We are waiting on our Farm Determination. A committee at the Agency of Agriculture reviews our Farm Prospectus and then decides if we are a farm. The purpose of the Farm Determination is to ensure farms of a certain size are following water quality based Requited Agricultural Practices. There is a list of thresholds that cause a farm to fall under these RAPs. The threshold we are trying to cross is $2000 gross annual sales of products principally produced on the farm.
We wrote up a business plan that essentially called for us to sell five $300/year shares plus a dozen eggs/week to our neighbors. Each share gets an assortment of crafting supplies from gots and chicken parts (feathers, skulls, hides, tallow) and some other homestead products like goat meat, frozen chicken, soap, tea blends, tinctures, and dried and preserved food. We envision growing our goat herd by housing non milking goats in small pens located with a mile from our house on neighbors property with invasive scrub growth (glossy buckthorn, japanese knotweed, honeysuckle) and hard to manage slopes. We also envision improving our milking and animal processing facilities to allow for milk and cheese sales and kosher and halal slaughter and butchering.
We have produced what we intend to sell in our shares over the past year, we just consumed it ourselves or traded on the bartering market. We already have three subscribers for our farm shares and three neighbors have already gathered fencing in anticipation of us housing goats on their property.
The gerfufle with the Town Zoning began a few months ago. A property owner in town was causing a problem with their neighbors because their goats and chickens and ducks and turkeys were constant roaming. The Development Review Board had been primed to crack down on this by another farm in town near where the Chair of the DRB lived. I never heard what cause that other farm to shut down, but it did.
So the nuisance animals get a complaint and the Zoning Administrator decides the Zoning Ordinances don’t allow Agriculture. . Maybe the chair of the DRB lead him down this path. I am not sure. But the DRB holds that Agriculture isn’t allowed in any but the three most renovate zones (where Agriculture is specifically allowed).
Agriculture includes the production of food, beekeeping, orchards, boiling syrup, greenhouses, raising livestock, equines, and poultry, and some other activities incidental to farming like storing farm products which I assume is compost and feed and whatever is produced for sale.
A few weeks ago now, one of my neighbors asks for a variance from the DRBs decision that agriculture isn’t allowed. She asks for a variance to have a greenhouse and a chicken coop with chickens.
I am on the DRB. I haven’t been to any of the other meetings that a relevant to this topic because I have missed most meetings since the pandemic started. I had heard how the last decision went and I decided I needed to go to this meeting to get the full story since I have goats and chickens and here the DRB is saying I can’t.
At the meeting, things move fast because the board has already decided Agriculture isn’t allowed. I am not prepared. Most of my reasoning about why the Zoning Ordinances say nothing about goats and chickens is forgotten. I spend most of my talking time trying to sort out the action the board intends to take. When I talk about having goats and chickens next door to the applicant, the board gets upset with me. I then get flustered and lose most reason.
The board somehow decides that my neighbor can have a greenhouse. They don’t actually make a determination here. They seem to just ignore that agriculture includes greenhouses rather than allowing a variance for a greenhouse. Then they deny the variance request for chickens. They are even more upset with me that I don’t abstain for a conflict of interest. I am embarrassed.
A week later I get a letter. The board has complained that I am violating the Zoning Ordinaces and I am to remove my animals or appeal. I appeal on the grounds that the board does not have the authority to regulate agriculture. My appeal will be heard in May. If I have the farm determination then I am exempt from Town zoning ordinances. If I am not a farm then I have to try to convince the board that they have made a mistake in their interpretation of the ordinance.
I have little to no expectation of being able to convince the board they are wrong. So then I appeal to a higher court and try to get that court to say the DRB has exceeded their authority. In the meantime I have to pay $600 in fines and if I lose at the Environmental Court then I have to give up the animals. Hopefully by then the campaign to re-write the zoning ordinances will have resulted in laws that allow chickens at least and goats cows horses ducks, etc. at best.