Urban agriculture is growing. And its not just city-dwellers frequenting farmer’s markets for their vegetables, eggs and honey – more of them are interested in growing or cultivating it themselves.  That’s leaving officials scrambling for ways to regulate the new farmer that’s cropping up in American cities, farmers like Jana Thompson.

Meredith Greeley, urban farmer

Thompson grew up on farms. Seven years ago she moved to Pittsburgh. Although she had a garden she missed having a connection to nature. So, first came the bees. 70,000 of them, in open-bottomed hive boxes on her roof. Then came the chickens – three Salmon Bantams. Next, she wants to raise rabbits for meat. But then she received an email with some troubling news.

“The first code the city proposed everything I’m doing here would have become illegal,” says Thompson.

Urban chickens

As an urbanite with a growing farm-stock, Jana Thompson isn’t alone. As a nationwide consciousness about where food comes from increases more city-residents are growing their own food – and keeping farm animals. Which is leaving city officials struggling to figure out how to codify the practice.

“In order to protect the people that were doing urban agriculture and also the neighbors of those people doing urban agriculture  we thought it was the perfect time to start going down creating an ordinance for urban agriculture. Before, well actually currently  there is nothing on the books for urban agriculture. And that’s pretty prevalent in a lot of cities.”

That’s Jason Kimbitsis, a senior city planner who’s working on the urban agriculture code. When the proposed one was released earlier this year, there was a bit of an outcry from the urban agriculture community. The required square footage per chicken and the distances bees needed to be from a neighbor’s house would have nearly negated the chance for anyone to practice urban agriculture in the densely packed, narrow streets that make up the majority of Pittsburgh’s landscape.

Kimbitsis said the city looked to cities that had recently enacted or were in the process of enacting urban agriculture codes–New York, Portland and Detroit for example.

Julie Butcher –Pezzino is the director of Grow Pittsburgh, an urban farming non-profit. She says that was part of the problem.

“Pittsburgh being a rust-belt city and an older city has a different property set-up,” says Butcher –Pezzino.

Cities around the country and within the Ohio River watershed are all slowly creating or changing codes. For cities that take chickens into account like Nashville, Tennessee, it’s unlawful to keep any chicken in the metro area in a way that a nuisance is created. In Lexington, Kentucky, where the county makes the code, pigs or goats can’t be kept at all in urban areas.  In Asheville, North Carolina, it was illegal to have any livestock within city limits unless they were permitted until last year. Each city is different. Many don’t have anything on bees at all.

Meredith Greeley learned beekeeping from her grandfather. Now she keeps hives on her rooftop deck. Urban beekeeping is important for a number of reasons, she says. Among them – honeybee population is on the decline. She says rural areas are no longer the best place for bees.

“Urban bees tend to do better actually because country bees are surrounded by far more pesticides and that’s one of the key contributors to colony collapse and other diseases that are sort of ravaging our honeybees. The other thing that honeybees enjoy is this greater diversity of food sources. In rural areas bees are confronted with these agriculture mono-culture right where you just have acres and acres of corn or almonds or soybeans.”

Greeley is a director of Burgh Bee’s, a bee keeping non-profit. They have four hundred people on their mailing list – but that doesn’t mean that’s all the beekeepers.

Not having numbers on the practice is part of why the city is attempting to regulate the practice. There is no animal census. Under an ordinance there would be. Jason Kimbitsis:

“I couldn’t say exactly how many chickens are in the city of Pittsburgh. But once our zoning is finished, people will come in and you’ll essentially have an occupancy permit saying you have x amount of chickens on your property,” says Kimbitsis.

The code will also regulate other animals. Christopher McGuirken came to own his four heirloom chickens last year. Now, he wants Nigerian Dwarf goats.

“If we have two small dogs we don’t see why we wouldn’t be able to have two small dairy goats,” says McGuirken.

The advocacy groups are all meeting with the cities to revise the code. The goal, after all, Kimbitsis says is to allow urban agriculture to keep growing – but not go wild.

-by Erika Beras

[podcast]http://archive.wfpl.org/environment/20100427urbanag.mp3[/podcast]