This has gotten totally out of hand.
A SWAT team raided a farm in Texas for code violations. They said they were looking for pot (after 10 hours of searching, they found none), but what they seized were fruits, vegetables, and native grasses. Their real reason for raiding was to enforce zoning codes against tall grass, bushes close to the road, and so on. It allegedly all started because some neighbors complained about infringements on the “enjoyment of their property” and threats to neighbors’ property values.
People need to learn that there’s a difference between their enjoyment of their own property and their enjoyment of their neighbors’ property. If you don’t like the view, don’t look out the window.
And since when is it anyone else’s responsibility to protect your financial investments? If I’m selling a widget and someone else starts selling a new widget that makes mine obsolete, I don’t have a legal claim against that person. If you buy stock in a company and that stock loses value, you don’t get to have the police go and raid the person responsible for that loss.
Think about this–your house would be worth a lot more if the houses next to it were all worth more. If you build a $100,000 house, and then everyone around you builds million-dollar houses, your house would presumably be worth more than $100,000, so the reasoning goes. But does that mean you can sue your neighbors for not building more expensive houses? You’ve suffered a loss in gains if they fail to build houses that increase the price you can get for yours. But do the cops bust your neighbor for hurting your profit if the house next door isn’t fancier than yours? Of course not!
That being the case, how can we justify police action against lesser-value houses “bringing down our property value?” Only by calling it what it actually is–classism enforcement. It’s not about protecting anyone’s money. It’s about protecting their ability to exclude “those sorts of people” from their presence, whomever they may happen to be. In this case, “those people” are farmers.
I’m going to say what somebody needs to. If you want to keep farms out of your neighborhood because of vague squeamishness about “country things” or because of what people will think of you for living among rednecks farmers, you’re no better than someone who wants to keep people of a certain race or religion out of their neighborhoods. Growing food is no more a criminal act than is being born a certain color.
I see laws that prohibit farming as being no better than ones that prohibit the presence of people of certain races, because, really, what’s the difference between outlawing the existence of a human being and outlawing that which is needed to sustain human existence? I liken farmers markets in places that have such laws to the old “sundown towns,” where African-Americans were arrested if they remained after dark. They’ll let us into their Disney-esque town square for a few hours so they can get our organic goods, but then we’d better get out, because our kind isn’t welcome there when the market’s not open. You can sell your pastured pork in Worthington, Upper Arlington, Bexley, New Albany, and the like, but don’t you dare get caught raising it there. Being too good to be around food being grown apparently doesn’t mean being too good to eat it.
It’s a simple principle: Don’t cuss the farmer with your mouth full. If you want food, you have to tolerate the production of it. Don’t eat a chicken and then complain that your neighbor has a chicken. Don’t eat sunflower seeds and then call in a paramilitary strike force to seize your neighbor’s sunflowers.
