Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
James C. Schwab, AICP	© & Author Info

Abstract

The widespread expansion and consolidation occurring within the pork-producing industry is part of a larger trend toward similar concentration that has already occurred and continues within other livestock industries, particularly poultry and beef. Concentrated animal feeding operations have posed new challenges concerning manure management and odor control, with significant impacts on neighboring landowners. In spite of these challenges, old state planning legislation exempting agriculture from county zoning regulations often severely limits the ways in which local planners can respond to these problems. In other locations, limits on staff capacity can hamper effective local regulation.

The Industry Trends

Concentration in the hog industry is part of a larger trend of concentration in livestock production generally, one that has been underway now for nearly half a century. Beginning as early as the 1950s, emerging large producers like Tyson Foods worked out a system of contracting with independent growers to produce chickens exclusively on terms that critics have long said make such growers dependent on the company for their survival with minimal compensation. These operations moved steadily toward highly industrialized, systematic, confined feeding operations that today dominate the poultry industry. Similar trends have been underway in more recent years in both the beef and pork industries, with the latter changes by far drawing more attention, in part because of the severity of their environmental impacts. These operations have come to be known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

Concentration in all livestock industries is proceeding at a rapid pace. Fewer operations are producing larger quantities of animals for slaughter. The following numbers concerning the increase in the average number of animal units per operation, from the recent Draft Unified National Strategy for Animal Feeding Operations, a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1), reveal the extent of that consolidation just between 1987 and 1992:

In terms of land-use impacts, this means that a greater number of highly concentrated individual feeding operations is producing ever more concentrated environmental, social, and economic impacts on the communities in which they choose to locate. Moreover, there is good evidence that they often choose to locate in the most poorly regulated states and particularly in communities with either minimal planning and zoning or none at all. The scramble among local planners in rural areas to determine the best course of action in responding to these challenges, which, in the case of hog CAFOs, involves serious odor and manure management issues, has produced a steady flow of inquiries to APA's Planning Advisory Service (PAS) for information on zoning and best practices. As a result, APA has chosen to develop a PAS Report on this topic to fill the gap in information available to planners wrestling with this issue.

The Impacts

The impacts resulting from these operations can largely be placed in three categories: environmental, social, and economic. In the end, like most planning issues, these issues often prove to be intertwined, but planners must nonetheless be able to distinguish carefully those they are in a legal and professional position to address, and those which must be left to the wisdom of other agencies and professions. We will get to that question of the planner's role later.

First, the environmental issues. Almost invariably, especially with hog farms, the issues revolve around odors and water quality. To the extent that there is some downwind deposition of acidic chemicals, the odor issue becomes entangled with other issues of local air quality. But by and large, odor control is an issue at least somewhat susceptible to regulation by performance standards applied to these operations in their design and maintenance. Because of the expertise needed to regulate impacts on water quality from manure runoff, much of the regulation of CAFOs in this respect has fallen to the U.S. EPA and state environmental agencies. Many states in recent years have at least considered new legislation specifically regulating the environmental impacts of CAFOs. For instance, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, and Nebraska have all enacted legislation in response to this issue. In this session, David Yearout has offered some firsthand experience with regard to the nature of some of these impacts.

Suffice it here to say that the impacts are severe enough in many cases to have made planning and zoning believers out of many communities that had previously regarded both with a great deal of suspicion. Just a year ago, when I did an all-day seminar on this topic for the Nebraska Planning and Zoning Association, newly minted planning commissioners, appointed to a newly created commission only within the past few months to year, arrived at the training conference specifically to find out how they could initiate county planning and zoning in response to proposed hog feeding operations. Few other industries are capable of evoking such responses from rural counties with a strong laissez-faire tradition regarding land use.

And that speaks to the social impacts of these operations. Their arrival has fractured the social network in many small communities where family farms have been for more than a century the bedrock of the local social structure. While most research in the livestock industry has focused on scientific ways of increasing productivity, two researchers from the University of Iowa in this decade have begun to fill the huge gap in sociological research concerning the social changes wrought by these facilities. Kendall Thu and Paul Durrenberger have been mustering contributions to scholarly anthologies and helping to organize vital conferences to explore the full range of impacts in the swine industry, and I recommend reading their literature (2). It is a gold mine of leads to other resources concerning health impacts from living near swine odors, changes in social structure and attitudes following the arrival of CAFOs in rural communities, and even, in some cases at least, the demoralizing effect of undue political influence on public participation in the political system of communities and whole states. These are serious issues, and whether or not they are within the purview of planners to address, they are certainly worth understanding as well as we can.

