Back in January of this year, DeKalb County Code Enforcement officers cited Miller for growing too many vegetables and having unpermitted workers on his property. Apparently, according to city zoning laws, Miller broke the law when he started producing that many organic veggies on his land. Miller responded by putting his garden on a hiatus this summer while he got his property rezoned. But here's the kicker: The city is still suing Miller. "It's a passion that I have and unfortunately, the passion has gotten me into trouble and I can't understand why," Miller told a WSBTV reporter. ...Sadly, as is the case with Miller, archaic city zoning laws often run counter to the urban farming movement. "As agriculture comes back into urban areas, we are dealing with old laws on the books," Alice Rolls, director of Georgia Organics, told WALB News.

I TRIED to get out of writing about zoning and regulation, but they keep pulling me back in. It seems that DeKalb County, Georgia, enforces strict legal limits on how many vegetables you grow on your property. A gentleman named Steve Miller, who apparently has a suspicious fondness for broccoli, is facing a $5,000 fine from county officials, reports Sarah Parsons at Change.org.

That's a logical historical description of what's happening here. What I can't understand is how vegetable farming ever got zoned out of urban areas in the first place. There are a lot of commercial activities that urban areas might reasonably want to zone out of residential areas. I can see the logic behind, say, considering whether steel mills or psychiatric outpatient facilities are appropriately sited in a given community. Or an intensive hog-farming operation with massive waste ponds. But why would anyone object to a vegetable farm in their neighbourhood? Who wouldn't want a cornfield or a cabbage patch down the road?

More broadly, the segregation of suburbia from farming has always seemed to me like one of the tragic cultural missteps of the 20th century. You periodically hear about Italian immigrant families that continued raising chickens or growing grapes in their backyards in Connecticut up through the 1940s. They should have kept it up! My 98-year-old grandmother used to tell stories of moving to the Bronx when there were sheep grazing on the opposite side of the boulevard. Those sheep are gone because that activity was no longer economically viable in the Bronx; but if it were, who would object to a few more sheep in the Bronx? It's sad enough when urban sprawl drives out farming because land values rise, and you lose that rich interspersal of potato farms and beach houses on Long Island or cornfields and neighbourhoods in Maryland. But there seems no reason at all to exacerbate the scarcity of small-scale vegetable farms in near-urban areas by actively outlawing them.

(Photo credit: AFP)