Illegal Chickens and Small-Town Politics

The courtroom reminds me of my high school cafeteria. Peach and cream tiles gleam on the walls, dated wood paneling adds a homey touch and the ceiling looms low and slightly gray from wear.  Similar to lunchtime in my high school cafeteria, I sit in a plastic chair to talk about food.  But unlike the high school gossip interspersed with comments on the boys we hope to Instant Message later, I join those in the courtroom to discuss the legality of backyard Brussels sprouts in Canton, NY.  

I work every Friday at a local diversified farm as part of my Literary Harvest local food and literature class. Some weeks I plant garlic or spread mulch; other days I pull carrots, clip kale, feed chickens, hose down parsnips or hunt for purple potatoes camouflaged in the deep brown soil.

Together with a handful of St. Lawrence students and a Canton resident or two, I help with the endless tasks allowing LittleGrasse Foodworks and owners Flip Filippi and Bob Washo to feed their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shareholders each week.  Our work is dual purpose: we learn about farming and support a working farm, while discussing our classes, weekend lives and hopes for the future over beds of onions and steaming weekend potluck dinners.

Bob and Flip’s farm is located just a mile from St. Lawrence University and the village of Canton, its location an undeniable plus. I bike to the farm every week; my classmates have walked, run and canoed to get to their Friday shifts. But the great location had its downfalls, Bob and Flip discovered when they applied to keep animals on their land last spring. Little Grasse is residentially zoned, and the Town of Canton prohibits any agricultural activity within its residential zones.

Flip and Bob grow crops over 5 or 6 acres of a 25-acre plot.  They keep six gleaming heirloom pigs to clear new farmland through foraging, and 50 or so red Freedom Ranger chickens that cluck around and return nitrogen to the fields. These two animals make up the meat portion of their CSA, maintaining a closed-loop nutrient cycle and freeing Bob and Flip from dependence on a diesel tractor and industrial fertilizers. The animals, Bob and Flip found out this summer, turn out to be illegal. What they didn’t anticipate was that Canton Town residential zoning makes their acorn squash and cherry tomatoes illegal, too. 

It’s hard to believe a rural town like Canton, NY could forbid the very type of economic activity on which it was founded. But about 40 town residents, ten St. Lawrence students and I are stuffed into the dreary Main Street courtroom to debate just this.

It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to hear residents nearly in tears over selling their children’s chickens, having moved to Canton to enjoy a rural lifestyle. Other leaders of the local food movement speak, as well: CSA shareholders, students, professors and others, all deeply passionate about Canton and about local food.

My latest foray into local politics has shown, however, that even something as delicious as food can be twisted bureaucratically into a struggle for power. Most board members own property in Canton, in an unavoidable conflict of interest, and zoning changes will indeed affect their pocketbooks. I stand to speak at one point, frustrated at a circular discussion that involves more foot-dragging and hear-say on the nuisances of non-domesticated animals (eg., chickens) than actual action.  

(I grew up owning chickens, as a side note, and I can tell you the feathered friends who came when I called them are considerably more domestic than the collared dogs chasing and growling after my road bike on some of Canton’s more rural roads).

We leave the courtroom unsatisfied all around, supporters grumbling about and planning to draft definitions of permitted animals, regulations on lot size for agriculture and a signature campaign to see how many Town residents own enough land for a zoning change to apply. Board members, on the other hand, are impassive, voicing their support but not showing a clear path forward to compromise. Bob and Flip’s chickens and pigs went to slaughter before Thanksgiving and only some still-tall Brussels sprouts peak up from the fresh snow, the issue covered but not forgotten.   

Will a legal batch of early greens fill Bob and Flip’s wicker baskets next May? Will Little Grasse join the hundreds of U-pick, farm stands, community gardens and the co-op supplying year-round local food to the coldest corner of NY State? With the education I’ve gleaned after only some hours on Bob and Flip’s farm, I am optimistic it will. The CSA just might have to operate black market-style until that day comes.  

For more information:

Access the LittleGrasse Blog to read more about small scale, diversified direct-to-consumer agriculture.
Read about GardenShare, a regional nonprofit working to build a local food system in St. Lawrence County.

All my photos are from this past fall at Little Grasse Foodworks in Canton, NY.