Empty Fields, Empty Promises A State-by-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm

• Main Author: Ashwood, Loka (auth)
• Other Authors: Diamond, Danielle (auth), Franco, Allen (auth), Imlay, Aimee (auth), Kuehn, Lindsay (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press 2023
• Series: Rural Studies Series
• Subjects: Food & society; Rural communities; Regional government policies; United States right to farm laws; agricultural nuisance, trespass, and negligence; takings of rural property rights; agricultural law and the rural burden; agrarian democracy; foreign ownership in agriculture; agribusiness; Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations; rural poverty and rural racial minorities; environmental justice; distribution of ownership in food and agricultural production; monopoly and oligopoly power in agriculture; humane treatment of animals in industrial agriculture; decline of U.S. farmers; industrial agriculture pollution; public and community health effects of industrial agriculture; sociology of food and agriculture; environmental sociology; rural sociology; global corporate agribusinesses
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

The right to farm is essential to everyone's survival. Since the late 1970s, states across the nation have adopted so-called right-to-farm laws to limit nuisance suits loosely related to agriculture. But since their adoption, there has yet to be a comprehensive analysis of what these laws do and who they benefit. This book offers the first national analysis and guide to these laws. It reveals that they generally benefit the largest operators, like processing plants, while traditional farmers benefit the least. Disfavored most of all are those seeking to defend their homes and environment against multinational corporations that use right-to-farm laws to strip neighboring owners of their property rights. Through what the book calls the "midburden," right-to-farm laws dispossess the many in favor of the few, paving the path to rural poverty. Empty Fields, Empty Promises summarizes every state's right-to-farm laws to help readers track and navigate their local and regional legal landscape. The book concludes by offering paths forward for a more distributed and democratic agrifood system that achieves agricultural, rural, and environmental justice.