By John McCracken
Marenda Porter’s new home in Ledgeview, Wisconsin, seemed like the perfect fit for her family of four children. The growing suburb outside Green Bay was a tight-knit community with nearby land for her kids to explore and space for a large garden.
Then there was a knock on the door.
A few days after moving in, concerned neighbors informed her that Ledgeview Farms, a large dairy farm behind her home, was planning to expand, which included building a manure pit to store millions of gallons of waste next to the subdivision.
Over the next several years, Porter began noticing manure runoff in the creek her kids would play in. Originally from rural South Dakota, she had been around farming her whole life, but this felt different.
“We don’t even want to think about health consequences because it’s out of our control, unless we were to pick up and move away,” she said. “But at this point, it’s just not feasible for us to do that.”
Residents, including Porter, openly complained about the farm’s operations and the risk associated with a waste pit near their homes. The town denied the farm’s permit application, saying the expansion would violate a newly updated town ordinance.
In late 2023, the farm responded with a lawsuit against the town.
The legal fight between the large dairy farm and the city government is an example of a growing trend in the nation’s Dairyland. As Wisconsin dairy farms get bigger and municipal and state governments impose new restrictions in response, the dairy industry is increasingly fighting back through the court system.
Many of the dairy farms that have sued municipal and state governments are represented by Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, a national law firm that helped craft state statutes to weaken local control over agriculture.
Since 2018, large Wisconsin dairy farms have filed 13 lawsuits against municipal and state governments, according to an Investigate Midwest analysis of court records and state permitting data for concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
Dairy farms with roughly 700 or more milking cows are considered CAFOs, requiring a Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permit.
“The trend does seem to be moving up, particularly for CAFOs and state agency-based litigation. The local municipality-based litigation tends to rise, as well,” said Adam Voskuil, a staff attorney at the environmental law firm Midwest Environmental Advocates. He does not represent either party in the Ledgeview Farms lawsuit.
The count only reflects the subset of CAFO conflicts that made it to the court bench: Farms settle many cases with municipalities or state agencies beforehand, sometimes after an appeal or public hearing. Farmers also settle legal disputes with municipalities after filing a notice of claim.
“As data comes out that shows the effects of (CAFOs on) groundwater contamination, local governments and the state government start responding with the authority that’s been given,” Voskuil added.
While the overall number of Wisconsin dairy farms has declined by nearly two-thirds over the past 20 years, the farms that remain have grown bigger.
The state’s dairy industry is estimated to be worth nearly $46 billion, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison research. Most of Wisconsin’s dairy is used to make cheese.
“Demand for dairy products overall, both United States domestic and export demand, continues to grow,” said Charles Nicholson, an agriculture and economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Larger farms mean more cattle. More cattle means more waste and runoff problems for nearby communities, especially in areas of population growth. Livestock waste runoff has been linked to various public health problems such as cancers, infant deaths and miscarriages.
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