Finally, the economic impacts of increased concentration are ones that at least economic development planners should consider long and hard. For one thing, there is the long-term impact of creating, from short-term gain, what may well in some places become rural brownfields due to groundwater and other contamination as a result of excessive nutrient loads, polluted runoff, and other problems. Many of these problems can be ameliorated or mitigated to some extent, but not where a community is incapable of effective review and regulation of proposed new operations. But it is also important to understand that the steady decline in the number of smaller, independent operators, combined with the increasing dependency of contract producers on large food corporations, as has happened in the poultry industry, can lead to wrenching changes, including greater socioeconomic stratification, in the communities where these changes occur. Many of these economic changes are global or at least national in nature, and will occur whether or not large CAFOs come to town, but they are certainly accentuated when such operations become a dominant local presence.

Planning and Zoning

So what are communities doing? A lot depends, unfortunately, on what they are allowed to do. Back around the 1950s, with all good intentions, many states enacted county zoning enabling legislation that exempted agriculture. No one at the time envisioned today's CAFOs, and thus they failed to distinguish them from the types of family farms they had in mind in drafting the protective legislation. The result is that, under the umbrella of those exemptions, CAFOs have escaped local zoning regulations by using a truck-size legal loophole. Moreover, once they have gained that advantage, they tend also to have enough lobbying power to hang onto it in the face of critics' attempts to amend these laws to create such a distinction. One of the results of their frustration is the passage just last fall, in a South Dakota ballot initiative, of the most restrictive law in the country controlling corporate ownership of farmland. There is a battle royal raging in many of our state capitols over the issue of popular control over rural land use.

In the meantime, however, in states like Iowa, where the issue went all the way to the state supreme court, county planning commissions lack the power to control the location of CAFOs. Counties may, if they have the technical capacity to do so, try to regulate them under health and environmental codes, but zoning involves tools like site plan reviews that can make a critical difference. The tensions arising in many rural areas over new CAFOs are in large part an expression of popular frustration over the simply discovery that there is nothing people can do about it. The problem for planners, of course, is that this is a political problem that is beyond their control. And, as I noted earlier, in many rural counties, no planning commission or zoning ordinance even existed prior to the arrival of CAFOs on the scene. By that time, it is obviously a bit too late.

Nonetheless, our PAS Report does discuss the ways in which planning and zoning can be used to regulate CAFOs, in those places where these tools can be legally applied to the problem. In those states where the exemptions exist, it may be an appropriate question for state APA chapters to consider whether and how such legislation ought to be amended, and whether taking on that issue, along with appropriate allies, is a worthwhile struggle. But let me conclude by outlining the essential techniques our report suggests:

1) As Kirk Bishop's report for the state of Minnesota (3) suggests, do not use zoning to attack CAFOs in isolation from other issues facing the community. If you are going to introduce planning and zoning to the community, or revitalize it, as a response to CAFOs, then go all the way and engage in a community visioning process that identifies the community's positive dreams for its future as well as its negative concerns.

2) Make a clear, concise effort to define the differences between traditional farming and the more industrialized operations that are of concern, and identify the differences in impacts clearly so that it is clear what you are regulating and why. Both EPA and state environmental regulations concerning CAFOs provide some models in terms of defining CAFOs based on size and the nature of the operations.

3) Make effective review of the site plans for the facilities a part of the ordinance, including performance standards with regard to odor and manure management. Again, technical guidance on these points is available and should be used.

4) Be sure that whatever regulations you adopt can be supported with adequate staff capabilities and technical expertise to enforce them. If something is better left to enforcement by state health and environmental experts, and if you are reasonably confident in their abilities and regulatory stance, then don't add useless and unenforceable provisions to local zoning.

Conclusion

Planners and rural communities have too often been blindsided by the impacts of concentrated animal feeding operations before they ever understood what is happening in the livestock industry. There is no substitute for adequate technical information in this area, yet planners have not, by and large, enjoyed easy access to the types of information they need most. This PAS Report is an attempt to plug that gap, and APA will try to make other resources available as well. The issue is too important to the future of our nation's rural communities to be ignored.

Endnotes

1. U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 1998. Draft Unified National Strategy for Animal Feeding Operations. September 11. Accessible via Internet at:

2. See Thu, Kendall M., and E. Paul Durrenberger, eds. 1998. Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities. Albany: State University of New York Press; and Thu, Kendall, general editor. Understanding the Impacts of Large-Scale Swine Production: Proceedings from an Interdisciplinary Scientific Workshop, June 29-30, 1995. Des Moines, Iowa. Sponsored by The North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, UI Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, Iowa's Center for Agricultural Safety and Health, The Farm Foundation, and UI Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination.

3. James Duncan and Associates, in association with Iowa State University. 1996. Planning and Zoning for Animal Agriculture in Minnesota: A Handbook for Local Government. St. Paul: Minnesota Department of Agriculture. June.