“If you’d have told me before I served in Vietnam that when I came back, the government would control my farmland and try to take my acres, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Can a farmer build a pond on his land? Can a veteran keep eminent domain off his property? In the case of John Moriarity, both questions apply.
“They were fine with me fighting for someone else’s freedom in a foreign country, but at home, what matters is power,” he says.
Locked in a 25-year saga of litigation, Moriarity, 80, holds his ground.
County Calling
Every school day as a boy in the late 1950s, exiting a yellow bus at the gate of his Grant County farm in northcentral Indiana, Moriarity awkwardly watched as classmates gawked at a hog barn perched at the front of the property.
(Photo by Becky Moriarity)
Intent on hiding a source of childhood embarrassment, Moriarity asked his father, Orville, to rebuild the hog barn on the back 40. Orville’s words still ring: “No, son. It’s not worth it because someday, somebody is gonna try to put a road through there.”
Out of high school, Moriarity served a tour in the Vietnam War, returning home to take the helm of the family farm, managing corn and soybean production while his wife, Becky, ran a car auction.
“I inherited the 100 acres I grew up on and bought a little more as I could, eventually getting up to the present 500 acres,” Moriarity notes. “Ever since I was little, I’d always heard the county would try to put a road through.”
In 1996, Moriarity purchased heavy equipment, intent on building a 34-acre pond. “This was highly erodible ground that didn’t produce well. I was getting 25-30 bushels per acre, while my nearest neighbors to the field were getting about 60 bushels. We decided to turn it into a big pond over time.”
Two years later, with a portion of the embankment built, a Grant County official came calling: A road project, crossing Moriarity land, was in the works.
“We didn’t want any part of a road,” Becky says. “It would have affected what we’d done and made our equipment pointless. We ignored the road and hoped the project would go away.”
“Instead, we got sued.”
Drain the Tub
Every 5 to 10 years, during high water events on the Mississinewa River, the area around a Grant County mobile home park and housing addition consistently flooded, cutting off road access to residents. In response, the county planning commission proposed a relief road.
“They said they needed to come across our land, but we refused,” Moriarity recalls. “I wasn’t being unreasonable, because what farmer or landowner wants a county road cut over their property? I tried to help by offering to put in a gravel road myself with my own equipment on a different spot of our land that could be used in emergencies, but they declined my offer.”
Pond construction continued, according to Becky. “In 2000, Grant County told us our pond was going to interfere with their highway plans and that we were out of compliance with no permit.”
Moriarity contends compliance was a box he tried to tick. “I went to the Corps of Engineers, and they told me under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, no permit was necessary because I wasn’t beside water. We were just a farming couple minding our own business, building a pond on our private land—just like I’d done as a young man with my father building livestock ponds. We hid nothing.”
(Grant County declined Agweb/Farm Journal interview requests regarding the Moriarity property.)
On a similar timeline, producer Ed Blinn repaired several ponds on his Grant County farm. He requested a permit: “I personally went to the county to be certain I did things right,” Blinn describes. “They told me no permits were needed, period. They said, ‘It’s a farm and we have nothing to do with it. There is no such permit.’”
“What happened next with the pond on John and Becky’s property was about one thing—the county’s desire to build a road,” Blinn says. “John and Becky were not supposed to fight back. It’s called government overreach, plain and simple.”
After repeated warnings and a series of stop-work-orders nailed to the Moriaritys’ fenceposts, Grant County officials filed a suit. Becky dug into the law and knew the couple’s acreage was zoned agriculture. “We started selling fish out of the pond,” she says. “Aquaculture.”
“Bottom line,” Becky adds, “they wanted us to stop building and would have taken our property by eminent domain, but they had to back off because of agriculture. They dropped the lawsuit in 2002, but we knew things weren’t over.”
Enter the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR)—and an order to drain the 34-acre tub.
Pond Panic
While Moriarity was digging, dragging, and dozing dirt, the legal saga picked up steam. In 2002, his big pond drew DNR’s eye in Indianapolis.
“I believe Grant County coaxed DNR into coming after us,” Becky says. “I suspect Grant County might have reported us to every agency in the state they thought would help their cause and got the best response from DNR. How else do you think a farmer’s pond caught the attention of the state?”
DNR exercised jurisdiction based on the agency’s determination that the dam was in, or along a stream, thus making the ground subject to state regulation. DNR’s definition of a stream was “flowing water through a defined channel” with size and consistency of flow given diminished consideration.
(Citing pending litigation, DNR declined Agweb/Farm Journal interview requests regarding the Moriarity pond.)
In a nutshell, DNR accused Moriarity of diverting a stream to fill the pond. He denies the claim: “They told me I’d built an embankment across a stream. That’s crazy. There was no stream, no matter what ridiculous definition they use. DNR never set foot here until the pond was already full of water.”
“I’ve been on this ground for 60-something years and I’d sure as hell know if there was a stream. We’re talking about highly erodible farmland with erosion gullies and seasonal runoff fed by snow and rain. Only a bureaucrat could define all that as a stream.”
By 2006, after eight years of summertime work, Moriarity completed pond work. The 34-acre body, stocked with thousands of fish, was an average 2-3’ depth with several areas of fish habitat dipping to 4-6’. The highest section of earthen bank reached 20’ in height.
In 2007, DNR hit the Moriaritys with a notice of violation related to dam regulation.
