Down by Law: Compiling Los Angeles’ Urban Ag Regulations
My favorite line from the article:
“If this all seems confusing and somewhat scattershot, that’s because it is.”
That’s the problem with just copying another municipality’s policy. It’s the blind leading the blind. It’s often the case that even the people charged with enforcing a town’s rules don’t fully understand what they are. If the first farmers ten-thousand years ago had had to navigate the current morass of bureaucratic red tape regulating urban agriculture, we’d all still be hunting for our dinner with stone-tipped spears.
It’s time to question why we ever gave local officials the authority to stop us from growing food in the first place, why they would even want to, whose interests are served by doing so, and whether a majority of us agree that those interests trump our right to not have to choose between starvation and eating Monsanto’s frankenfood.
As my wife Mayda put it when she linked to this story on Facebook,
Why is it that some city dwellers can’t seem to get any sleep on account of a rooster crowing, but hardly notice the sirens, motorcycles, jet planes, booming car stereos, dogs barking sounds of a typical city? Could it be that crowing is just one more sound you can get used to ignoring?
