North Dakota Again Rejects Corporate Farming

Hurrah for North Dakota voters, who on June 14 voted in a statewide referendum on the issue of whether non-family corporations could buy up farmland in their state. Rejecting specious arguments that foreign (non-local) owners were needed to help the farm economy, North Dakotans maintained a 1932 law, a legacy of the era of populism and the Non-Partisan League.

Protecting soil and water and local farm jobs are priorities for the citizen commons, but not so much for large, investor-driven hog and poultry operations that were going to be allowed by a 2015 law passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor. But the North Dakota Farmers Union launched a drive for a referendum on the law, and they defeated it by a 3 to 1 margin.

Farm Aid’s executive director, Carolyn Mugar, wrote in the New York Times on June 18: "As Willie Nelson, the founder of Farm Aid, wrote in an Op-Ed essay that ran locally in North Dakota: 'Citizens are told that their long-held values are getting in the way of progress, or that the family farm is obsolete. But the truth is just the opposite: Corporate farming is destroying our present; the family farm is our future.'"

For an additional commentary on the successful referendum, see this from Center for Rural Affairs: http://www.cfra.org/news/160620/thank-god-north-dakota.