Stop letting businesses put pig poop in our water

From Crawford Stewardship Project:

Help stop another preemption of local control!  Our Wisconsin legislature is threatening to make CAFO Operations Ordinances illegal...we need all hands on deck to stop this!

This is a call to support the efforts of Sustain Rural Wisconsin Network (SRWN) to protect local control at the statewide level. Crawford Stewardship Project is a co-founding member of SRWN, a statewide coalition of partners working to hold Big Industrial Ag accountable for their impacts on our family farms and rural communities.

Our communities have the inherent right to self-governance in defense of public health and safety. Current regulatory structures for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) have a singular focus on water quality, (and even that is lacking), leaving it up to local governments to protect public priorities including air quality, biosecurity, fire safety, disaster-mitigation, property values, road impacts, etc.  A growing number of Wisconsin counties and townships have put protections in place by passing Operations Ordinances. These are not bans, but through extensive study and public debate between area stakeholders Operations Ordinances put protections in place that have passed in both liberal and conservative municipalities. They are a basic and appropriate exercise of our democratic process and local control.  Operations Ordinances raise the bar on industrial livestock operations by asking them to address community concerns and behave as good neighbors. Big Ag's Madison lobbyists want to outlaw local ordinances, and they've tried this before: last year SRWN stopped the state from making these ordinances illegal through a concerted campaign that resulted in 900+ messages to the Governor!  Good work team! We need to pull together again. With your support, SRWN can retain our own lobbyist to help make our rural voices heard in Madison and protect our health and property. Grassroots action has gotten us far, but a lobbyist helps make sure we can be at all the right meetings, have an inside scoop on the Capitol as things develop, and can go in to meetings with all the insights we need to be effective.  Whereas CSP works primarily at the local level, SRWN is a coalition of grassroots groups working to take our local voices to the state level in Madison. SRWN has a statewide goal of raising $10k to retain a lobbyist, you can click here to contribute to SRWN's work protecting Operations Ordinances from current threats at the state level.