September 4, 2024
Everyone in Marenda Porter’s family of four kids seemed to love their new home in Ledgeview, Wisconsin. The neighborhood in the growing area outside of Green Bay was close-knit, and there was land nearby for her kids to play on and a big garden.
After that, someone knocked on the door.
A worried neighbor told her a few days after she moved in that Ledgeview Farms, the big dairy farm behind her house, was planning to grow, which would include building a manure pit next to the neighborhood to store millions of gallons of waste.
For the next few years, Porter saw that manure was running into the creek where her kids liked to play. Since she was born and raised in the country of South Dakota, she had been working all her life, but this felt different.
She said, “We don’t even want to think about the health effects because we can’t do anything about it unless we pick up and move away.” It’s just not possible for us to do that right now,
Porter was one of the people who publicly complained about the farm’s activities and the danger of having a waste pit close to their homes. The town said no to the farm’s permit application because the growth would be against a new town law.
By late 2023, the farm had had enough and sued the town.
A growing trend in the nation’s dairy country can be seen in the court case between the big dairy farm and the city government. As Wisconsin dairy farms get bigger and local and state governments put in place new rules to stop them, the dairy business is going to court more and more to fight back.
Michael Best & Friedrich LLP is a national law company that helped write state laws that make it harder for local governments to control agriculture. Many of the dairy farms that have sued city and state governments are represented by this firm.
Investigate Midwest looked at court records and state data on permits for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and found that since 2018, 13 lawsuits have been filed by big Wisconsin dairy farms against local and state governments. CAFOs are dairy farms with 700 or more milking cows, and they need a Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permit.
“The trend does seem to be going up, especially when it comes to CAFOs and lawsuits brought by state agencies.” “Local lawsuits against municipalities also tend to go up,” said Adam Voskuil, a staff attorney at the environmental law company Midwest Environmental Advocates. He is not a lawyer for either side in the Ledgeview Farms case.
“Local governments and the state government start to use the power they’ve been given as more information comes out about how CAFOs pollute groundwater,” Voskuil said.
About two-thirds as many Wisconsin dairy farms are now there as there were 20 years ago. However, the farms that are still there are bigger than they were before.
Research from the University of Wisconsin–Madison says that the state’s dairy business is worth about $46 billion. Cheese is made from most of Wisconsin’s milk.
“Demand for dairy products overall, both in the United States and abroad, continues to grow,” said Charles Nicholson, an economics and agriculture professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
More cattle means the farm is bigger. In places where people are moving in, having more cattle means more problems with waste and pollution for nearby towns. Several public health issues, like cancer, baby deaths, and miscarriages, have been linked to animal waste runoff.
Ledgeview Farms sued the town because it didn’t give them a permit. They said they had the right to farm and use their buildings the way they did before the town’s ordinance changed. Jason Pansier, the owner of the farm, and his lawyer both turned down an interview with Investigate Midwest.
Larry Konopacki, an attorney in Ledgeview, said that the town needs to protect many different interests, some of which may be at odds with each other, like the growth of a big dairy farm and the growth of a residential area.
In Wisconsin, he said, “we have very few tools to use because we’re a very pro-ag state.”
Years of legal battles
In 2017, Ledgeview Farms put in an application to build a new manure pit that could hold up to 13 million gallons of garbage. This would allow the farm to have more animals.
Porter and her friends were worried about what would happen if there was more trash near homes and bodies of water. Even Mike McCarthy, who lived in the area and was head coach of the Green Bay Packers at the time, was worried.
The town of Ledgeview, which used to be mostly rural, had become a hub for suburban cul-de-sacs and housing projects. According to the U.S. Census, the town’s population grew by a third between 2010 and 2020, reaching over 8,800.
The five-county area also had the most CAFOs of any area in the state. The space between living areas and large dairy farms was getting smaller.
The town board said no to Ledgeview Farm’s request for a permit to build a new manure pit.
The state’s high court, court of appeals, and Livestock Siting Review Board all agreed with the town that the permit shouldn’t be given. When the farm took its case to the state’s highest court, it was turned down.
The farm opened a manure pit in the nearby town of Glenmore in 2021. It now takes some of its Ledgeview trash there. Official in charge of planning in Glenmore, Ben Schauer, said that the pit is working and can hold more than 20 million gallons of manure.
