Lynne Kiesling
A ruling last week from Minnesota’s Court of Appeals provides an interesting case study in using common law and legal liability (a la Coase) in an environmental case. As summarized in the St. Cloud Times, the issue at hand is pesticide drift — when pesticide spray on one field is carried over to another field by wind. In the case of an organic farm, such pesticide drift has a significant economic cost, because the organic farmer cannot sell the affected produce, and may even have to take affected acreage out of rotation for several years to clear the pesticide and retain the foundation of the organic attribution (usually defined by law).
Here’s a bit more about the fact pattern:
The Johnsons turned their farm into an organic one in the 1990s to take advantage of the higher prices organic crops and seeds bring at market. They posted signs noting that the farm was organic, created a buffer between their property and neighboring farms and asked the co-op to take precautions to avoid overspraying, according to the Court of Appeals opinion.
But the co-op violated state law four times from 1998-2008 by spraying chemicals that landed on the Johnson’s organic farm, the opinion said. The opinion said that the co-op was cited four times by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture for violating pesticide laws that make it illegal to “apply a pesticide resulting in damage to adjacent property.”
A 2002 overspray led to the Johnsons selling their crops at lower, nonorganic prices and taking the tainted field out of production for three years. In 2005, 2007 and 2008, the overspray led the Johnsons to destroy alfalfa and soybeans and plow under and take out of production for three years parts of their fields, according to the Court of Appeals opinion.
What’s interesting to me about this case is the Johnsons’ use of the common law — they filed a lawsuit claiming nuisance and trespass. The district court found against them, but this appeals ruling negates that and sends it back to the district court:
The Court of Appeals opinion Monday decided that what the co-op did could be considered a trespass because it met the two elements necessary — that the Johnsons had rightful possession of their fields and that the cooperative’s unlawful spraying of the pesticide, causing it to drift onto the Johnsons’ otherwise chemical-free fields, constitutes an unlawful entry.
Looks to me like an application of Coase to the pesticide drift question — clarifying who has legal liability for the consequences of actions when those actions affect others, use of the common law concept of nuisance — with the result that the pesticide sprayer is liable for the costs of the consequences.
In a case like this, with two adjoining plots of land, the identification of the actors and the actions is pretty straightforward, so it’s a textbook low transaction cost case. But what happens if, say, the organic farm is adjacent to three other farms, and the issue is not pesticide drift, but is rather GMO propagation drift? If all four farms plant corn, but three of them plant the same strain of drought-resistant GMO corn, some seed propagation across property boundaries is likely. How do you assign liability with multiple potential actors? Is there a way to avoid such a cost, and if so, who is likely to be the least-cost avoider? Or more interestingly, since the GMO corn is drought resistant, how do you net out the beneficial effects of the need for less irrigation against the cost of the corn not being able to be sold as GMO-free any more?
I think I may have just identified a new case study for my fall environmental class …