Fitchburg, WI Right to Farm: Farm Nuisance Protection (2026)

Fitchburg created the RC Rural Cluster District in 2012 (Sec. 22-611) to let landowners outside the city's urban service area split off house lots, at a rate of one dwelling per 35 acres calculated from a 1979 base year, without abandoning the surrounding farm operation. Sec. 22-614 sets the approval criteria the plan commission applies to every RC rezoning request. Subsection (1) limits eligible land to parcels where at least 75 percent has no tillage history or carries a poor soil classification (Class IV through VIII), steering clusters away from prime farmland.

Subsection (3) is the right-to-farm safeguard: rural cluster requests must be compatible with nearby agricultural zoning, allow only one single-family detached home per development claim, and require all new residential lots to have a right to farm document recorded to protect surrounding agricultural operations, with each cluster limited to between two and ten homes. The same section layers on siting rules meant to keep the new houses from crowding out farming: building groups must read as a single farmstead or rural hamlet using historicist architecture, driveways must follow public-works standards under Sec.

27-399, and stormwater runoff has to stay at 90 to 100 percent of the predevelopment rate. Claims used to justify a cluster are tied to a matching 35-acre agricultural-use restriction recorded against the source parcel at the county register of deeds under Sec. 22-612(10), keeping that land in agricultural use unless the common council later removes the restriction by a two-thirds vote after the property enters the urban service area.