Loka Ashwood & Aimee Imlay, The Mid(burden): Courtroom Battles Over the Right-to-Farm in the Heartland
Loka Ashwood and Aimee Imlay provided our sixth and final presentation in the Rural Law and Policy Series for this spring 2021 semester. Their talk, The Mid(burden): Courtroom Battles Over the Right-to-Farm in the Heartland, can be viewed by clicking below.
bios
Loka Ashwood is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. She studies corporate and regulatory structures that prompt environmental injustices and animosity toward the state, with a mind toward action-based change in rural communities. She published the book, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government is Losing the Trust of Rural America (Yale 2018), and is co-author of An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (6th edition, Sage, fall 2020).
Aimee Imlay is a Sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests are at the intersection of stratification, political sociology, and public policy. Specifically, she considers how welfare states create poverty policy and how these policies impact social mobility, systems of stratification, citizenship, and democracy. She is currently researching food insecurity in SNAP ineligible households.
abstract
Two pronounced trends in rural America exist at the confluence of agriculture and the environment: industrial consolidation and spatial injustice. However, scholarship on the rural as a dimension of environmental injustice has yet to come fully into dialogue with agrifood studies, and more specifically, the declining agriculture of the middle. This paper draws on a preliminary, national analysis of statutes and case-law pertaining to property rights and nuisance litigation in the context of industrial agriculture, what are known as Right-to-Farm laws. Our results demonstrate that a disproportionate number of lawsuits filed in opposition to industrial scale agricultural operations happen in the Midwest. Further, we find that corporations prevail more in the Midwest than any other U.S. region, despite being largely white and frequented more by medium sized farms. We examine key attributes of these Right-to-Farm laws that enable large-scale operations to prevail, like immunity from nuisance culpability as soon as they begin operating. We consider how these Right-to-Farm laws, in legalizing the differential treatment of rural people’s property rights, enable spatial injustice and may further rural anti-governmentalism.
other work
You can find more information about this important project here: https://onerural.uky.edu/right-to-farm