Judge halts new Missouri law blocking local regulations on CAFOs

Austin Huguelet
News-Leader
Photo shows a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation for cattle in Indiana.

A Cole County judge has put a temporary halt to a new law aimed at reining in local regulations on large-scale farms known as concentrated animal feeding operations.

In an order Monday, Circuit Court Judge Patricia Joyce granted a request from opponents of the law to block the law from taking effect Aug. 28 and set the next hearing for Sept. 16.

The decision came after the Cedar County Commission, the Cooper County Public Health Center, the nonprofit Friends of Responsible Agriculture and three property owners filed suit calling the new law unconstitutional.

In their petition to the court, they argued that by barring counties from enacting any rules on CAFOs more stringent than what the state Department of Natural Resources does, lawmakers were violating the Right-to-Farm amendment.

When voters adopted the amendment in 2014, they guaranteed the right to farm subject to county rules, which were not yet restricted.

And by eliminating Cooper County’s regulations, the petition states, the new law deprives residents who live near a planned CAFO site there of their “constitutional rights to life, liberty, the enjoyment of their property, and equal protection.”

The concentrated feedlots, which can put thousands of pigs or chickens in roofed buildings on a single property, have raised concerns among neighbors and environmentalists about pollution from runoff and manure-fueled odors here and in other states. Critics cite issues in states like Iowa, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arkansas as cautionary tales, 

In a news release Tuesday, the plaintiffs applauded Joyce’s decision.

Among them was Cedar County Presiding Commissioner Marlon Collins, who cast the lawsuit as an effort to defend his county’s rules against unnecessary outside interference.

“We believe this is an important fight because we, as local elected officials, are in the best position to address local health concerns in Cedar County and to protect Stockton Lake, which provides the water supply for the city of Springfield,” he said.

Republican legislators described the new law differently as they pushed it through the statehouse this spring, arguing that overly strict rules in roughly 20 counties were holding back modern agriculture.

And they had the backing of major industry groups.

The Missouri Farm Bureau, Cattlemen’s Association, Pork Association, Soybean Association and Corn Growers Association applauded the bill's passage in May.

"Missouri farms should be governed by science-based rules and expert oversight, not reactionary fear mongering,” a joint statement from the organizations said then.  

But not everyone bought in.

By June, Cedar County Peggy Kenney was telling a full courtroom of residents about how the county's rules keep industrial farms reasonable distances away from vulnerable waterways and residential homes and manage traffic on rural roads.

Collins told the News-Leader in an interview how irritated he was that Republican lawmakers he helped elect turned a deaf ear to his concerns about the legislation.

And other conservative places, like Hickory and Christian counties, began thinking about enacting new regulations before the law was scheduled to take effect.

Representatives from the Missouri Farm Bureau said they would all be overridden by the new state law, but representatives from the Missouri Rural Crisis Center were just as adamant about their legal opinions that law can’t be applied retroactively, meaning any county with stricter rules in place Aug. 28 could keep them.