The town of Ledgeview not only denied the permit, but also told the farm that it had to keep its herd at or below 1,000 animal units and make sure that all of its activities were legal under state and federal law.
The farm has had problems with the size of the herd.
As the town was going through the process of getting permits for the manure hole, Ledgeview Farms refused to give them the town’s herd numbers. In reaction, the town got a warrant for an inspection to be done by town inspectors along with the county sheriff’s office.
A town memo received by Investigate Midwest says that the farm’s owners refused to let town officials count the people who lived there. People who didn’t follow the warrant could have been arrested, but in the end, town leaders told the sheriff to leave without making any arrests.
A recent application for a sewer permit to the state showed that Ledgeview Farms had just under 2,000 cattle and planned to have more than 3,000 within five years. These plans can be seen in records from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) wouldn’t say anything about lawsuits between dairy farms and city governments.
In their most recent lawsuit, Ledgeview Farms said they should be able to keep doing what they’re doing because their big, free-stall barn was built before the town’s rule that limited the size of herds.
According to Eric McLeod, an advocate for Ledgeview Farms, the Pansiers had facilities in place before 2017 that let them have — and actually did have — several thousand cows in their facilities. He was talking about the farm owners during an oral argument in Brown County court on July 12, 2024.
In July, the town’s lawyers said that the judge should throw out the lawsuit because the businesses were working illegally before the 2017 ordinance.
Matthew Fischer, an advocate for Ledgeview, said, “The record shows that this is a bad-acting farm.” “They broke almost every state and federal rule about the environment.” It makes sense for the town to want to stop these violations.
People who live near the farm have seen these violations for themselves.
Porter said she has seen too much manure spread on nearby fields and found farm waste in her yard. She said that neighbors had to leave because the trash and smells were too much for them to handle.
She said, “It stinks so bad that we almost never open the windows.”
Litigating for the industry
Twelve people from the Pansier family sat on the two-by-two wooden benches in the small Brown County courtroom during the July oral argument session. A few Ledgeview officials sat on the other side of the room while McLeod, the lawyer for Ledgeview Farms, said it was usual for large farms and suburban residents to fight.
As he explained, “I’ve dealt with a lot of these kinds of disputes involving large dairy farms, and they always come up when people build neighborhoods next to dairy farms.” There are people who built homes in rural places who often find that they don’t like living next to farms.
Wisconsin lawyers like McLeod make a lot of money by taking these cases to court.
In its review of cases, Investigate Midwest found that Michael Best lawyers have also regularly defended farm owners against fines for breaking city permits and local pollution laws.
McLeod, the lawyer for Ledgeview Farms, used to work for Michael Best. There, he fought for a big dairy farm in a 2004 case against a small town in rural areas. It was one of the first times the law was used in court.
McLeod turned down an interview request from Investigate Midwest because he is currently working for Husch and Blackwell.
On the other side of the state, more business groups are involved in the same kinds of lawsuits.
The biggest business group in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, recently sued the town of Eureka over an ordinance that limited the operation of CAFOs.
“If we let local governments like the town of Eureka break the law, we’ll put at risk and maybe even kill an important part of our state’s economy,” said Scott Manley, executive vice president of government relations for WMC, when the case was announced. “There are already a lot of rules for these farms.”
Last year, WMC represented Venture Dairy Cooperative and the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance in a lawsuit against the DNR, arguing that it overreaches by forcing CAFOs to have wastewater licenses. Case dismissed. The groups declined comment.
In the past, industry groups tried to deregulation CAFO wastewater permitting by the state. The Dairy Business Association sued the DNR in 2017 for its runoff management policy, arguing it was not practical or scientific for Wisconsin farmers. Michael Best attorneys represented the group in its action against the agency, which settled that year.
Dairy Business Association denied Investigate Midwest’s interview.
Matthew Sheets, a policy organizer for the Land Stewardship Project, a Minnesota-based sustainable agriculture nonprofit, said municipalities want to regulate CAFOs that cause health or environmental issues, but the fear of lawsuits chills them.
It “reinforces the idea that if you’re large enough and have enough money to sue a municipality and you have more money than them, they won’t want to interfere,” he said.