A rancher, somewhat rugged looking, but more of a gentleman cowboy, stands along a fine white fence in a recent viral video, an expanse of green farmland rolling behind him.

He gazes at viewers behind a pair of sunglasses, doesn’t give his name, and says this:

“The state of Oregon has effectively shut down small farms and market gardens on a large scale, and they’re actually sending out cease-and-desist letters to farms. They’re using satellite technology to find their victims and send them these letters that say you can’t operate.”

Articles on the internet attest that small farmers are under attack in Oregon, which has begun shutting down family farms throughout the state under the guise of water conservation and groundwater protection.

The 20-minute video, produced by Yanasa TV, claims bureaucrats are erroneously dubbing small family farms as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, in order to shut them down “to save the environment.”

Given the massive effort to shut down farms across Europe, news that similar efforts are taking place in Oregon is giving rise to concern in farming communities across the United States. The rancher in the video warns us that “these kinds of things start in one state and often spread.”

Concerns beyond Oregon are making the rounds in alternative news: Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the United States, with nearly 269,000 acres in twenty states. He is touting a new approach to farming, and has recently backed a startup company that plans to use artificial intelligence to grow crops indoors. Gates is also buying up farmland in Kenya, where white farmers are being displaced, some killed in cold blood.

There are so many nefarious headlines in farming industry news that it’s hard to keep up: hundreds of food processing plants have burned to the ground in the U.S. and across the world in the past five years; millions of chickens have been destroyed over concerns of disease; two organic farms have suffered chemical attacks; wildfires are destroying farmland in Texas and elsewhere; heat and humidity killed hundreds of heads of cattle last August in the Midwest; Asian longhorned ticks are a threat to cows; news of plans to replace protein with bugs and algae is being explored by science and industry; and there are some estimates we’re losing 2,500 farms in the U.S. per month.

It’s important to point our radar toward Oregon in the coming months, however eye-catching the other headlines are–as it marks some of the first efforts to control farming here. European farmers have been protesting closures and restrictions for a few years, but the U.S. has yet to see an outward concerted effort by state governments to abolish small farms until now.

Based on legal definitions in Oregon, a few-acre homestead with pasture and, say, two milking cows and some chickens qualifies as a CAFO if it has any area on the property where rock or gravel is used as a pathway to get to a small barn or coop.

“The way that they have redefined CAFOs is going to impact nearly everybody,” the rancher warns. “Even on our property, we don’t have animals that are necessarily contained in one area (they’re roaming on pastures).”

A lawsuit was filed last January on behalf of small family farms in Oregon, arguing that the definition of a CAFO is too broad and negatively impacts anyone who produces eggs from backyard chickens, no matter the size of their property.

The National Review recently picked up a story about Godspeed Hollow Farm in Newburg, Oregon. which has been reclassified as a CAFO simply because it has a gravel pathway from the milking machine to the pickup station about 100 feet long.

The presence of gravel pathways isn’t the Oregon farmers’ only problem: the state’s rules on water is also an obstacle. Rainwater is the only water that farmers are legally allowed to collect. Everything else, including water from rivers and streams, and even groundwater on private property, is considered a public resource. Oregon farmers cannot even use water from their own private wells.

“It has slowly rolled out to the point where market gardeners on a half-acre of land are now receiving cease-and-desist orders saying, ‘you can’t water your gardens; figure out another way,'” the rancher explains.

I hope that local farm bureau representatives are keeping county farmers appraised of the developments happening throughout our country, and indeed the world. If not, now would be a good time to start talking about it.