McHenry County, IL Right to Farm: Farm Nuisance Protection (2026)

010(A), the purpose statement for the county's Agricultural Zoning Districts, warns that owners, residents, and other users of property in or adjoining an A-1 or A-2 district may be subjected to inconvenience, discomfort, and possible injury to property or health from normal and accepted agricultural practices and operations. The code lists the specific impacts covered: noise, odors, dust, the operation of machinery of any kind including aircraft, the storage and disposal of manure, and the application of fertilizers, soil amendments, herbicides, and pesticides. The section then states that such owners and occupants "should be prepared to accept such inconveniences, discomfort, and possibility of injury from normal agricultural operations," and are put on official notice that the Illinois Right to Farm Law, the Farm Nuisance Suit Act at 740 ILCS 70/, may bar them from obtaining a legal judgment against those normal agricultural operations.

This notice is written directly into the zoning code rather than a standalone chapter, meaning the protection travels with the A-1 and A-2 district designations themselves: any parcel zoned into one of those districts, or adjoining one, carries this legal warning as a condition of the zoning map. The Farm Nuisance Suit Act it references is the state statute that actually creates the affirmative defense; the county's role here is to put adjoining landowners on record notice of that state-law bar before they buy or build near working farmland.