Mcbeers asked a difficult, and excellent, question recently: Define a legally created farm.
My initial response was, admittedly, difficult to understand. After thinking about the question for awhile, I realized there is a better way to explain it that people might understand. The question IS difficult to answer in a way that makes sense to most people, but I think I may have figured it out, so here goes nothing.
Let's ask a simpler question first: What is the definition of legally obtained money? There are many ways to obtain money. You can find it, earn it with a job, get it as a gift, make it in the stock market, get it as interest on savings, almost unlimited ways. You can also steal it or print it. We can't list all the ways to get it legally but we CAN list all the ways it can be gotten illegally, by looking at the laws. This means that the easiest way to define it is to say "well, if you didn't obtain it illegally, then it's legally obtained money!". We can easily check any obtained money to determine if it is legally obtained or not by asking if it violates any laws. Hopefully this makes sense because, if it doesn't, you should get good legal advice before starting any suspicious endeavour.
Now if you obtain money illegally, are you entitled to use ANY law to keep it? Of course not! That is so ridiculous that most people laugh it the very mentioning of it.
Now let's see how well we can define an legally created commercial farm. Using the same logic, we would say that an legally created farm is one that was not created illegally. Looking to case law we find that there are in fact very few situations where a farm was ruled to be created illegally. In fact, there is only one that really sticks out as illegal creation. From Jerome Township vs Milchi in 1990: The appeals court concluded that apiary was a farm operation for purposes of the RTFA, but the RTFA did not apply since the apiary did not exist prior to the 1965 zoning ordinance.
So we have a definition for a legally created farm. It is any farm that is created without violating zoning ordinances in existence at the time of startup. This actually IS the definition the courts use, and they use it consistently. This definition will potentially change over time. If something else becomes illegal, that condition must be added to the definition. For example, say the legislature makes the (ridiculous) ruling that it is illegal to raise both chickens and horses on a farm. In that case the definition of a legal farm would be any farm that was created without violating any zoning laws at the time of startup AND is not raising both chickens and horses.
If you create a farm illegally, are you entitled to use ANY law to keep it? Of course not! People are arguing this anyways. RTFA does not apply in this situation.
The courts really have been amazingly consistent in their use of RTFA in accordance with this definition. In fact they have NEVER strayed from it as far as I can tell. Since it is a fundamental doctrine of law that you can not break the law to obtain it's protections, the circuit court made a totally correct ruling in Jerome Township vs Milchi. In every case where RTFA was successfully used to get around a zoning ordinance, the farm was not violating any zoning ordinances at the time it was created. It's easy to verify for yourself.
I am sorry if people are not happy with this, but this really is how things work, or at least how things have worked so far. If you have an illegal farm, you might not want to put so much time and money into it that it will hurt if/when you get shut down.
