Ten things I took away from the recent four hour hearing for a permit for a 9,000-head hog farm near Buffalo, N.D., were:

1) Zoning for Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) is going to become an issue in North Dakota. The publicity generated in the state's biggest media market by this controversial case is will likely have counties and townships across North Dakota thinking about their zoning regulations. If someone doesn’t introduce some restrictive zoning bills in the North Dakota legislature next sessions, I’d be surprised.

2) Opponents are going to call for 5 to 7 mile setbacks from large livestock facilities. People living 2 to 3 and even 4 miles from the site of the Buffalo project weren’t happy about it. They considered the roads they drive on to and from town, and where they walk, run or bike to be their space, too. They were even worried about manure being applied to fields as far away as a mile or two of their homes.

3) Farmers need to talk to their communities about their plans long before it gets to the permit stage. The mayor of Buffalo was really ticked off that the project appeared to have been in the works for over a year before she heard about it. Winning support from non-farmers for CAFOs will be hard enough without making them mad first.

4) Farmers need be ready to counter what’s on the internet. When they hear about a proposed project, people are going to immediately search the web for information about what’s it is like living near CAFOs. Nearly everything that comes up first in Google Search will be from activist groups. Your advantage is that you can make personal connections. Take key people from your area to other farms and show them what you would like to do. Visit other communities that have livestock facilities. Morris, Minn; Veblen, S.D.; Sioux Center and Orange City, Iowa, are great local examples. You can bring people who operate and work in livestock farms to meetings in your community. They need to see that these people are regular folks like them, not the three-headed monsters as they are often portrayed on the internet.

5) Farmers should line up support of other farmers. No farmer in the Buffalo community spoke up in favor of the proposed project at the hearing. Instead, opponents told and landowners who had signed pledges that they not would allow the hog manure to be applied to or even pumped across their land in hoses.

6) Project developers should talk to the media early. When they don’t know who you are or have any background about the project, reporters and especially radio talk show hosts will just repeat what opponents say and try to balance their story the best they can. I thought the developers interviews on talk radio after the hearing were pretty effective. I wish they would have done more of them before the controversy went nuclear.

7) It wouldn’t be a bad idea to form a livestock advocacy group in North Dakota, like they the ones in South Dakota and Iowa. I think Agriculture United for South Dakota and the Coalition to Support Iowa Farmers have been a big help to farmers interested in livestock in those states.

8) It’s too bad the North Dakota Health Department regulates livestock permits. In Buffalo, it caused a lot of confusion. Some of the people who testified at the hearing said they couldn’t believe that the state would allow a CAFO to be citied in their communities, regardless of zoning laws, because of the health threat many of the experts they could find on the internet said CAFOs posed. It made them think the Department of Health is incredibly inept or even corrupt – which couldn’t be further from the truth.

9) Local people ought to have a significant, visible ownership stake in a livestock project. I’m not sure what the whole situation is at Buffalo with local farmers, but critics complained that the owners and operator were from Minnesota. Local ownership reason why Riverside, LLP, out of Morris, Minn., has had so much success getting large dairies established in Minnesota and South Dakota. There are a lot of local owners and feed suppliers.

10) I could do more to help support livestock development, too. I need provide success stories. It would give a sense what’s possible and some ideas on where you could go to get help creating a story for your project.