When I worked in a fab, we saw process variation driven by weather patterns, so fabs are quite sensitive to their environments. (Barometric pressure can affect both diffusion and wets.) But I have a hard time seeing how a nearby farm would affect a fab. The air handling systems are pretty intense, so I imagine you'd see more filter changes if anything, and every change point has the potential to harm the process. But that's a pretty indirect mechanism. A sibling comment mentioned heavy machinery, which also seems unlikely. The lithography equipment had its own pedestals grounded in bedrock, separate from the building foundation, and each stepper/scanner has its own vibration damping. The rest of the equipment is less sensitive to vibration.
Heavy equipment causes vibrations in the ground, which most people probably can't notice, but when you're literally printing at the atomic scale, microscopic vibrations probably make a difference.
I work in a lab. We can't use our most accurate scales when there's construction going on with heavy machinery within a couple of blocks. This isn't cutting-edge stuff either, it's measuring to 0.001 gram, with a $10k scale and a 4" thick granite table on rubber pads (unlike other equipment that's on air floating supports with active counter balancing).
Wouldn't they make less difference than the vibrations caused by regular factories? Or should we be adding homeopathic fracking to the list of environmental concerns?
Sorry..was offline for a day. Farms generate more than food. They generate among other things
-Dust
-Chemical over spray
-Cow poop
there is no such thing as a perfect filter. What you learn over time (not me, the factory as a whole) is that wind direction matters, everything matters, and you start to pick apart causes and figure out why.
