Legalizing veggies: Sacramento County to bring clandestine produce stands, backyard farms out of the shadows

Bringing their underground produce industry out of the shadows, Sacramento County supervisors last week approved a framework for allowing backyard gardeners and urban farmers to sell their yields in areas hungry for healthful crops.

Supervisors unanimously voted last Tuesday to create an urban agriculture ordinance that will allow “county residents and community groups to grow and sell crops, raise chickens, ducks, and bees” starting February 24, according to a staff report.

The impetus for amending the county’s zoning code was twofold, officials said: to mitigate so-called food deserts—defined by the American Nutrition Association’s website as areas “vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods”—and to allow urban and suburban farmers to sell their products.

The policy will apply in the unincorporated areas of Sacramento County, but the issues it’s aimed at addressing resonate countywide. In Sacramento County, 22 of its 317 census tracts were categorized as food deserts as of 2016, according to Health Education Council spokeswoman Amelia Anderson.

The ordinance was pushed by the Sacramento Urban Agriculture Association, which got a similar measure passed in the city of Sacramento two years ago. Katie Valenzuela Garcia, an SUAA coordinator, said that the measure would help increase access to urban agriculture stands that sell fresh produce, and help bring moderate regulatory oversight to a practice that was already occurring clandestinely.

“Folks were doing it sort of guerrilla-style,” Valenzuela Garcia said. “They’d find a lot and take it over. It’s something that’s already happening to a pretty large extent. It’s something that we see in immigrant populations and refugee populations—there isn’t a cultural group in the area that isn’t practicing urban agriculture. It’s one of the things that binds us all together, we’ve all got to eat.”

Such improvised farms, Valenzuela Garcia said, sprout up in backyards, vacant lots, hidden gardens and abandoned parcels. The new ordinance allows for onsite sale, but differs slightly from the regulations in the city proper, with no sales restrictions on certain days of the week. Also unlike the city, the unincorporated county will allow the raising of larger animals such as pigs, goats and sheep for educational purposes only, such as as a 4-H program.

Supervisor Patrick Kennedy supported the measure at the board level.

The District 2 representative says he first became concerned with food deserts while serving on the Sacramento City Unified School District Board, where he developed the Healthy Foods Task Force in 2010, which was designed to deliver healthier locally-sourced foods to school kids in the district. Kennedy sees this ordinance as a continuation of those efforts.

“My direction to staff was to look at the city’s [ordinance] and make sure it’s a floor and not a ceiling,” Kennedy told SN&R. “It’s twofold in benefits: We can provide fresh fruits, vegetables and other products to neighborhoods that currently don’t have it and are in food deserts, while also giving people who are growing produce an opportunity to have supplementary income. It’s a win for both sides of the quotient.”