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Letter: When is a farmer not a farmer? To P&Z board
Op-Ed · April 17, 2014
It is time local food producers were treated as what they are: farmers.
There is no question about what a farm is. It is defined by Iowa Code as the land, buildings, and machinery used in the commercial production of farm products. Farm products are also defined by code, to include plants and animals and their products which are useful to people in the form of food, feed, fiber or fur.
Yet, a family that operates a 1,000-acre diversified farm was told by county planning and zoning that what they were doing was not farming, even though they produce corn, soybeans, vegetables, pumpkins and timber, and have a 140 head cow-calf herd. They are known by their friends and neighbors as farmers. They are farmers. So what’s the problem?
They wanted to put up a building to add revenue to their operation and support an additional family member, and the county determined the building was for commercial, not agricultural use. They had to comply with a layer of regulations any other farmer was free to ignore.
There is interest in developing a sustainable local food system in Iowa, so what’s the disconnect that makes local planning and zoning commissions a barrier to doing what’s needed for farms to survive and thrive?
There is plenty of evidence that Iowa’s local food movement creates value.
The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture showed that institutional purchases of local food added nearly $9 million to the Iowa economy in 2012.
The 2013 Linn County Comprehensive Plan seeks to “enable and encourage small and midsize farms, including farms with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), u-pick, agri-tourism, on-farm stores, and other sustainable agriculture farm ventures.”
The Johnson County Board of Supervisors created a food policy council that worked with the community to solve a common problem for local food producers: the lack of a commercial kitchen. Why the disconnect?
A farmer should be able to do anything Iowa Code doesn’t specifically prohibit them from doing based on the agricultural exemption. Yet when it gets to the county level, there is variation in how the law is interpreted and enforced. The result is local food farmers have to live with the strictest interpretation of the law, something which conventional farmers do not. They get the short end of the stick.
We hear a lot of talk about creating sustainable local food systems and expanding the economy surrounding them. But at the intersection of state law and county planning and zoning, promotion of local foods has broken down and something needs to be done to fix it.
Why should sustainable, local food farmers be treated differently? They shouldn’t. The Iowa agricultural exemption should apply to all farmers, including those who work within local food systems.
The legislature should reinforce the agricultural exemption in that local food farmers are farmers and should receive its benefits. Segregating them for special treatment is a practice that never should have been started, especially when it presents barriers to entry for new farmers, and restricts needed revenue stream improvement to expand farm operations.
Iowa should follow the lead of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack in promoting and facilitating diversity of farm operations to provide opportunity for the next generation of farmers. It begins with treating a farmer as a farmer.
State Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, Wilton
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