“DNR and all its supposed experts said our pond was a dangerous structure, would flood the county, and that John had no background to build a pond,” Becky notes. “That’s ridiculous. Guess what? Twenty-seven years after we first started, the water and embankment are safe and sound—and our pond is beautiful.”
“I think there was pressure all the way up to then Gov. Daniels’ office for DNR to clamp down on us,” she adds. “What started when the county was denied a road was now a state panic over a pond, and we were supposed to take the fall.”
Refusing to bend to DNR, and paying substantial costs for legal representation, the Moriaritys took their fight to court. In the meantime, the pond remained.
Dollar to Death
Once in the courtroom, the Moriaritys faced a legal leviathan—the doctrine of judicial deference, i.e., when it came to details and definitions, judges could defer to agency interpretations.
Standing before judges—not juries—in administrative court, the Moriaritys bounced along in an in-house, appeals chain of losses.
“Administrative court is a kangaroo court,” Becky says. “It’s set up for the government agency to win. No matter where you go, you’re still connected to the administrative system, and you’re still at the mercy of judicial deference—and that means the judge gives preference to the state’s experts. And they have unlimited experts, and all the time and money.”
(Moriarity’s legal fight helped cast light on the controversy around judicial deference. Indiana passed state legislation ending judicial deference in March 2024, months prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s parallel decision in June 2024.)
The losses and the expenses took a heavy toll, according to Moriarity: “You walk into a courtroom with the deck stacked against you, but you initially have faith that it’s a level playing field. You find out otherwise. But you get smarter as you go, because you realize facts alone don’t win the day. Common sense isn’t allowed in the room—only the regulations. It makes you feel like you’re in the Third World.”
Landowner Ed Blinn contends Grant County representatives assumed the bureaucratic process would break Moriarity’s resolve. “Look at the physical pond: It was built bigger than most, but it’s remarkably shallow, with virtually no watershed—maybe 30 acres of watershed that’s all on John’s property. Not DNR, Grant County, or anyone else would have ever cared about the pond—except that John and Becky denied them the road.”
“The county forcibly cost John all kinds of grief and cost,” Blinn continues. “Just think about at least $100,000 to build the pond, and then he spent far, far more to protect it in legal costs. Basically, the county thought they could dollar John to death, but they were wrong.”
During the legal brawl, at a point when Moriarity believed his property rights saga couldn’t get more tangled—Grant County approached with another road project in 2016. Hello again, eminent domain?
A second bite at the road apple.
Lose and Win?
“Once again, the county wanted our land for another road,” Becky says. “It was unbelievable, but we were ready this time. They offered around $80,000 for 10 acres they wanted to take, and we immediately went to the papers and television to tell our story. We also built another pond right where the road was supposed to go—a 1-acre hole. They gave up on the project in 2018.”
(Photo by Becky Moriarity)
“They don’t want the public to know that when they go around offering money for private land, they’re paying eminent domain lawyers and negotiators hundreds of thousands of dollars. All taxpayer money,” she adds. “They don’t want the public to know the details of any of these kinds of cases.”
Meanwhile, the 34-acre pond reached center stage before five justices at the Indiana Supreme Court: Did DNR have jurisdiction to control the Moriarity pond?
In the ruling, handed down in 2019, the Moriaritys lost—and won?
Rubberstamp
In a 4-to-1 vote, the Indiana Supreme Court decided DNR’s interpretation of a “stream” was correct and determined DNR acted within in its regulatory powers when dealing with a “high-hazard dam.”
However, Justice Geoffrey Slaughter jumped ship, penning a scathing dissent. Slaughter called the decision a “rubberstamp” and called out the court’s reliance on DNR explanations and definitions:
I would give no deference to the Department’s interpretation of “stream” within the Dam Safety Act. The prerogative to interpret the law authoritatively belongs to us. And we disserve separation-of-powers principles when we allow agencies within the executive branch to usurp a core judicial function. Second, on the merits, the Court’s conclusion that the Department properly exercised jurisdiction over the Moriaritys’ property follows from the Court’s deferential standard of review. Its application of the wrong standard has caused it to reach the wrong result.
An agency interpretation that is “reasonable” but not the “best” is not good enough.
Our job is to interpret the law fully and faithfully—no more, no less. Today’s standard does much less. It is a standard where judicial review is plenary in theory, deferential in name, and a rubberstamp in fact.
Within the ruling, the state Supreme Court gave the Moriaritys a substantial pond lifeline, providing the couple with an option to “remove it from DNR’s future jurisdiction” via multiple dam repairs/refurbishment.
“We won and lost,” Becky says. “The county came at us with eminent domain twice for our acreage to put in roads, and DNR came at us to take away our dam. DNR is still hellbent on taking our pond, but we fight on.”
Blood and Water
As of 2025, the pond remains.
(Photo by Becky Moriarity )
“We’re never afraid to talk to anyone,” Becky says. “The basic facts speak for themselves. When people hear the simple facts of our story, and realize how long it’s gone on, they’re disgusted by our county and government.”
Looking across the surface of his pond, after a lifetime on the farm, Moriarity insists the state’s pursuit of 34 acres was never about water—it was about asphalt.
“Look me in my face and tell me that it’s ok for the government to put my blood on the line in a foreign country, but that I can’t build a pond on my own private farm. That doesn’t sound like freedom.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told