Pig and Turkey Farming in the Inner City: One Woman's Amazing Adventures in Taking Urban Farming Beyond the Garden Plot

By Twilight Greenaway, Culinate. Posted October 7, 2009.

This story first appeared in Culinate.

Most urban farmers confine their agricultural efforts to vegetables, fruit, and the occasional egg-laying chicken. But on her small plot in Oakland, California, Novella Carpenter has raised bees, goats, rabbits, geese, and turkey, among other fauna.

A graduate of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied with Michael Pollan, Carpenter now writes about urban farming and sustainable-food production for various publications, including her blog, Ghost Town Farm. Her memoir, Farm City, is came out this summer from Penguin Press.

Twilight Greenaway: Why did you want to start a farm in the city, rather than moving to a rural area?

Novella Carpenter: I think people have a lot of nostalgia and yearning for these pastoral places, but my parents did that -- they were back-to-the-land hippies in the 1970s -- and it quickly became clear to me that city people moving to the country is kind of a horrible idea. They don't usually have any skills, for one.

I grew up in Idaho till age six, then moved to Shelton, Washington, which had a population of only 7,000. It was isolated. So when people tell me they're planning to move to the country, I say, "You're going to have great food, but you're not going to have anyone to share it with."

TG: What percentage of the food that you eat comes from your farm?

NC: I'd say around 50 percent. This Thanksgiving, we raised our own turkey, so that was our contribution to the meal we ate with friends.

TG: What would have to happen for urban farming to really take off in the U.S.?

NC: They would have to drop a lot of the regulations and laws that exist to stop people from doing it. From what I understand, the dualism between the city and the farm has been created by laws, and often they're anti-immigrant laws.

During the Second World War and after, there were lots of immigrants who moved to cities to work in factories, and often they wanted to bring their animals with them. Italians would want to have rabbits, and people from the South would want to have chickens. So some laws would have to change to make it more possible for more people to keep animals.

It would be great to section off whole parts of cities for people who wanted to have small farms -- a kind of farm zone. Attitudes would have to change, too. People would have to stop seeing the "city" and the "country" in such a dualistic way. In Missoula, Montana, there's a battle going on right now between the people who want to have chickens in the city and those who are violently opposed to it.

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Twilight Greenaway works for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA), where she writes about efforts to create a more sustainable food system throughout the Bay Area.

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