"Protect Your Town": How New Rural Formations Challenge Right-to-Farm Discourse and Enhance Local Control

Nan Enstad, University of Wisconsin, Madison
John Canfield, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Elena Bird, UW-Madison (Community & Environmental Sociology)

In multiple rural northwest Wisconsin communities, a wide, cross-party coalition has emerged to fight the expansion of intensive animal agriculture by establishing town operations ordinances. This effort has crystallized under the slogan, “Protect Your Town.” Industry groups have worked legislatively and judicially to deny this exercise of local control. The coalition’s strategies of passing township-level operations ordinances challenge an entrenched discourse originating in the 1980s’ nationwide battles surrounding Right-to-Farm legislation (Ashwood et al. 2023). The discourse supporting Right-to-Farm posits that urban interlopers–squeamish about the normal smells and sounds of agriculture–pose threats to rural areas. This Right-to-Farm discourse resonated with rural communities due to suburban sprawl (Hand 1984). Although industry groups claimed that they were defending “the farmer,” they used Right-to-Farm laws to deprive rural communities of their property rights and local control. Such Right-to-Farm discourse, with little revision, is alive in the current battle, though the new formation of rural opposition to intensive agricultural pollution is local, cross-party, and committed to rural livelihoods. This persistent public discourse has enabled big agricultural interest groups in Wisconsin to distort current state-level policy conversations (Graddy-Lovelace 2020). We examine the ways that visionary, cross-party activist formations are emerging in rural Wisconsin around a new discourse of community and environmental well-being. These formations have the potential to upend the long-effective frames that have contributed to the erosion of rural local control nationwide since 1980 (Diamond et al. 2022). Using content analysis, we illustrate the complex evolution of discourses supporting and challenging efforts to preempt local control. To do so, we examine three data sets (interviews with town board members; contemporary industry documents opposing the ordinances; and historical archives surrounding Wisconsin’s Right-to-Farm legislation). Our study seeks to help scholars and activists better understand the discursive mechanisms driving these innovative “Protect Your Town” community collaborations.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 42. The Past and Present of Agribusiness