"Taxpayers do not pay for it, so it must not work."

If you have never had a garden tomato grown in the heat of a Kansas City summer, you have never really had a tomato. In addition to the nutritional value fresh vegetables provide, the acts of planting, tending, and harvesting rival yoga as a form of low-impact strength exercise. Growing food locally also reduces shipping costs and exhaust fumes from trucks and trains. Competition from local growers has forced grocery stores to buy fresher produce. Who wants to buy a crunchy tomato from Chile if you can get those soft, heavy tomatoes we produce locally? People who cannot easily find jobs doing other things can grow and sell food from their gardens. Garden produce takes high quality food out of elite grocery stores and puts them in poorer neighborhoods. If a working mom can buy better food at a lower price, it’s like giving her a raise.

It is, however, apparently illegal to grow food on your own land unless it is zoned for that purpose. In July 2009, the unfortunately named, “Bad Seed Farm” was cited by the city for selling produce from property at 95^th and State Line. A Kansas City Missouri city councilman introduced an ordinance to change the zoning and development code to make the practice easier under the law.

Recently, KCUR sponsored a roundtable on this ordinance. I found it very interesting to listen to an opponent articulate her arguments. First, the opponent cited an increase in crime that she believed would result from the added traffic into neighborhoods. Criminals, hooked on tomatoes, would drive into sleepy little neighborhoods to score a quick fix. Tomatoes, as we all know, are a gateway vegetable leading to harder produce such as peppers and spinach. Urban farming will also require gardeners destroy the aesthetic beauty of littered vacant lots. Beautiful hamburger wrappers and old shoes will be picked up to make room for the gardens. Urban gardening will also hurt the poor by reducing their numbers. Successful urban farmers will leave the ranks of the poor and develop increased economic self-sufficiency. It’s a stimulus program that doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime so it must be too good to be true.

Zoning laws are intended to create orderly boxes on a map so we can cluster industrial uses in one area, residential uses in another area, and commercial uses in a third area. But these boxes actually tend to slow community development. Some people like to live near where they work. Other people enjoy walking to a grocery store or a neighbor’s house to buy locally grown produce. Allowing residences and businesses to co-locate in the same neighborhoods increases a community’s efficiency and density. Too often, zoning laws become the preferred weapon of choice by busybodies and know-it-alls who want the power to manage their neighbor’s land without buying it. Discouraging urban farming for profit has the unintended consequence of hastening the decay of the economic core of the city. Tell the busybodies to mind their own business.

Guest Editor David P. Dawson