Cities Grapple with Rise of Urban Agriculture

 

 

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Cities Grapple with Rise of Urban Agriculture

via City Farmer News by Michael Levenston on 4/28/10

Photo by growpittsburgh.

Pittsburgh plans for urban farmers

By Erika Beras
Ohio River Radio Consortium
2010-04-28

Excerpt:

PITTSBURG, PA (WEKU) – 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.

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. (Nat Sound from the Hives) 70,000 of them, in open-bottomed hive boxes on her roof. Then came the chickens – three Salmon Bantams. (Nat Sound of Chickens) 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.

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.

See the rest of the story here.

 

 

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