The following material is excerpted from the publication, "Farms, Communities, and Collaboration: A Guide to Resolving Farm-Neighbor Conflict." You can download the full guide, as a pdf, by clicking here.

Preface

This manual is a guide to resolving the kinds of conflicts that arise when farmers and nonfarmers live together in rural communities:
conflicts over farming practices, life styles, land use, the environment. We designed the manual to help farmers and neighbors, regulators, local government officials, environmental advocates, and interested citizens become familiar with the process of collaborative problem solving. Collaborative problem solving draws on mediation and/or facilitation skills and involves an approach to conflict that engages participants in resolving differences constructively. Equally important, the process helps build socially strong and economically vital communities.

The manual that follows reflects the authors’ varied professional expertise as well as our experience working with communities around the state as they grappled with farm-neighbor conflicts. We have divided the manual into four chapters that provide the context and the concepts that can help you reach accord on critical matters. An appendix of contact information with Web addresses (The Resources, p. 35) appears at the end. The chapters are:
The Issues, page 4
The Rural Landscape, page 7
The Laws and Regulations, page 14
The Process, page 26

We would like to thank the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for funding this project (Grant No. ENE-99-50) and for patiently awaiting its conclusion. We would also like to thank Barbara Bellows, agriculture specialist at Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas, Larry Fisher, senior program manager at the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, and Tahnee Robertson—who were at Cornell during the project’s formative stages— for their leadership; Cathy Sheils, director of NY FarmNet, R. David Smith, CALS Professor of Agriculture and Food Systems Sustainability, and Bob Somers, chief of the Agriculture Protection Unit at the Department of Agriculture and Markets, for their high standards in reviewing this manual; the Cornell Center for the Environment for administrative support; and all the farmers, neighbors, Cornell Cooperative Extension educators, dispute resolution center mediators, and agency representatives who gave of their time and their knowledge to join us in this collaborative journey.
Finally, the authors acknowledge the contribution of an excellent earlier Cornell publication, Cultivating Farm Neighbor and Community Relations (see The Resources). The document is a useful companion to ours and offers a particularly helpful list of ways farmers might promote good neighbor relations.

For more information, contact:
Community & Rural Development Institute
43 Warren Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853