that operations with unclear ultimate benefitiaries do not receive protection. These suggestions are further clarified in our book, Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (UNC 2023).
Publications
- Type:
Books
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Ashwood, Loka, Danielle Diamond, Allen Franco, Aimee Imlay, and Lindsay Kuehn. Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-by-state Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.
|
Progress 06/01/22 to 05/31/23
Outputs
Target Audience:This was our most important year for ourtreach. In part, this is because the pandemic hindered our efforts substantially. This year, however, we attended the 2023 National Farmers Union convention, where we distributed hard copies of each state summary of the RTF law to farmers who visited our booth and asked about specific states. We also promoted our forthcoming book, Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right-to-Farm (UNC 2023). We met with individual chapter NFU chapter presidents and discussed ideas for reforming their RTF statutues to better help small and medium sized farmers. Additionally, we gave a series of invited talks and paper presentations. Ashwood presented an invited talk at the keynote panel of the International Academic Asosciation on Planning, Law and Property Rights at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor on May 2, 2023. Ashwood gave the invited Haller Lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as part of the Agroecology symposium, where she presented on the RTF project findings at the Memorial Union on April 12. Ashwood also gave the invited keynote for the Rural Geography Specialty Group at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting on March 25, where she spoke about the RTF project findings. PhD Student Aimee Imlay presented on the project findings at the Rural Sociological Society annual meetings on August 5, 2022. Perhaps most importantly, the project gained national media attention. NPR quoted Ashwood and covered the project's finding on Science Friday, Here & Now, and Harvest Public Media. Ashwood also spoke about the project while she was on Minnesota Public Radio as part of a special program on "Revealing the Realities of Rural America" on September 19, 2022. Farm Aid also help fund a subvention to help make the forthcoming book, Empty Fields, Empty Promises, open access and has invited Ashwood and their team to present on the book. Changes/Problems:After surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, nothing seems like a major change or problem. We have moved full steam ahead and are excited for the next year. There is great momentum. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has proved invaluable to Aimee Imlay, who worked on the project first in an hourly position and then as a Research Assisant from 2022-2023. She just graduated this May with her PhD and will be joining the Mississippi State University as an Assistant Professor fall 2023. This project enabled her to present at multiple conferences and make crucial connections with other scholars. During her interviews for various assistant professor positions, she was frequently asked about her work on the Right-toFarm project and congratulated for it. It is no doubt that this grant has enabled her, but that also, she has enabled this project by doing tremendouly important work on it. Also, a talented undergraduate student has been employed through the grant to help update and revise the website https://onerural.uky.edu/right-to-farm. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?While our dissemination has leaped forward through the launch of the online website and also our deep engagement with farmers, we still have more to do. In the next year, we will do arguably the most important work on the project, sharing the book across the country and especially working to get it into the hands of rural organizations so property owners more broadly have better access to this information. We will continue our deep engagement with academics and farmers. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The publication of Empty Fields, Empty Promsies will be the most important element in achieving our second goal, which requires suggesting statutory changes to improve RTF laws to help farmers stay on (and we might even add return to) the land. We will continue to work with organizations to help reform RTF laws to better serve small and medium sized farmers. We will hold a series of workshops on RTF laws, enabling participants to use the book as a guide to thinking through how they would like to have these laws revised to best suit their needs. In our engagement with farmers nationally, we have become even more convinced that state specific variations will remain absolutely central in the best revision path forward.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
In regards to our first goal, we have engaged in direct outreach with farmers, particularly through the National Farmers Union and their state level affiliates. We have communicated direclty with Farmers Union state presidents across the country and worked with our national affiliate to make important inroads to reaching farmers directly. We directly met with farmers, and continue to work with them. We continue to field emails from those who access our website (https://onerural.uky.edu/right-to-farm), and request more information about how to best navigate RTF laws. The national and international impact of our project is now clearer academically, leading to a series of keynote speaking requests as part of national and international meetings. National media coverage of our work has helped the broader public understand the importance of RTF laws and how they can better work to serve small and medium sized farmers. Our goal in accordance with (1) have most certainly been achieved and we are proud of this. Our second goal will come to fruition in the next year, as our book Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm, is released. With the help of Farm Aid and an internal subvention here at the University of Kentucky, readers will be able to access the book virtually and for free anywhere. Already, the book can be preordered at no costs through amazon. However, with the grant, we will also be disseminating hard copies of the book to readers (specifically an aging farming demographic) less likely or inclined to read books in virtual form. We plan on disseminating these in the next year. This book lays forth our state specific summaries, but also goes much further. In the introduction, it provides a national analysis of how RTF statutes are impacting different socio-demographics as well as geopolitical contexts differently. We identify specific statutory language that is least benefitial to small and medium sized farmers. In the conclusion of the book, we set forth a series of recommendations to effectively revise these laws to help those who need it most, rather than the largest of operators, which currently are benefiting the most from RTF laws.
Publications
- Type:
Websites
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
We created the https://onerural.uky.edu/right-to-farm website to host summaries of state specific Right-to-Farm laws. Interested viewers can access these summaries by clicking on the state they are interested in. Some of our state summaries are now the top hit for searches on state Right-to-Farm law. We think this has been an incredibly successful outreach effort and educational campaign that has had real life-impacts on rural American and farming communities.
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Diamond, Danielle, Loka Ashwood, Allen Franco, Aimee Imlay*, Lindsay Kuehn, and Crystal Boutwell. 2022. Farm Fiction: Agricultural Exceptionalism, Environmental Injustice and U.S. Right-to-Farm Laws. Environmental Law Reporter, 52: 10727-10748.
- Type:
Books
Status:
Awaiting Publication
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Ashwood, L., A. Imlay, L. Kuehn, A. Franco and D. Diamond. Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-by-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm. The University of North Carolina Press.
|