Outlaws: Part II

Mayda received a letter from the zoning enforcement guy today. (Our Paul Drive house is in her name.) It said we can’t have chickens here, and we have seven days to comply. It was dated Monday. I have less than a week to relocate the hens, disassemble and move the broiler houses, and move all the bags of leaves and sawdust, as well as any other junk in the backyard.

There’s also a certified letter that’ll be at the Post Office tomorrow. We’re guessing that’s from him, too.

We slaughtered the last of the broilers and don’t have any more chicks ordered, so that’s one thing out of the way. I’m just going to move everything over to Woodland.

The problem is that while the section of code he’s citing only prohibits agriculture on properties less than one acre, there’s another point he could use against us at Woodland. If you have between one and five acres, agriculture is prohibited if your subdivision is at least 35% developed. Nobody’s actually ordered us not to farm there, but we haven’t started yet. The code is very clear that we can’t do it. Even just having an acre of apple trees would be illegal there. Any kind of natural resource harvesting other than a garden attached to a residence counts as “agriculture” and is prohibited. This is wrong, and we’ll take up the fight to get that changed on at least the county level, if not the state. But first thing’s first. We need to take care of our own survival before starting any crusades.

I’m thinking the best thing to do is to not fight it here at Paul Drive. Just comply (though that is a hardship with the hens.) Before he gets a chance to nail us at Woodland, I want to request a variance from the Mifflin Township Board of Trustees to allow me to practice agriculture there. They can do that by a resolution. If they won’t do that, the next step is to try for a variance through the county. I’m not sure how best to approach that.

I’m feeling caught between two levels of government here. I need to get caught up on my child support before the end of the year so we can declare one of the kids I’m paying support on as a dependent on our tax return. Makes a big difference–the difference between getting money and owing it. But to earn the money to do that, I either need to go do paying work, or produce stuff on the farm and sell it. But if I go work for money, I’m not here cleaning up and moving stuff for Code Enforcement and the Health Department. And if I actually comply fully with Zoning and quit raising chickens, I’m severely restricted in how much money I can earn at farmers markets, especially over the winter.

We have the land, though, and a few freezers full of chicken, and outlaw hens laying about a dozen eggs a day, and a couple big boxes of egg cartons. We have jars to sprout beans in, and an oven for baking stuff. I’m paid up to do two days a week at the farmers market downtown through December. And I’m sure that at least a few people in either the township or county government must see farms as something other than a dirty embarrassment that all the shiny urbanites have to be sheltered from. We’ll get through this somehow, but I’m not sure we’ll still have animals by the time we get to the other end of the tunnel.

I find it ironic that a Department of ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT & Planning would be going into a blighted neighborhood and trying to make people poorer. They went after one of my neighbors and gave him a huge list of things to alter that aren’t even visible from the street. They told him the color of his garage has to match his house. This isn’t a homeowners association, it’s the county government telling him this. They said they’re trying to “clean up” (ie, gentrify) the neighborhood. Now they’re trying to put me out of work while I hear scores of people telling me that more people need to be doing what I’m doing. Local magazines praise my work while the local government criminalizes it.

Another thing that troubles me about this is that if I just built a large building and raised the chickens indoors, that would probably be fine. There’d be no evidence visible from the property line that there’s any agriculture going on. My customers pay more, though, because I don’t do it that way. The fact that the chickens are allowed to scratch around out where people can see them–the very thing that makes them more desirable and trusted as food–is exactly what Zoning finds objectionable.

I’m seriously wondering about the market for rabbits. Quieter than chickens, I could breed my own stock instead of having to buy them, and they can eat mostly grass. They have about the same grow-out time and feed conversion rate as broilers. I could do that completely clandestinely by clearing a spot back in the woods and keeping them in movable pens that I can stash in the garage or an underground shed or something when the revenuers show up. But Americans don’t eat bunnies like they eat chicken or eggs. Otherwise, I’m not sure what my backup plan would be.

Nobody owes me a job, but I have a responsibility to earn a living. For those two facts to co-exist, there must be a possibility of working for myself. If I can’t do it by farming, I don’t know what else I could do that I can just jump right into and start earning enough money without investing a whole lot up front. Art? Woodworking? Soap? Candles? They all seem so much more speculative than food.

Maybe I could learn Somali and start a new career as a pirate.