Is It Your Right to Grow Your Own Food? The Criminalization of At-Home Agriculture

Most Americans get their food from a supermarket or supercenter, like Walmart. But increasingly, people are opting to grow their own food. A 2014 report by the National Gardening Association showed that 35% of households in America (42 million) were growing food in a community garden or at home, with the largest increase in participation among younger households. These numbers signal a growing interest in agricultural self-sustainability and independence.

Yet in many places across the U.S., it might be against the law to grow your own food. It was so for Denise Morrison, a gardener in Tulsa, Oklahoma who grew over 100 species of food and medicinal herbs in her front and back yard until receiving a letter from the city citing a complaint about her garden in 2012. After photographing her lawn, Morrison “went to meet with city inspectors who told her ‘Everything…need[ed] to go’ when she asked for problem areas to be pointed out.”

Upon entreating the police to issue a citation so she could have her day in court, city workers showed up at the gardener’s home “with a bobcat and a riding lawnmower and cut down her yard as she watched in horror.” When she tried to sue the city for cutting down all of her plants before her court date, a federal judge threw her case out without hearing it. Tulsa city ordinances state that plants can be over 12” tall if they are edible, a rule by which Morrison says everything in her garden complied. Unemployed and uninsured, Morrison says her garden was her primary source of food and medicine to treat her diabetes, high-blood pressure, and arthritis.

Morrison’s case isn’t unheard of. Cities across the country are cracking down on the right of property owners to use their property to grow food, citing the practice as “unsightly.” These crackdowns are lucrative: in 2010, Steve Miller of Clarkston, Georgia received a $5200 find for growing too many vegetables in his backyard. In 2016 an Orlando couple were told they would be fined $500 a day until they uprooted their 25×25’ vegetable garden. In some cases, grassroots efforts help to reverse fines or rulings. In the case of Jessica and Jason, the Orlando gardeners who faced a $500 fine per day, a door-to-door petition campaign which gained over 10,000 signatures helped force the city to back down. It remains legal to grow vegetables on one’s property in the city of Orlando thanks to Jessica and Jason.

Yet not everywhere are property rights prevailing. In November of 2017, after years of legal battles between local gardeners and the local government, a Florida Third District Court of Appeal ruled that homeowners do not have the right to garden on their own property. Tom Carroll and Hermine Rickets had been growing food in a garden on their lawn for 17 years when they received notice in 2014 that their garden violated recently changed zoning laws—and that they would be fined up to $50 per day for violating this newly-created infraction. Rather than dig up their garden, Carroll and Rickets sued the city for violating their constitutional right to use their own property as they wanted and the equal protection clause. City officials had changed zoning laws to strictly prohibit food gardening, but not, they said, ornamental plants. Growing lettuce was suddenly illegal, but flowers were perfectly permissible.

The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit “libertarian” NGO which represented the couple, called the 2017 ruling a “major blow to property rights”:

“If Hermine and Tom wanted to grow fruit or flowers or display pink flamingos, Miami Shores would have been completely fine with it…They should be equally free to grow food for their own consumption, which they did for 17 years before the village forced them to uproot the very source of their sustenance.”

Michael Bindas, director of IJ’s National Food Freedom Initiative, said “the Institute for Justice will continue to fight until courts make clear that all Americans have the right to peacefully and productively use their property to feed themselves and their families.”

Not only do these kinds of arbitrary property restrictions infringe on constitutional rights, but they also reflect a deeply-seated enmity towards independent, cooperative, and functional ways of living. The idea it should be a crime to use the earth around one’s home—also called a “lawn”—for anything other than growing grass (no higher than 4”) is not only ludicrous, it is deeply neurotic and signals a profound alienation from the natural world.

The labor and water costs alone of maintaining a perfectly groomed and uniform plot of grass around one’s home are a less-than productive investment; in fact, research shows that planting fruit and vegetable gardens in the same space a lawn takes up could reduce water usage by about 66%. Yet the functional goals of the suburban lawn—to serve as an aesthetically uniform, genetically homogeneous, and meticulously manicured foundation for our lives—reflect a more insidious cultural obsession with conformity and artificiality, and a fundamental antipathy towards functionalism and nature. The hostile reactions of many suburban landowners to neighbors who violate norms of lawn appearance, whether by allowing one’s grass to grow too long, or by growing vegetables, demonstrate an acute intolerance that is not merely aesthetic, but also existential; directed towards any reminder of the role of humans in our natural habitat. What else is a well-manicured lawn than a costly artificial ornament which seeks to remove us from nature through its sterilization and control?