Detroit Needs Urban Farms

Urban farming may be getting a push from the State legislature in Lansing today. Sponsored by state Senators Virgil Smith, D-Detroit, and Joe Hune, R-Whitmore Lake, a bill would grant the City of Detroit an exemption from Michigan's Right to Farm Act which would allow the city to regulate internal agriculture. It would give Detroit the necessary powers to regulate through zoning and other means, whatever new farms which may pop up.

In a time when Detroit needs close jobs, this might be a decent tonic to help the city's chronic unemployment. Some sources, Michigan State University and the SHAR foundation to name two, believe that commercial agriculture could provide around 30,000 jobs and up to seventy percent of the city's food.

Such numbers sound a little rosy. But the fact is that Detroit has a significant amount of already open land which could easily be converted to agriculture. The very idea or urban farming too is an exciting, outside the box approach to aiding a town set back on it heels in years. Why not grow things? That has to be better than maintaining huge open lots for no productive reason.

There will be problems, of course. When thinking about farms, odors quite naturally come to mind. Yet that is part of the reason to give Detroit a more direct power of local agriculture. It would allow the city the legal ability to respond to citizen complaints should they arise. That itself may open a few jobs, in terms of the necessary inspectors to oversee the proposed farming areas. Done rightly, it ought to even increase the city's tax base, through new sources of income taxes based on the new jobs, as well as the higher taxes which developed property of any type should come from productive land. Land the city gets next to nothing if anything at all for now. Further, it's a green idea. There's nothing at all wrong with that when it serves a good purpose.

We complain fairly often about feel good legislation being only that: something which both sides of the aisle can support in the vainglorious cause of bipartisanship. Yet this is the kind of feel good lawmaking which genuinely merits support across the board. Urban farming would be good for Detroit. It's good to hear Lansing working proactively for the city, if only just this once.