I was born and raised in farm county. You wouldn't want a pig farmer to move in next door. Yes too much zoning is a bad thing; too little is bad as well.
In the state where I live, every community within a large region has received an application to build and operate a pig farm with upwards of 10k pigs, plus multiple satellite farms with 999 pigs each. These applications have been traced through murky chains of ownership to one or two businesses, notably Smithfield.
So a "pig farmer next door" is the Peoples Republic of China, and the "farm" is 20000 pigs. Also, every business that proposes moving into the state lobbies the state government for relaxation of environmental regulations, and files lawsuits to challenge regulatory jurisdictions, especially regarding water pollution. The small communities are totally out-lawyered, and out-lobbied.
Look up "the Highland Clearances." That was what happened when someone figured out that sheep were more valuable than people. Now someone has figured out that pigs are.
Arguably a pig farmer isn’t going to want to raise pigs on a suburban lot either. And many places already allow backyard chickens, bees etc.
I don’t like how much my neighbour’s dog barks, but can you imagine if zoning prevented dog ownership? Why allow yappy dogs but not pigs? Is it just the number of animals or is it truly the type?
you are missing the forest for the trees.
zoning does not prohibit you from owning a pig as a pet. have you ever seen the kind of nutrient rich runoff a pig farm produces?
Ok, I agree with this, but in this case there is a direct impact to the adjacent landowner receiving this runoff. So regulate that.
For some reason we craft all these laws to avoid the possibility of bad things happening, creating these broad dragnets that impact so many things unintentionally, rather than just regulating the thing we don’t want directly.
Runoff isn't the only concern. There's noise, big-rig traffic, odor, unappealing landscape (important to some). At some point it's a lot cheaper and easier to just regulate with zoning than to regulate each individual component of a site[0]. And frankly both sides -- residential and farmer -- should be happy to be away from each other.
0: Which, of course, developers would also object to and would lead to a lot of patchwork regulation due to grandfathering.
What you're describing is a recipe for a convoluted and incomprehensible zoning code that tries to predict every possible consequence instead of simply stating what people don't want.
Don't know where the pig farms are around my town--New England, so a lot of farms are fairly small--but there's a dairy farm down the street alongside houses, people have goats and chickens, there's some light industry including a junkyard just down the road. (With respect to farming specifically, like many Massachusetts towns, it's a "right to farm" community, which means with some restrictions farming activities are generally allowed.)
Now you certainly can't walk places for the most part if that's why you want mixed zoning.
So a "pig farmer next door" is the Peoples Republic of China, and the "farm" is 20000 pigs. Also, every business that proposes moving into the state lobbies the state government for relaxation of environmental regulations, and files lawsuits to challenge regulatory jurisdictions, especially regarding water pollution. The small communities are totally out-lawyered, and out-lobbied.
Look up "the Highland Clearances." That was what happened when someone figured out that sheep were more valuable than people. Now someone has figured out that pigs are.