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What Oklahoma Farmers Think About The Right-To-Farm Issue In Oklahoma

Dustin Green, owner of 10 Acre Woods farm near Norman, feeds a few of his 400 or so chickens.
Logan Layden
/
StateImpact Oklahoma
Dustin Green, owner of 10 Acre Woods farm near Norman, feeds a few of his 400 or so chickens.

The right-to-farm bill got through the legislative process last week. That means voters will have a chance to decide next year whether to give farmers and ranchers broad protections against future state laws that might interfere with their operations.

But opponents say right-to-farm is a license that allows big ag to harm animals and the environment. But where do actual Oklahoma farmers and ranchers stand on the issue?

StateImpact randomly knocked on current and former farmers’ and ranchers’ doors east of Norman to find out.

“I don’t have an opinion. I don’t know anything about it. Do you know anything about it?” Debbie Downey asks her son, Dustin. “I know absolutely nothing about it,” Dustin says.

The people we met with unannounced didn’t know much about right-to-farm. At the Norman Farmers Market there was more awareness of the issue, but few strong opinions about it. Janetta Tesch and Justin Reed.

“I’ve heard a little of the opposition, but I haven’t actually read the bill myself,” Justin Reed, owner of JR Farms says and one of the market’s vendors says.  “And so, a lot of times I notice with these bills it will say one thing, but mean something else.”

StateImpact has reported about how right-to-farm is really a fight between the Humane Society of the U.S., which pushes for stronger animal welfare laws, and Farm Bureaus, which push against those kinds of laws. Some small farmers passionately oppose it, like Dustin Green, who owns a 10-acre farm near Norman with about 400 chickens.

“See, this is the difference between big ag and real farmers,” Green says. “Farming in the 50s was farmers who went and they sold their stuff at the co-op, their grains, their animals. But now everything’s mass-produced. And when you start mass-producing, you lose accountability. It’s important — and I have no affiliation with Human Society at all — but it’s important to have organizations like them who hold us accountable, that say “this isn’t good for the animal. It’s unsanitary. It spreads bacteria. It spreads diseases. They shouldn’t be locked in cages. They shouldn’t be locked in barns.”

Sheep, ducks, llamas, hogs and cattle all mingle on Coleen Thornton’s 60-acre farm down a maze of gravel roads near Tahlequah. Thornton sees both sides of right-to-farm.

“Personally, I’m not sure we need an amendment to our constitution, but I do understand the question of: Do we want someone from out of state telling us how we do business?” Thornton says.

Travis Schnaithman, whose family’s owns a 5000-acre farm near Garber is adamantly in favor of right-to-farm, and points to a Humane Society-backed law in California.

“Basically, they put rules and regulations on how animals are housed. They’ve got to be in enriched crates, enriched pens,” Schnaithman says. “What it’s done is decrease that production. Those farmers out there can’t compete on a national scale with other states that don’t have those rules and regulations.”

There’s a trend here: The bigger the farm, the more likely the farmer is a right-to-farm supporter.

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StateImpact Oklahoma is a partnership among Oklahoma’s public radio stations and relies on contributions from readers and listeners to fulfill its mission of public service to Oklahoma and beyond. Donate online.

Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. Logan spent six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017.
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