Fauquier County zoning officials may soon be wishing they had left organic farmer Martha Boneta alone. As The Washington Examiner reported in September, Boneta was threatened with a $5,000 fine for hosting a birthday party for the 10-year-old daughter of a friend on her 70-acre Paris farm. She was then forced to shut down the small shop she operated out of her 19th-century barn when county bureaucrats decided that the business license they had issued her in 2011 was insufficient.

A protest by Boneta’s outraged fellow farmers, who showed up with pitchforks in hand, made national headlines, exposing the harsh dichotomy of Politburo-like bureaucrats threatening small landowners who scratch out a living in the bucolic Piedmont countryside.

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