Right-to-Farm Methods

The Right-to-Farm State Summaries were authorized by a team of lawyers, practitioners, and sociologists, detailed in the RTF authors tab.

We analyzed the original language of statutes, including preambles; amendments; and statutes current as of fall 2020. We gathered current statutes, amendments, and case-law electronically using LexisNexis and Westlaw. We gathered original statutes by contacting state specific law libraries.

These statutes and cases were then qualitatively coded within the NVivo software program. Together, the team created a codebook by open-coding separately and discussing emerging themes. We regularly common coded shared files to ensure our inter-coder reliability, with our Kappa Score consistently <90%. Our codebook consisted of 178 codes. We use queries derived from our NVivo analysis to identify trends across states, which will soon be presented on this site.