Urban farmers score a win in Oakland

You can now legally sell peas grown from your backyard in Oakland.

The City Council voted Tuesday to eliminate the ban on selling home-grown produce, a relic of an era when cities wanted to distinguish themselves from rural areas. But the old code, which was updated, has increasingly come into conflict with a growing but relatively new movement, urban farming. Urban farmers generally seek deeper connections to their food by growing it themselves, and the money helps. Kitty Sharkey harvested 80 pounds of heirloom tomatoes on Tuesday from 3-foot by 24-foot raised bed at her home in the Havenscourt neighborhood of East Oakland. She thinks she could make up to $400 at a farmer's market, which would be a big help to her finances.

Until now, she gave away or bartered what she couldn't eat, cook or can.

"A little bit more money makes it more enticing," said Sharkey, 47, who devotes all her time to being an urban homesteader and growing almost all of her own food. "I might work a little harder on that winter garden."

Others saw a larger significance in the change.

"It's the first step in legitimizing urban agriculture in Oakland," said Esperanza Pallana, 37, who has a 1,200 foot backyard plot in the Grand Lake neighborhood and has been pushing for the change. "It's also preserving our right to grow our own food for ourselves and our community."

The code change altered the definition of "home-based businesses," which previously mandated that it had to be indoors. The new code allows outdoor vegetables as long as it didn't need farm equipment to produce it. Previously, all it took was one phone call from a neighbor to bring down the city's wrath on someone selling backyard carrots.

Eric Angstadt, the city's deputy planning and zoning director, said he estimates that anywhere from a half to three-quarters of urban farmers in Oakland will be protected by this change.

"These are people for whom urban farming is not a primary, money-making occupation," he said. "These are maybe people who are just trying to recover their own costs of growing, or maybe people who are trying to see if it can be a possible commercial occupation."

There's little if any controversy over this code change - the first and perhaps least disputed element of the city's desire to revamp its urban farming rules. But that's partly because of what this does not address.

Farmers whose operations are so big they need a tractor won't be covered by this code change. Nor are cooperatives that sell produce boxes or people who grow on vacant lots - because those lots aren't considered yards.

But the biggest reason Tuesday's change attracted little hubbub was because it didn't address the issue of farm animals. At a community meeting organized by the planning department and on the blogosphere, the city's vegans and farm animal lovers have been battling over this issue. The vegan farmers say animals should not be used in farming because they're typically slaughtered, often in a backyard. Those who want to have animals as part of their farms say they help the vegetables, by tilling soil, eating bugs or providing manure.

Livestock - or a rabbit pot pie, more specifically - was what prompted complaints to the city against Novella Carpenter, who wrote about the creation of her urban farm in the book "Farm City." Rabbit-rights activists complained about her farm animals after learning that she was offering rabbit pot pies from her farm in West Oakland to people willing to donate cash.

The city forced Carpenter to apply for a $2,800 conditional use permit to grow vegetables and raise a small number of animals on a vacant lot adjacent to her apartment. None of Tuesday's changes would have helped her because she operates her farm on an empty lot adjacent to her home - but the lot is not considered a yard at her home.

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