Every fall, Mary Bull prepares for the olive harvest at her small-scale permaculture farm, Chalice Farm, in Sonoma County, California. She expects this year to be their biggest harvest yet, with more than 50 volunteers coming to help harvest over a thousand pounds of olives to make premium olive oil.

Along with olives, Chalice Farm also grows perennial vegetables, fruit and nuts on their sunshine-drenched land surrounded by creeks and forested ridge. It’s the kind of farm that many think of when Sonoma County comes to mind, along with organic wine, freshly grown produce and artisanal cheese.

But not all of the region’s farms are as idyllic as Bull’s, and the county has grown fiercely divided over a ballot measure that would challenge some of Sonoma’s biggest agricultural interests. On Nov. 5, residents will vote on Measure J, a novel bill that would cap the number of animals allowed on-farm, forcing all facilities that exceed that number of animals to phase out over the next three years. In other words, the bill would ban factory farms. If it passes, it could be a blueprint for the rest of the country to do the same.

Across the U.S., there are thousands of factory farms — also known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) — where thousands of animals are confined in large buildings or open feedlots, sometimes put in crates or cages without the space to move freely. Together, farms like these confine over 1.7 billion farm animals in large buildings or feedlots and produce 941 billion pounds of manure, according to a report by Food and Water Watch.

While California isn’t known for the mega-farms that dominate states like Iowa, Wisconsin and North Carolina, there are still over 1,000 CAFOs........

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