The Town of Gilman became Pierce County’s third township (10th in the state) to pass a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation regulation operations ordinance Wednesday, Dec. 10.

Lisa Doerr, a Polk County resident who has pushed for the ordinance in many of Pierce County’s town meetings, said air pollution controls, an infectious disease plan, carcass disposal plan, biosecurity plan, road plan, water use plan, impact on property value analysis, fire response plan and financial bond in case of a factory closure all go from not required to required under the ordinance. The proposal Doerr presented has served as the framework for the ordinances passed in Maiden Rock, Isabelle and now Gilman.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, a CAFO is where over 1,000 animal units are confined for more than 45 days a year. Livestock varies in animal units depending on both the species of and the size of the individual animals.

As Gilman Town Board Chair Phil Verges noted, the approved ordinance is not a ban on CAFOs in the township, but rather an increase to regulations and enforcement on them. Verges said the ordinance has legal backing, citing a lawsuit in Polk County against a CAFO operations ordinance being dismissed by the judge.

“This ordinance has held up in the court. It was crafted by attorneys,” Verges said. “It’s an operations ordinance, not a siting ordinance, and I think a lot of people confuse siting for agriculture because there is a livestock siting ordinance at the state level.”

Siting ordinances regulate the creation, layout, setback and design of a facility, while operations ordinances regulate how businesses operate day-to-day.

Opposition to the ordinance has ranged from questions of the authority/legality for the board to add required planning the state does not require to concerns that farmers will be harmed because of the cost and time it takes to create additional plans. Also, CAFO farmers have stated their farms already have plans in place for many of the proposed additional analyses, but they are found within different plans, meaning they would have to create an entirely new plan to cover each base. In turn, because of the added cost of making more plans, some farmers felt costs would go up, leading to adding more cows to cover the gap, looping all the way back to farms being larger than the owners even want them to be to cover the gap.

The town board discussed pursuing an ordinance as other neighboring towns mulled it over back in early spring. They then approved the Plan Commission to study the ordinance, and after a summer and fall of looking into it and a public hearing to measure communal interest, the board made the ordinance approval unanimously Dec. 10.

“We went, pretty much, off the existing operations ordinance that’s been out there,” Verges said.

Hearing from the community was a vital step, Verges said, allowing the board to see how residents and taxpayers felt about a potential ordinance.

“Just to get a feel on where the community is on this,” Verges said. “Most of the general community, the people that live near the farms especially, are in favor of doing something.”

Verges pleaded that the state take action on the issue, making changes to take the burden out of the local government’s hands to regulate CAFOs. He mentioned groundwater, surface water, air quality, roads and safety as top priorities that are addressed through the ordinance’s passing.

“It isn’t something that we take pleasure in having to do. I think the failures at the state level with these farms that keep getting larger and larger make it important to look at what tools we may have to hold some accountability to these farms as they continue to grow,” Verges said.