LEXINGTON — For one family wanting to expand their ranching operations in Lexington, Senate Bill 85 has reared its less-than-attractive head.

“When you think of SB 85, you should automatically think of wastewater,” said Lara Neiffer, who with her husband, Jake, and two boys, Josh, 11, and Luke, 9, operate Neiffer Ranch. “We’re the regenerative farm. We actually use the manure in the wastewater to fertilize our pasture. We’re not providing toxic anything, we’re actually using it as a fertilizer correctly. Our land can absorb the amount of chickens we have. It’s just like a drop.”

The family would like to expand the number of chickens they can raise for meat or egg production, but SB 85 has pulled the reins back hard on that goal, Neiffer said.

She said theirs is a small family farm, raising beef, pork and aiming at 5,000 chickens per year.

She said the ranch’s permit with the Oregon Department of Agriculture is for 20,000 birds.

“But it’s an annual permit,” she said. “We wanted to do 5,000 this year.”

Neiffer said SB 85 puts their small ranch in the same category as somebody who processes 150,000 per day, and runs 24/7 all year.

“We’re talking about Tyson and Foster Farms,” she said.

She said their chicken meat production season runs May through October and does not process every day.

“We don’t have the refrigerator space for that,” Neiffer explained. “Chickens need to be in refrigeration for 12-24 hours, and you can look at our equipment alone just to see how much space we have.”

Drive to Idaho necessary

She noted there is no U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection facility for poultry close, so the family drives five hours to Idaho to have their birds processed. The family would like to start their own USDA facility to process chickens for the meat market, she said.

“Senate Bill 85 was a terrible bill,” said Sen. Bill Hansell, R, Athena. “We passed it on a straight party line vote, and the Republicans were opposed to it.”

Hansell said the Neiffer family’s experience “was just this type of thing we were fearful was going to happen.” SB 85, he said, is “a mess, absolutely.”

“I’m just speculating, but perhaps someone was doing chicken processing and the odor was offensive to neighbors because they did nothing,” he said. “They might have put it out in a compost pile right next to a neighbor’s swimming pool. I’m just saying. So you get a bill passed to take care of it. That makes it something that commonly didn’t happen, but everybody’s affected by it.”

Different scale, different methods

Neiffer said SB 85 does not make sense with the volume her family farm has.

The bill is in the rulemaking phase with the state agriculture department, which will take public comments through June.

“It’s supposed to be ready by fall 2024 when our season will be done,” Neiffer said, but by then if she has to wrestle with a 100-page application regarding wastewater, “that might put us out another year.”

An earlier version of the report gave an inaccurate number for the total chickens the Neiffer family aims at raising annually. The correct number is 5,000.