ASSOCIATED PRESS
EDGERTON, WIS. - Opponents of large-scale dairy farms have won a fight to keep a proposed $10 million, 2,850-cow dairy farm out of Edgerton. "It has been an endless battle" to come up with a suitable site, said Ken Buelow, who would have been part-owner and manager of the farm proposed in the town of Porter.
The town zoning board Tuesday night turned down a request for a land use permit for the operation, called Holsum Inc. A conditional use permit was needed because Porter zoning ordinances allow only two cows per acre and 320 cows at one operation.
Buelow said he and his New Mexico business partners planned to look for another site, likely not in south-central Wisconsin and possibly in Indiana.
"We can't do this without community support," he said.
Critics contend that mega dairy farms with thousands of cows aren't a good fit for Wisconsin's landscape, which is dotted with hundreds of small farms.
Once big farms move into an area, it could be difficult for state and local governments to deal with problems they might create, the opponents said.
"Wisconsin's right to farm law would make it very hard to win a lawsuit," said Glenn Stoddard, a Madison attorney who represented about 30 town of Porter residents opposed to Holsum.
Town residents and others, including environmental activists from Madison, said the proposed farm would blur the lines between farming and industry.
"Clearly, this farm (Holsum) would be industry, and it should be subject to industrial, and not agricultural, regulations," said Jeff Conn, of Evansville.
Buelow said big dairy farms are using a plethora of cutting-edge technologies to control odor and minimize pollution.
No one denies that manure lagoons, holding millions of gallons of liquid manure, can leak, "but I think you would see more manure runoff from small farms," he said. by the concentration of several thousand cows in a small area.
"I have deep, emotional feelings about this land," said resident Paula Porter Bennett. A mega farm, she added, "would be ugly, unnatural, unfair and unsound."
State Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, attended the zoning committee's meeting and said the state Department of Commerce put the Town Board in a tough position.
He criticized a plan by the department to loan $850,000 to the farm's backers.
"Wisconsin was built on the back of the family farm," Erpenbach said. "I had no advance contact on this. Why aren't we using the $850,000 to grow local area farms?"
Documents distributed at an earlier public hearing, obtained under the state's open records law by dairy opponent Jeff Conn, showed that the Commerce Department had outlined terms of an $850,000, low-interest loan to Holsum Inc., to offset the cost of a waste management system.
Town residents said they didn't want to find out, years from now, that their water wells were ruined and their quality of life diminished.:
