Spring is officially here. We received our annual visit from the Health Department. No, I don’t mean the inspection for my mobile food vending license. I still need to schedule that. I’m talking about the follow-up on an anonymous complaint about the chickens that’s become something of an annual ritual here, typically about this time of year. I can only imagine that’s because the complainant crawls out of their home after a long and groggy winter, notices we have chickens, and with winter cobwebs still clouding their mind, fails to remember that this is not a new condition and that previous complaints have yielded nothing. I must give them credit for effort, though. This year, they’ve resorted to sicking a foreign jurisdiction on us. Instead of just getting a visit from the county health department on Tuesday, we also got a letter in the mail on Wednesday from the city of Columbus. We laughed. You see, not only don’t we live within the city limits of Columbus, we specifically chose this house for that reason. Mayda called the city health department (the letter came to her since the house is in her name), and informed them of their error. The veterinarian with whom she spoke readily agreed that he has no jurisdiction over us.
Granted, the report to the county also included complaints about things strewn about the yard, and I agree that it is unsightly. A public health hazard? Not so much. Mr. Sanitarian, as I’ll refer here to the sanitarian who visited us, disagrees. He feels that anything touching the earth provides a harborage for rats.
His concerns aren’t completely unwarranted. At least two of our neighbors have rats in their homes, and we did, years ago, find a rat’s nest dug into the ground at the junction of our property and two others. Rats are a problem in this neighborhood, but not on our property in particular. We have over six cats (we claim six, but others come over for dinner) patrolling our little quarter-acre at all times. I built the barn up on a foundation of concrete block piers so the cats have easy access underneath. All the chicken feed and cat feed is stored inside this building in metal trash cans. The hens themselves would no doubt rip apart any rodent that dared venture into their domain. I once saw a mouse in our house, and we’ve seen perhaps a grand total of five cockroaches in the five years we’ve lived here. I’ve shot one oppossum and about eight or nine raccoons here, and no others have appeared since last fall. I occasionally find a dead songbird that’s fallen victim to the cats. The only wildlife of any sort that’s managed to thrive here are the squirrels, and to my knowledge, the county health department has not yet declared them a public health nuisance.
This has not deterred Mr. Sanitarian, who no doubt feels he has to do something since he went to the bother of coming out here. Yielding to the powers given him by the ridiculously vague wording of the county health code, we’ve complied with his wishes. So far, this has included building three elevated platforms–two for building materials, and another for firewood. Yes, firewood. You know how when you see firewood stacked…oh, anywhere in this county, it’s stacked on the ground or on someone’s porch? That’s a violation. It’s supposed to be at least 12″ off the ground. I personally feel having that stuff elevated and thus more prone to toppling is a far greater danger, but we’ve humored him. I even put our compost bins right out in the middle of the yard so that there’s lots of open ground around it, like Alcatraz island sitting in the middle of a bay full of sharks.
Technically, we’re not even supposed to have the compost. In the initial complaint some years ago, we were told we couldn’t have “an accumulation of vegetation and feces.” That time, I buried it. On a later visit by Mr. Sanitarian, I showed him an old chicken tractor put to use as a compost bin, with grass clippings on top of the compost. It was full of chicken manure, but you couldn’t smell a thing, and it was cooking along nicely, as compost should. I raised the lid to show him. “This is good practice,” he said. Since then, I’ve built larger, open compost bins, with compost heaped up such that it can be seen from the street, but he chose not to mention it when he visited Tuesday. We’re coming to an understanding. He tells us to do silly stuff like levitate the woodpile, and we do it without giving him any guff, so he overlooks things that are technically violations but aren’t hurting anything. In a previous visit, he told us we couldn’t have salvaged lumber stacked on the ground. I cut it up and arranged it neatly on the ground as a walkway and flower beds. That was okay.
This is a good arrangement, because the county health code–as I mentioned, and as I express to Mr. Sanitarian routinely–is ridiculously vague. We have ash trees probably fifty feet high or more. The code prohibits “vegetation over 12 inches tall.” Last I checked, trees are vegetation, as are hedges, rosebushes, pampas grass, or any number of expensive, over-twelve-inch-high ornamentals sold by your local garden center. You’re also not allowed to feed animals outdoors. The last time we went to Tractor Supply, we got a forty-pound bag of sunflower seeds. I got these for sprouting and to plant, but I didn’t get the tax exemption for agricultural use because these were being sold as bird seed. You’ve heard of bird feeders, I’m guessing. Again, back to those garden centers selling illegally tall plants. They sell squirrel feeders, too. They even sell birdbaths and fish ponds and all kinds of other standing-water hazards that breed mosquitos and promote the spread of West Nile virus. And compost! Why, Noah and I were at the Oakland Park Nursery just yesterday and saw a great pile of what appeared to be either compost or mulch, ten feet high if it was an inch. It dwarfed my little rat harborage by many orders of magnitude, and was probably less than a hundred feet from an elementary school! It’s a wonder the health department doesn’t call in the National Guard to firebomb all these garden centers, being as they’re a menace to the public health on so many levels.
Oh, one more before I leave this topic. You can’t leave anything out overnight that animals might eat. We have fruit and nut trees. We gonna pluck off all the immature fruits and nuts and bring ’em in before sundown every evening? For that matter, there are owls in this neighborhood. Feeding them at night by letting them get at the rats could be construed as a violation.
It’s just silly. I don’t see how something written as broadly as the county health code has stood up to a single challenge in court. The whole point of having written, codified law in the first place is so we can easily distinguish, fairly and objectively, what is a violation and what isn’t. We adopted this system because we didn’t much fancy the idea of a government official banging on our doors and saying, “The king’s feeling cranky today and he doesn’t like you. We’re hauling you off to prison.” That’s essentially the power that the county health department gives itself, though, by writing regulations so expansive that they actually outlaw trees and shrubs. They have no intention of enforcing these rules to the letter. They have neither the resource nor an interest in doing so. They just like to keep it nice and vague, like the police officer’s charge of “persistence in disorderly conduct.” It’s something to charge people with when they defy your authority. I’ve expressed to Mr. Sanitarian many times a sincere intention to cooperate and stay on the right side of the health code, and he’s reaffirmed to me that there is absolutely nothing illegal about raising chickens in the township, as long as I do it sanitarily.
The whole situation frustrates me, though. If I knew who the complainant was, I could build a higher fence or plant some arbor vitae or something to shield that person’s view of our yard. I’d work with them to develop a mutually satisfactory solution. But because they haven’t got the guts to identify themselves, that leaves us guessing and gossiping, suspicious of all our neighbors. This troubles me. As a member of the Transition Movement, I appreciate the importance of connecting with my neighbors to build a strong community, and of including them in the farm or otherwise inspiring them to adopt sustainable practices of their own in order for our community to be increasingly resilient and self-reliant. So far, it’s seemed largely successful. One neighbor behind us plants a few vegetables (they’re pagans, too, so that’s another connection). The octogenarian next door used to raise chickens himself. When he’s not working at a local hardware store, he’s tinkering in his garage on a recumbent tricycle he plans to use as a dog cart. The guy on the other side of him hunts, gardens, and raised a pig last year. The pig was provided by the folks across the street, who aspire to have their own farm someday soon. For the most part, our neighbors are very supportive of what we’re doing here.
There is a minority, though, a stealthy, mostly anonymous minority, who wishes they lived in the sort of neighborhood where you can’t hang out your laundry and where your flowers and Christmas lights have to be the same color as those of all the neighbors. Not being able to afford to move to such a neighborhood is no doubt a source of frustration for these people (I speak in the plural, but for all I know, it might be a lone individual), and seeing chickens and crates and greenhouses and such probably only aggravates these frustrations.
People sometimes ask me what the hardest thing is about farming. A lot of them expect it’s getting up early (which I rarely do) or physical labor (which I enjoy) or cleaning up after animals (which isn’t too bad if you do it frequently and don’t let it get out of control). They’re all way off base. They have this pre-conceived, largely incorrect notion of what farming entails, and they’ve been taught to think of it as unpleasant. I tell them that the greatest obstacle we face, even greater than having such a small parcel, is urban sensibilities. Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not using the word “sensibilities” to suggest that I think the people exhibiting these sensibilities are being sensible. I’m using the dictionary definition of “sensibility,” referring to the ability to be affected by aesthetic or emotional stimuli. That is to say, the greatest challenges I face as a farmer relate to things that make my city neighbors turn up their noses. These things don’t have to pose any danger or damages, no sounds louder than those indigenous to the city or smells any more offensive than the ones typically on the air. They just have to offend the sensibilities of those observing them. That is, they have to seem out-of-place, unfashionable, or weird.
Virginia farmer and author Joel Salatin once wrote that country people will only tolerate so much weirdness. “You can be a Buddhist, or you can be a nudist, but you can’t be a Buddhist nudist.” I think that, for however much city folks, especially liberals, like to think of themselves as tolerant, the rule applies just as much in an urban setting, if not more so. It’s just that urbanites define differently what qualifies as weird. In the city, you can color your hair and skin every color of the rainbow; pierce, burn, stretch, or otherwise mutilate every square inch of your body; dress up as though for Halloween; make up your own religion and preach it on a street corner; and drive a contraption with pneumatic lifters, spinning rims, concrete-crumbling speakers, and Barbie doll heads glued all over it–and that’s okay. That’s tolerable in the city. Cool, even. But grow food other than a potted tomato plant? Have an animal that’s not sold in a pet store? Kill an animal for food? Horrors! These are atrocities of the highest order in the eyes of the citified. What country folks call a hayfield, city folks call a public nuisance and an eyesore. What is day-to-day life on a farm is a crime or a scandal in the land of pavement.
The reason I say this rule against weirdness applies even more in the city is that in the country, you at least have a degree of privacy. Tall vegetation and sheer distance provide a buffer between neighbors. If our rural Buddhist nudist keeps to himself, nobody need even know about his skyclad meditations. In an urban environment, though, we’re packed on top of each other like cattle in a CAFO, wading waist-deep in each others’ presence. If city dwellers are perceived as being less hospitable, it is only because they must create an imaginary bubble of isolation around themselves to preserve their own psychological well-being against constant intrusion.
Just as urbanites shut out awareness of their neighbors, so too do they shut out awareness of the natural world itself. To me, a farmer and a pagan, nature is everything, everywhere. It is both beautiful and brutal, awesome and inescapable. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the process of breaking that down into its chemical components and rebuilding it as flesh and bone, even the forces that stick all our molecules together and keep our cells the same pressure as the surrounding atmosphere so they neither explode nor implode–all of this is nature. Gravity, heat, pressure, all the laws of physics, everything that makes our existence possible, all fitting together into a very neat system in which nothing is wasted–this, to me, is nature.
To our mall-walking urbanite, though, nature is “the outdoors,” an amenity, an option that exists all by itself inside the boundaries of a park and can be put on a shelf or thrown away altogether when you’re done playing with it. Food comes shrink-wrapped and processed on a grocery store shelf, or magically prepared from a restaurant. Wastes go “away,” as though there is such a place. Birth and death both happen behind closed doors in hospitals so the general public doesn’t have to see that they exist; their perceptions of these events come from depictions on TV and in movies. If you told these urbanites that they are eating what used to be a breathing, moving, live animal or a plant that grew in dirt which was itself rotted leaves and grass and manure, they would lose their appetites. They know all this in the back of their minds (well, some do–I’ll get to the ones that don’t in a moment), but they choose to push it to the back of their consciousness where they can pretend it doesn’t exist. They are discomforted by the idea of food that stares back at them, and so prefer to eat it from a paper wrapper or a plastic tube. Ignorance may be bliss, but when ignorance is spoiled by knowledge, denial makes for a pretty convincing substitute.
I’ve been referring to “urbanites” and “city dwellers” here, but the problem is no less present in the suburbs. Suburbs are how cities eat farmland and turn it into cookie cutter subdivisions of McMansions and dog pasture. Ironically, these suburban communities that think of farming as weird, these artificial worlds that enact regulations against agricultural practices, are actually located on the sites of former farms. Whereas municipal governments tell city dwellers not to live as a part of nature, suburbanites often adopt these regulations voluntarily through neighborhood covenants and homeowners associations. Indeed, they often go even further than the cities to enforce a Stepford-like conformity to standards which create a Disney-esque showcase bearing hardly any resemblance to a place lived in by people.
I don’t live in such a neighborhood, thank goodness (though at least one of my neighbors would like to change that). Some people I care about live in such places–by choice, even, and I respect their right to do so. Heck, if a person wants to live in a place that’s a year-round Renaissance Fair where everyone is required to dress in period clothing and speak with an English accent, I figure that’s their prerogative. Where it becomes a problem is when they move into a new area and try to coerce the natives to play along. Don’t move into a neighborhood where people have always hung their clothes out on a line to dry and then tell them that clotheslines are forbidden. Likewise, don’t build a city so large it swallows up rural townships and then tell the township dwellers they can’t farm.
Another thing that bothers me about this is the ethics of it all. Thrift is a virtue. Conservation is a virtue. Self-reliance is a virtue. Industry, as in working hard and producing things, is also a virtue. Diversity is healthy. Self-expression can be artful. But what do the homeowners’ associations and code enforcers promote? Bring your clothes in off the line and burn more energy with a clothes dryer. Put compostables in the landfill and buy peat moss in a plastic bag imported from Canada. Put toxic chemicals on your lawn so you don’t get that homogenous green monoculture cluttered up with pretty yellow (edible) flowers. Quit fixing your own car and take it to a mechanic. Stop growing your own food and buy it imported to the store from California and Thailand and Peru. Make your house look like all the ones around it. Waste, spend, dispose, consume, conform.
Can’t we just live? Grow our food and make things at home and trade with our neighbors like we have for thousands of years without some bureaucrat or busybody standing over us telling us no? My sincere concern is that we’re reaching a point where the bureaucrats will be laid off and the busybodies will lose their influence, and we’ll need to know how to do for ourselves and rely on nature rather than a paycheck, but too many people won’t know how because they’ve been kept ignorant by a culture that thinks natural living is yucky.
I said a few paragraphs back that I’d get to the issue of people who were completely ignorant of nature, and this seems as good a segue as any, talking about a culture that thinks natural living is yucky. We have produced entire generations that know nothing but the artificial, manufactured, indoor existence in which they have been confined since birth. Farmer and author Gene Logsdon wrote a couple articles (“What Kind of Tree Do Acorns Grow On” and “The Acorn Tree Syndrome Strikes Again“) where he coined the term “Acorn Tree Syndrome.” I’d encourage you to follow the links and read both articles (they’re short), but the gist is that many, many people today are so ignorant of the natural world that they don’t know what sort of tree produces acorns, think that potatoes grow above ground on bushes, and can be easily fooled into thinking marshmallows grow on plants. The problem (or one of them) with this is that these people, ignorant of where their food comes from and of the other natural systems that sustain life, get an equal voice in making the policies that affect us all. It’s like three people sitting on a keg of dynamite with a book of matches voting on whether to light the matches, but two of them don’t know what dynamite is and they think the third person is too weird to be trusted.
